People often think about what they are going to wear in terms of color, silhouette, style, etc. I think very primitively at times. When I think of wearing something, I think about the type of materials. I’m going to wear either hair, fur, or skin of an animal or a plant fiber, or silk. How can anything feel more luxurious than silk against bare skin? And the most luxurious of all silk is what Hermes scarves are made of.

I became a collector of Hermes scarves not just for the status quo, but because each is like a story, an allegory. I could write a novel for each one.

***

L’Arbre de Soie (The Tree of Silk): lush red mulberries and blue jagged leaves against pearly white background; deep blue border; fat, rippling silk worms feasting on the succulence; velvety moths taking flight. Half-tone shadow of leaves around the middle. A mottled sparrow in the center.

“The tree is where it all starts,” he said. “Without mulberry leaves and the worms, there would be no silk. I almost went blind tracing all the leaves. It took me forever.”

Cameron was training to become a master engraver at Hermès. He had told me about the bolts of silk twill, each over a hundred meters long, woven from the finest threads from Brazil—the skeins of raw silk called flottes. He said a single female silkmoth, a Bombyx mori, could produce a single Hermès scarf. The insect could lay 300 eggs which would become cocoons feeding on two trees of leaves to yield 450 kilometers of thread.

“Pearl, do you know how long 450 kilometers is?”

“No. Isn’t a marathon about 42 kilometers?”

“The thread would be long enough to keep us tied together even if you were in Paris and I’m in Lyon.”

-“Pearl’s Labyrinth,” unpublished novel