The latest issue of Texas Monthly features a fascinating profile of Kermit Oliver, a reclusive resident of Waco, Texas, who works the night shift at the local post office and paints during the day. In other words, he’s the last person you’d ever expect to design $410 silk scarves for ultraluxury French label Hermès. It’s worth reading the story in full, but here’s how the connection came about: In the seventies, Oliver was represented by the well-respected DuBose Gallery in Houston. He befriended the gallery’s publicist, Shelby Sanders Stroope, wife of Lawrence Marcus, the executive vice-president of Neiman Marcus. When Xavier Guerrand-Hermès, then the president of Hermès’s U.S. operations, told Marcus he was looking for someone to make a Southwest-inspired scarf design, the collaboration was born.
Oliver later retreated from the art world and now lives a secluded life with his wife Katie. The only paintings he sells are those commissioned by art consultants, and he pays the bills with his post office job and the occasional scarf design. Since 1980, he has made a total of sixteen; you can see more of his intricate works here.
Portrait of the Artist as a Postman [Texas Monthly]
Categories: Accessories, Brands, Designer, Fashion
Tags: Artist, Designer, Hermes, Postman, Texas Monthly
Hermès scarves are well known for the heterogeneity of their designs. Each scarf tells its own story with stunning themes, motifs, colors, and designs. Designers slave over a worthy scarf design and artisans likewise slave over translating that design to perfection. Each scarf is screenprinted one color at a time, with the most complicated scarf using 40 different colors. Originally, this process was done with vegetable dyes that would take a month to dry, meaning a month between the application of each color to a single scarf. The whole process of coloring each scarf is incredibly time-consuming, but it is meticulously achieved for the sake of the quality of the scarf and the faithfulness to the artists’ design.