Hermès and the rise of hand-drawn luxury

We’ve long covered the AI backlash, and Hermès quietly dropping a hand-drawn digital refresh certainly reads as in keeping with this trend.

The hand‑illustrated website and Instagram treatment created with French illustrator Linda Merad is in place of the usual hyper‑polished CGI. Visitors are met with wobbly seahorses, inky sea creatures and products that swim through an underwater world with visible paper grain and imperfect lines.

Created in‑house with Hermès art direction working directly with illustrator Linda Merad; animation and sound handled by a small production team.

Hermès invites Merad to interpret the brand for “the year of the horse”, but instead of yet more literal horses, she expands a suggested seahorse into a full, surreal underwater ecosystem where jewellery, hats and scarves appear as part of the scenery.

The wallpaper-like narrative is light and scenic, but the art serves a purpose, inviting viewers to explore the drawings, and discover products, all while feeling a little more human, after all.

Indeed, Merad talks about Hermès explicitly wanting viewers to feel “a human made this”, at a time when AI images are infinite, free and eerily smooth.

The work is, of course, not the first to lean into the value of imperfection. By embracing wobbles, uneven colour, paper textures as a marker of craft and luxury, this sits firmly in the anti‑AI “prove a human did it” camp.

Past precedent

Luxury brands have gone in pretty hard on this sort of aesthetic. Burberry's ‘Art of the Trench’ Campaign (inhouse) in 2009 invited customers to share photos of themselves wearing Burberry trench coats. The campaign featured hand-drawn illustrations alongside user-generated content.

Nike's ‘The Nature of Motion’ with Wieden+Kennedy, meanwhile, focused on the fluidity of movement in sports, using hand-drawn graphics to echo athletic performance. The visuals aimed to inspire and connect with athletes. (OK, maybe they’re not luxury, but sometimes the prices are.)

Tiffany & Co.’s ‘Believe in Dreams’, meanwhile, used whimsical hand-drawn illustrations to evoke a sense of fantasy and elegance, focusing on the dreams associated with love and luxury. AI might not have been a twinkle in Sam Altman’s eye back then, but the accompanying video for the campaign featured theatrically handmade sets and artistic flourishes in keeping with the homemade vibes of the Hermès campaign.

Images courtesy of Hermès campaign/Illustrator Linda Merad