Pierre Hermé Paris will launch a special art collaboration with Nicolas Buffe, themed "A Tale of Love," in stores worldwide throughout 2016. Sketches of the story, the theme park, and the main characters have already been painted on the walls of the second floor of the Pierre Hermé Paris Aoyama store. Various packaging and special macarons and chocolates will be sold for seasonal occasions like Valentine's Day and Hinamatsuri (Girl's Day), and the store environment will also be themed around the story. Nicolas Buffe, a French artist known in the fashion industry for his collaborations with Comme des Garçons shirts and Hermès, is currently based in Tokyo. He is known for his work that fuses Japanese and American anime and subculture with European medieval, Renaissance, and Baroque classical styles. His work has been exhibited at the Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo, the Hara Museum of Contemporary Art, international contemporary art fairs in France, and museums in France. His wide-ranging activities include the visual design for the opera "Orlando Palladino" at the Théâtre du Châtelet in Paris. This story, centered around Elios of the "Kingdom of the Sun" and Roxanne of the "Kingdom of the Moon," depicts a poetic world of love and adventure, with new stories to be released throughout the year. Anime-inspired characters are planned to appear, including Roxanne's dress-up-loving youngest sister, her pet cat, and Cupidon, Elio's robot friend with the ability to unlock the door between the two lovers. One of the characters is said to have been inspired by the 1970s robot anime "UFO Robo Grendizer," originally created by Go Nagai. Each character will be featured on a special package, and different designs will be available at Maisons worldwide, ranging from 5-piece sets to 40-piece sets (exclusive to Nihonbashi Mitsukoshi). "When I visited Pierre Hermé's house in Paris for the first meeting about this project, I was jet-lagged, and Pierre and I walked around Parc Monceau, near the house, and we talked. I think we even talked about Grendizer (laughs). Later, when I looked into the history of Parc Monceau, I found out it was a theme park for 18th-century aristocrats. It's home to mysterious buildings and arches, some real and some fake. I was working on the opera The Magic Flute at the time, so the story of the park just kept expanding," Nicolas says. A painting of Parc Monceau is featured on the packaging and on the wall of the Aoyama store. The main character's name, Roxanne, brings to mind a song by The Police. "Of course, that song is like The Police, but I was also thinking of a strong female name with a word related to the moon. The opera I was working on in Paris was about King Alexander I, and the princess was a very strong woman from Azerbaijan. The fact that the princess's name was Roxanne was a strange connection," Nicolas explains, explaining the mysterious connection between the work.
The chocolates in the assortment are also tailored to the personalities of the characters in this story, with Helios having a Brazilian chocolate ganache and Roxanne having a vanilla-flavored chocolate noir, and their personalities are reflected not only in the packaging but also in the recipes, so we can look forward to the one-year collaboration between the two characters who will weave a world from the story.
Text: Noda Tatsuya
