At the heart of the visual strategy recently adopted by the French maison Hermès, a new narrative language is beginning to take shape, one that seems destined to become a trendsetter in how products are communicated in creative and engaging ways. Strengthening its ties with the art world, Hermès has launched a series of animations and illustrations conceived specifically for Instagram, entrusting the reinterpretation of its universe to a curated selection of international visual artists. These include Annie Choi, Angela Kirkwood, Guillaume Dégé, Chilean artist María Jesús Contreras, Helen Ferry, illustrators Geoffroy de Crécy, Lee Kyutae, and the Italian artist Stefano Colferai.
Each animated short is conceived as a miniature visual theater where the object loses its function and transforms into a narrative element: an apple opens like a curtain to reveal a handbag; a library spins and unfolds like a mechanical structure, revealing small leather goods and accessories; a Parisian building turns into an intricate puzzle box, reminiscent of Japanese modular constructions.
Digital micro-installations that are also real: the architecture of the new Hermès campaign finds its most interesting extension precisely in its relationship with the physical world of the brand.
In the animated video by illustrator Annie Choi (aka Ancho), who had also worked with Loewe before Hermès, an equestrian statue becomes the magic key that opens the brand's Parisian headquarters from the roof as if it were a small gift pack, revealing the Hermès H08 watch. With a visual style reminiscent of a cross between Studio Ghibli and Midnight in Paris, the hands of the watch - first unveiled in 2021 - run fast-forward from day to Parisian night.
The statue, together with the billboard reading “Hermes Sellier” and other elements illustrated by Choi, are indeed located on the roof of the historic boutique in the Rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré.
The leitmotif of the campaign is therefore “architecturally expanded” packaging: a sequence of dreamlike packages, suspended between reality and fiction. A concept that Hermès had already anticipated with its participation in Milan Design Week.
About the installation at La Pelota, in Domus we had spoken of a “white box”, an unarmed box of lights and geometries, in which the maison's plates, vases and carpets floated in an almost unreal space. The article was entitled “What makes an object”, a question whose answer seems to surface in this campaign: to make an object, you need a container, a packaging, a visual identity. Better if “architectural”. Whether it is a “packaging of nothing” or a content-container, it is perhaps precisely this ambiguity that makes the maison's latest visual operations so fascinating.
The choice of the Instagram reel format allows Hermès to reach a broader audience with cross-disciplinary interests, while staying true to its own aesthetic. This initiative, aligned with the brand’s broader embrace of contemporary visual culture, demonstrates how communication itself can become a space of design.
More than simple advertising campaigns, these works present themselves as digital micro-installations, where animation is used not merely to describe, but to evoke and breathe life into dreamlike, surreal, and sometimes ironic imaginaries. The Hermès object thus frees itself from its iconic form to become a mobile entity, or an animated work of art, capable of uniquely inhabiting the liminal space between art and fashion.