Ninja miners by Andrew Rowat

Forget Birkin, it’s all about the Mongolian felt jacket

No wonder he felt skeptical. One day a colleague showed up unexpectedly in Christophe Lemaire’s studio at Hermès in Paris clutching a swatch of strange-looking felt that had come all the way from Mongolia. She told him excitedly that it should be possible to make a jacket from a single piece of it—no seams, no darts, just felt. “We made a pattern for a jacket and sent it to Mongolia, but to be honest, I never expected anything to happen,” said Lemaire, who was researching new fabrics for his first collection as artistic director of women’s wear at Hermès. “But two weeks before the show, this guy flew over with the jacket. The felt had been made using a traditional Mongolian method of rolling cashmere yarn in water, like papier-mâché. Then they sculpted it into a jacket. We made a few corrections. He took it back, and the finished jacket arrived in Paris just in time for the show. It’s amazing! A three-dimensional object. It feels extraordinary to wear. Though I still don’t understand how they did it.”