A Hermès carré that landed in shops in spring 1992 was first sketched, in life size, on a 90 by 90 centimetre card, sometime in the autumn of 1990. That gap is the part of the object nobody sees. The square of silk you can drape over a handbag handle has already been waiting eighteen months by the time it reaches the counter. Half its life is gone before anyone has touched it.

Robert Dumas drew the first one in 1937. The design was called Jeu des Omnibus et Dames Blanches, and it was lifted from an antique parlour game in the Hermès family collection, with the horsedrawn omnibuses of nineteenth-century Paris turning back into print. By the early 1990s the house had produced hundreds of follow-on designs, each obeying the same brief, ninety centimetres on a side, hand-rolled hem, somewhere between fifteen and forty colours, a story you can read while you fold it.

The slow part is the engraving. An artist, often a freelancer working from a kitchen table somewhere in France, hands over a finished painting on card. Hermès engravers in Lyon then translate it into films, one transparent sheet per colour, traced by hand under a light box. A relatively simple thirty-colour design needs four hundred to six hundred hours of this. A complicated one can demand two thousand. Then those films become silk-screens, one per colour, and the scarf is printed on a hundred-metre table, lightest ink first, darkest ink last. Wash, set, iron, cut. The hem alone is forty minutes of stitching by one woman with one needle, and there is no machine that can do it without leaving the kind of edge a Hermès customer would notice.

Brazilian silk, oddly. The yarn comes from mulberry moth cocoons on farms the house keeps in Brazil, and the weaving in Lyon takes about three months on its own. A single 90cm scarf weighs sixty- five grams and consumes the silk of around 250 cocoons. The fineness is graded 6A, which means almost nothing to a customer and everything to a colourist trying to land thirty separate inks on a substrate that has to stay flat, take dye cleanly, and survive being knotted at the throat for fifty years.

What I find interesting about the early-90s carré program is that it ran on a clock the rest of fashion had already abandoned. Ready-to-wear in 1992 was operating on a six-month cycle and visibly straining. Magazines published trend reports in February about what people would supposedly want by April. The silk-scarf desk at Hermès was working two collections per year of roughly twelve designs each, every one of them already two years deep in production by the time the season turned. The decision about what your spring 1992 carré looked like was effectively made in the autumn of 1990, and nothing about Madonna's Blond Ambition tour, or the early signs of grunge in Seattle, or the Gulf War ending, or any of the other things that supposedly steered taste that year, could touch it.

Which is one of the things a Birkin shares with a carré, come to think of it. Both of them are objects whose internal time runs slower than the time around them. You cannot rush either, and that turns out to be most of the value.

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