“‘...one has hair, the other does not... could anything else bring them together?’ ...” Jean-Louis Dumas wrote to me on a small card  accompanied by a photograph taken during our first meeting.
I had a lot of respect and admiration for this man, and for the Maison Hermès he led. Twenty years later,
I had the opportunity to photograph Pierre-Alexis Dumas and Pascale Mussard.”

Portrait of Hermès, teaser, 2008

The Portrait of Hermès is a black and white photographic and video diptych.
Pierre-Alexis Dumas and Pascale Mussard, then artistic directors of Maison Hermès, are dressed in a single large tutu.

The memory of a costume party at Maison Hermès where everyone was dressed in a tutu, inspired the staging of this portrait. Through this absurd view, Dumas and Mussard are portrayed by the artist as if they were one. This ironic shift plunges them into the clothes of Monsieur and Madame Loyale, showing them to the viewer as two magicians.
Looking at the 4x5 contact prints of the shot, the artist was transported into a sequence from a Charlie Chaplin film. This revelation gave rise to a jerky dance, a stop-motion video shown to the right of the large portrait. The diptych shows a complementary balance between the still image and the moving image, reinforcing the comic aspect of the portrait.