VIVE: Please tell us a little about your background. How did being born into the Hermes family influence your early life and your career decisions?

DUMAS: There is not much to tell. I was the fourth of six children. What can a tree say about being in a forest? As far as the water and sun that influenced the young plant I was, to continue the botanical comparison, these elements were really left entirely to me.

I was born just before the war and my father was an officer who escaped from a prison camp. We left for the South of France which the Germans did not occupy until '43 and then we went back to Paris. Life was very difficult until I was about eight, so I was one of the generation who can remember the first chocolate I ate and the first English-speaking person I met. I remember a Paris which was under total control and so when the conditions improved, it was like being released from inside a cell.

I always dreamt of the big world and in fact close to our house was the Museum of Mankind and it was a kind of magic treasure chest in which you could find all the colours and scents and music of the world.

I went to university and studied law, economics and political science and in 1958 I travelled to Greece in a little 2CV. When my friends and I reached Constantinople, it was one of my most intense experiences. It was the kind of pleasure you have when you make love for the first time or the day you say your first words: you are reaching one of the steps in life. We made a promise between the four of us - myself, two cousins and a friend - that in 1960 we would drive to Asia. And we did.

It was a privilege to drive though the communist countries; Rumania, Bulgaria and then we reached Turkey and Armenia and then Iran and Tehran and the Caspian Sea and the Holy City. We disguised ourselves and visited the Holy Mosque. Then we took the necessary food and equipment to cross the big desert to the Afghan border and reached Herat. We did this trip about three years before the first hippies and people had never seen poor Europeans before. We had been sleeping on the ground for two months and they welcomed us and looked after us and it was a lesson in hospitality. I believe that you must always return the favours you receive and not necessarily to the person who gave them to you, and so every time I invite someone to stay in my guest room at home, I feel I am returning the hospitality I received in Afghanistan.

When we celebrated the 50th birthday of my friend who was on that trip and his children played the film we had made for the first time in 26 years and it was like going back in time. Some of our friends who were there watched the film and said, 'You know, Jean-Louis, you don't know how much we thought of the four of you going on that journey - you were all crazy but we admired you very much'. At the time we did not realize exactly what we had done, we just had fun, but it really was quite an accomplishment and it is only recently that I have appreciated what it meant to me and how it has influenced my life. This of course is the way that our mind slowly filters information from the past.

VIVE: Obviously this was a very special time for you and a world apart from what you are doing today.

DUMAS: I am trying to express the things which I felt were important to me in my learning period, which of course we are always in and yes, they were completely different to what I am doing today. I've got the time to talk, so it's okay. It is just that you asked the most dangerous question you could have asked me: What is my background? I could tell you what type of training I had, the kind of learning, but it is boring. Evidently I must have acquired, I suppose you would say some experience, but I don't care about it. I think that like Confucius said, 'experience is a lantern that you should hang well behind you, but remember, it only gives light to your past, to the road you have already travelled. It will not show the way for the future'.

VIVE: What period in your life, then, do you feel had a major influence on the way you run your business today?

DUMAS: Well, when I returned to Paris I went back to university and I met my wife, Renee. She is Greek, as you know. Her father sent her to school in Paris and told her not to return with a Frenchman. I don't know what she learnt in school, but here we are...I went into the army and was an officer in Algeria just after the war for independence had ended and when I had finished my time, I didn't know what I should do. I only knew the one thing I loved: travelling.

Renee and I went to America and it was a great privilege because a cousin of mine knew Mr. Davidson who was at that time ending his eminent presidency at Bloomingdales and we had the opportunity to work there. I became the very first foreign trainee in their young assistant buyer squad. I was selling watches in Bloomingdales in '63 on the day that President Kennedy was shot. The sound, the silence we heard that day when someone said, 'The President has been shot'...it knocked flat an America which was full of spirit.

I was twenty-five, a young married father in a country that was feeling full of generosity, and the feeling was that to be a merchant meant more than just making money; it meant to be in the middle of an exchange. You were trying to exchange a product that you had carefully selected and there was a pride in being a buyer for Bloomingdales because you had to go to all the remote places around the world to select with a taste that was not your own, but an educated taste which understood not only what people were expecting, but also what they were unconsciously expecting - in fact, what was appropriate for them to become more civilised.

It was like opening the doors of America, a country so completely submerged by the civilization of the refrigerator and washing machine and Coca Cola. They didn't know the magic of the world; what was from India, the smell of leather from South America...The people at Bloomingdales were explorers in this sense and we were proud to be part of that.

America in '63 was a time of enormous change for everyone living there. On the night of our arrival, I asked our chauffeur who was black to take us to the Bronx. He dropped us at our hotel and returned with a pink Cadillac and took us home to meet his wife. She was white and at first was very hostile towards us, but later we all went to Count Basie's Bar and listened to jazz and we three were the only whites there. The whole evening was transformed by the music. I remember one song, 'If the Woman Don't Get You, the Liquor Must' and while this song was playing they began handing out leaflets amongst the crowd and people were signing them. It was the night before the big march in Washington, the beginning of Martin Luther King and we were right in the middle of it.

You know, one does not appreciate that America at that time was a multi-racial country. After this night in August '63, the country changed and turned into a multi-cultural nation. It was the end of the country of blacks, Mexicans, Puerto Ricans and whites - it was the beginning of the comprehension that each group had its own culture. This is exciting and full of hope.

VIVE: When you left America to start working at Hermes, what were your intentions for the company and how much has Hermes changed since you took control?

DUMAS: I believe that Hermes is doing much the same today as when my father asked me to return from America. Some years ago, I met Mr. Ono, the then head of Shiseido . I don't know why, but I asked him, 'What, for you, is the role of an enterprise?' He answered, 'The role of the firm is to be faithful to the idea which started it'. And I keep this as a personal motto. I think that if you have better ideas than those which created the company, why don't you create your own? If you are in a chain, a fifth generation, are you really sure you understand the original idea of the company, or that you have done everything to develop its potential? They are the exact principles with which my father operated the business and what I am trying to do. I have done nothing other than, let us say, encouraged the apple tree to produce more apples. But I try not to change the apple tree into an oak.

I came to Hermes and tried to do my best and be useful and I was not sure at all if I would stay. I stayed because I was not aware and I don't think many people were, that Hermes was a sleeping beauty and we were all so charmed by her beauty that we did not realise that she was asleep. The awakening did not occur upon the arrival of the prince, as the story goes, but happened slowly.

In the '70s and the beginning of the '80s, first the French press and then the international press became aware that there was something wrong somewhere. So many names had been licensed to carry a name that was supposed to be famous and the public were starting to look for some proof of authenticity. We at Hermes just opened the doors for the press and their reaction was, 'My goodness, Hermes is a conservatory'.

VIVE: What do you think is the specific appeal of Hermes considering that your product range is so diverse and yet the same products sell to the people of many cultures?

DUMAS: Among our products there are so many babies, so many children in the family, so many branches and cousins that it is difficult to consider all the products at once. There was the mother product, the leather harnesses, and then the baby girl, the saddle. Since then there have been so many products, but with each there is an affiliation. We have the desire, the necessity that each product bearing the name Hermes must have the style, indeed more than the style: it must be Hermes.

How can we be sure about a product? There must be the affiliation - this is the key, such as when we entered into porcelain, since we are illustrators, on silk scarves, on ties, on beach towels, it was logical to put designs on porcelain, but it took more than this to make porcelain Hermes. There is a kind of chemistry about all Hermes products. When we have failed, the customer has corrected the product for us - they just don't buy it. They have an extraordinary sense of what is Hermes and what is not. This does not correspond to conservatism, it is a fact that we regularly surprise our customers.

I would like you to understand that our basic attitude is that we are very respectful of the cultures of the past and the future. We are not arrogant, but we are proud to offer our products to the people. We apply traditional craftsmanship to our materials, but what people do with them is their choice, and it pleases us to see a product being used in an Australian way or an Italian way. For example a scarf is worn differently in Australia to New York and this is very exciting. In Japan we had television shows to teach the people how they can use the scarves; how to fasten them and pleat them and how they can be used as a hat, a skirt, a blouse. sometimes you need only jeans and a t-shirt and the scarf completes the outfit. One thing I should say is that we are not looking for people to be Hermes from top to bottom - a touch of Hermes is enough. We are not selling Hermes products to be used as Hermes products, rather we are giving birth to products to be married with the personality of the young Miss X or charming Mrs. X or the very elegant Mr. Y.

VIVE: Many people treasure one or two Hermes products which they acquired, sometimes, years ago. For some, this is obviously because Hermes products are not inexpensive, but also because there is this sense of chemistry and personality you have mentioned. How do you explain to a new client what Hermes products embody, or what they mean to you personally?

DUMAS: The way I introduce Hermes to our clients is to say that Hermes is part of a dreamworld to which you do not yet belong, but you may find the door to become involved. You discover that a Hermes fabric may be expensive, but another product can be very expensive, too. You may decide that instead of going twice a year for a holiday in Bermuda, I could go only once and buy a Hermes handbag for my wife and maybe in future years, the result of this gesture may be more important to the stability of our love than the second trip to Bermuda. Maybe another day you discover that the Hermes Caleche perfume or the tie that changed the attitude of people towards you was not that expensive. You discover that a good wine from Australia or from France is expensive but it creates something that is very nice and the sense of quality comes into your mind and, progressively, you are part of the world of Hermes.

VIVE: There are certain products which are perceived as intrinsically Hermes - the Kelly bag, named after Princess Grace; les carres Hermes, the silk scarves; and Hermes travelling cases - are these the biggest-selling products today?

DUMAS: Today the Kelly bag, the silk scarf and the Hermes tie, the Caleche perfume and the Clipper watch are the stars. And yet so many customers are fascinated with Hermes but they have never bought a Kelly bag or a scarf; they have only ever bought belts or another perfume. Once again, it's like a forest: you can love a forest and only ever sit under one particular tree because you like its shade or movement or whatever.

VIVE: The official Hermes symbol is the horse and carriage, but around the world, the Hermes scarves, in a sense, have become flags of the company. How did the scarves originate as they were quite a departure from the traditional lines?

DUMAS: When we started producing the scarves about fifty years ago, it was like the culmination of the talents of my grand-father, Emile Hermes and his collaborators, amongst them an extraordinary woman Annie Baumel, who started the art of window dressing and his two sons-in-law, my father Robert Dumas and Jean Guerrand. They had a sense of colour and were developing gloves of many colours in wool and textiles and leather and this concentration on colours led them to the idea of Hermes scarves.

The development of 'les carres' Hermes' is a graphics story, it's a colour story and it's a silk story. The Hermes scarf is rather unique because the silk scarf did not previously exist in this form. In the north of France printed scarves were made of cotton; in England silk was sometimes used for scarves but only for special occasions like commemorations. There were also the famous soldiers' handkerchiefs during the First World War: to teach the soldiers how to dismantle his rifle, the instructions were written on a big handkerchief and he would invariably use his handkerchief and read about how to dismantle his rifle.

In the Thirties, 400km was a very long way - the distance from Lyon which was the silk capital to Paris - and so the people from Lyon came to Paris as explorers. At the time they were developing a new technique for producing images on silk to replace the old wood block printing. It allowed them to be much more flexible and reproduce almost any design. They came to visit the people at Hermes when my grandfather was extending the range of products to include scarves.

At this time, Emile was a collector of equestrian art which is in his museum today in the Paris store and these items were a gold mine of inspiration for the graphic mind of my father Robert Dumas. During the war and after the war the number of designs exploded. It takes about nine months for a design to be approved and another year for the plates to be made and the scarves printed. There are presently about seventeen designers and we launch about twelve new designs a year. We have produced some 800 different designs since 1937 and each of them tells a story and is different in terms of layout.

Nothing is created in this world, but creativity exists and this is evident in the layout, which is the extraordinary support for the colouring. From afar the scarves look all the same because they exhibit the Hermes colours, but in detail they are very different. This is why many people are collectors of Hermes scarves. When my father died in 1978, I took over his responsibility and I spent two hours a day with the designers and we look for new ideas and it is like following the development of a baby.

VIVE: If in America, you felt proud to be part of a meaningful exchange, what do you see as your role and service to your clients in your capacity as designer/chairman?

DUMAS: I think that if we can create tools for people to improve their lives, we will be very proud. It is up to our customers not only to select from our products, but to use them for the better. People can have a Hermes scarf or handbag and do nothing with them, or use them in such a way that they will become more fashionable and elegant and beautiful.