Hermès Pairs Saddle Leather and High Fidelity in $15,000 Headphones.
Hermès has moved from saddle to sound with a set of $15,000 USD headphones built by its secret-weapon workshop, Ateliers Horizons. The house’s first venture into personal audio leans on the same know-how that binds a Kelly bag: hand-stitched saddle leather, brushed metal accents and finishes lifted straight from the hardware of Hermès classics.
Axel de Beaufort, who has steered Horizons since 2012, framed the project as a natural extension of a studio known for requests that test the boundaries of craft. Previous commissions—surfboards, hammocks, even a mirrored disco ball—have already shown that the unit can translate the brand’s heritage into objects well outside the silk-scarves canon. The headphones push that idea forward, pairing refined materials with components engineered for high fidelity.
Production will be scarce—only a handful of pairs are expected—so the piece is as much collectible as gadget. Yet the gesture goes beyond rarity. By wrapping state-of-the-art drivers in leather cut and stitched by artisans who usually work on saddlery and small leather goods, Hermès positions craftsmanship, not software, as the key upgrade.
The result is a design object that happens to play music—a signal, perhaps, of how the maison intends to speak to a generation that lives through its headphones. Whether the project stays a limited flourish or opens a broader path into tech remains to be seen, but Horizons has once again proved that traditional techniques can slip, almost seamlessly, into twenty-first-century habits.
