hermès invites Delphine dénéréaz to imagine its winter windows
For the winter season of 2025, Hermès invites French artist Delphine Dénéréaz to design the festive windows of its Hermès Maison in Shanghai. Titled Aïgo, Flamo e Cacho Fio, the installation draws on Provençal winter rituals, the Gros Souper, the Cacho Fio, Epiphany, and translates them through weaving, collage, and light into a tactile landscape that bridges southern France and the birthplace of silk.
Rather than staging a cultural contrast, Dénéréaz approaches the commission as a meeting point shaped by textile history. ‘Provence and China are linked by a long textile history; here they do not confront each other as two foreign worlds, but rather meet through family traditions that anyone can understand,’ she tells us. Silk, she notes, has traveled between these territories for centuries, and the Shanghai windows become a way to honor those exchange routes through materials and gesture. ‘The dialogue happens through the hand and the materials rather than through discourse,’ she shares with designboom.
all images courtesy of Hermès Maison in Shanghai, unless stated otherwise
weaving memory and ritual into luminous worlds
Based in Villedieu, Provence, Dénéréaz works from a former magnanerie, a repurposed silkworm mill. Her practice centers on lirette, a medieval weaving technique originating in North Africa and southern Europe, traditionally used to reuse fabric scraps. Torn, knotted, and recomposed, these fragments form dense, hyper-colored surfaces that hover between tapestry, architecture, and object.
Dénéréaz describes lirette as existing ‘between craft and magic,’ though she is quick to demystify the term. ‘Magic for me is not mystical: it comes from transformation,’ she says. Each strip of fabric carries a previous life, a garment, a domestic gesture, a memory, and weaving becomes a way of activating those histories. Where conventional textile design seeks control or regularity, lirette allows accidents to surface. ‘It lets me express a collective memory carried by ordinary materials, and transform it into almost talismanic images,’ she notes.
Drawing from symbols of her village, the belfry, cypress trees, and fountains, Dénéréaz translates familiar landmarks into woven icons for the Hermès windows. ‘These motifs become almost like amulets, simple forms that protect and bring people together,’ she explains. Personal memory, in her work, becomes a shared language. ‘I speak of Villedieu, but I am also speaking of all the places that imprint themselves on us and shape shared memories,’ the French artist reflects.
Color plays a central role in this translation. Even when working with reclaimed or humble materials, Dénéréaz’s palette remains unapologetically bright, with saturated reds, electric blues, neon accents. ‘Color is a vector of energy for me,’ she points out. ‘It conveys atmospheres, sensations, memories — the southern light, festivities, the vivid contrasts of domestic life.’ For the artist, color is evidence of time, light, and transformation. ‘Each shade is a way to make visible what has been lived,’ Delphine Dénéréaz adds.
Hermès invites French artist Delphine Dénéréaz to design the festive windows of its Shanghai flagship
domestic materials as monumental icons
Across her wider practice, Dénéréaz pushes weaving toward spatial and architectural forms. Lirette becomes facade, doorway, altar, or shrine, often mounted on metal grids or wooden frames. ‘The idea of textile architecture fascinates me,’ she says. ‘Soft surface is the body’s first habitat, and I enjoy revealing how tapestries, traditionally reserved for interiors, can become walls in their own right.’ These structures form what she describes as an ‘imaginary village’, a network of passages and refuges where personal memory intersects with collective myth.
That tension, between softness and rigidity, domestic gesture and monumental scale, is also political. By elevating techniques historically associated with the home and with women, Dénéréaz questions hierarchies of value in art. ‘Why are some forms of art valued while others are not?’ she asks. ‘And how can we restore to ordinary materials the place they deserve in our cultural imagination?’ Ornament, in her work is a carrier of history, labor, and meaning.
At Hermès Maison Shanghai, these concerns converge at architectural scale. The windows unfold as a fresco-like panorama woven thread by thread, while a luminous exterior installation reimagines the Provençal bell tower in arches of light, crowned by a star and a golden bell. For Dénéréaz, the project also carries a personal resonance: she grew up in a former silk mill, studied textile design, and remembers her first lirette piece, made from plastic bags collected in China over a decade ago. ‘I like the idea of a Silk Road traveled in reverse,’ she reflects, an imaginary journey that brings Provençal symbols back to China, echoing the historical circulation of motifs, materials, and techniques. In that loop between past and present, craft and transformation, Delphine Dénéréaz positions weaving as a medium capable of carrying memory across geography, time, and light.
titled Aïgo, Flamo e Cacho Fio, the installation draws on Provençal winter rituals
a tactile landscape that bridges southern France and the birthplace of silk
the windows unfold as a fresco-like panorama woven thread by thread
an imaginary journey that brings Provençal symbols back to China
echoing the historical circulation of motifs, materials, and techniques
a luminous exterior installation reimagines the Provençal bell tower in arches of light
Delphine Dénéréaz positions weaving as a medium capable of carrying memory across geography
Le Palais d’Harmonia | image courtesy of the artist
Where Morphos Whisper | image by Pierre Meyer
Dénéréaz pushes weaving toward spatial and architectural forms | image by Grégory Copitet
view of the exhibition Bienvenue à Delfunland, Collection Lambert, Avignon | image by Gabrielle Sosson
view of the exhibition Bienvenue à Delfunland, Collection Lambert, Avignon | image courtesy of the artist
view of the exhibition Bienvenue à Delfunland, Collection Lambert, Avignon | image courtesy of the artist
Les objets | image by @southwaystudio
project info:
name: Aïgo, Flamo e Cacho Fio
artist: Delphine Dénéréaz | @delphine.denereaz
client: Hermès | @hermes
location: Hermès Maison Shanghai, 217 Middle Huaihai Road, Huangpu District, Shanghai, China
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