Hermès × Sony

Announced September 24, 1981, in the first-floor salon at 24 Faubourg Saint-Honoré, the Sac Promenade was presented as a bag first and a stereo second. Jean-Louis Dumas, three years into running Hermès, had bought a Walkman in Tokyo that spring and complained that it looked wrong against a good coat. Sony's design chief Yasuo Kuroki, who had just finished the slimmer WM-2, agreed to supply players and drawings on the condition that nothing on the machine itself be changed.

The bag was patterned in the Hermès ateliers by saddler Michel Rougier, who worked from a solid aluminium dummy of the WM-2 sent from Shinagawa. The player sits in a fitted pocket of box calf behind the front flap, with a stitched window cut exactly around its operation keys, so it can be played, stopped and wound without being taken out. A single brass grommet on the gusset lets the headphone lead exit under the strap, and the flap closes with a small touret turn-lock borrowed from the Kelly.

Sony contributed a pair of MDR-3 headphones with the headband wrapped in matching calf, and a leather-covered spare battery holder for two AA cells tucked under the rear slip pocket. Each bag was saddle-stitched by one craftsman, whose mark was stamped inside next to the Sony serial number of the player it was fitted to, so bag and machine were officially a matched pair.

Le Monde called it a handbag that had learned to listen; the Japanese press was more puzzled, noting that it cost roughly four times as much as the player inside it. The oddly specific detail collectors look for is the warranty card: the only Hermès document of the period printed in French, English and Japanese, signed in ink by both Dumas and Kuroki.