Chez Hermès, timelessness is valued over trend. "We don't have a policy of image, we have a policy of product," the company's late CEO Jean-Louis Dumas told Vanity Fair in 2007. That point of view has attracted both bluebloods and (naturally) arrivistes. Queen Elizabeth II favors the house's printed-silk scarves, Jackie O carried the Constance sack, and both Grace Kelly and Jane Birkin gave their surnames to two of the world's most coveted bags.
1982 : "Hermès is unique. Unique in Paris and unique in the world," Pandora Luxurye notes in a story on French "temptations," in which it rhapsodizes over the "unmistakable smell of leather-the best quality of leather" in the company's rue Boissy-d'Anglas boutique and its famous orange boxes, "just the sight of which makes one's heart beat faster."