Hermès ★

In menswear

Hermès makes ready-to-wear, including soft tailoring and leather blousons, and its leather jackets in particular are among the most expensive garments in the category. It also owns John Lobb Paris.

The company's restraint about licensing and distribution (no licensed products, controlled supply) is the clearest counterexample in luxury to the strategy most of its competitors adopted in the 1990s.

The saddle stitch

Two needles on one thread, worked in opposite directions through the same hole, each stitch locking the last. It cannot be done by machine (a machine lockstitch is one thread caught by another) and if the thread is cut, a saddle-stitched seam does not run.

It is slow. A bag represents many hours of one artisan's work, and the company's refusal to break that into an assembly line is the clearest example in luxury of a production decision that is genuinely about the object rather than about the story.

Still a harness maker

The house began making harness and saddlery, and the leather disciplines that came from that work (saddle stitching by hand with two needles, edge finishing, the treatment of a hide as a structural material) still govern how it makes everything else. It is the most disciplined of the large luxury companies about what it will and will not put its name on, and the restraint is a business strategy as much as a taste: scarcity maintained deliberately over decades.