Hermès has built a DJ booth. Not a concept, not a window display, an actual working setup you can buy, which is not a sentence I expected to write this year.
It is called the Atelier Horizons Disque Jockey Club. The frame is mahogany, the whole thing is wrapped in Pippa cowhide leather, there is a proper mixer, and underneath the leather panels sit a pair of Technics SL-1200s. That last detail is the one that lands for anyone who has spent time behind the decks. The 1200 is the workhorse, the deck most of us learned on, the one that has survived every trend going precisely because it was built to be used and abused. Seeing it buried inside a six-figure piece of Hermès furniture is a strange thing to make peace with.
It came out of Atelier Horizons, the maison’s bespoke workshop run by designer and naval architect Axel de Beaufort, made in collaboration with British DJ Prince Charles and built by French cabinetmakers. It was unveiled at Milan Design Week, shown at La Pelota in the Brera Design District, and is now for sale at Hermès Berlin.
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Terminal V has revealed Clydeside Live, a new dedicated open-air event space, as the home of its landmark 10th anniversary festivalHermès has not given a price, which is an answer in itself. For context, the related jukebox in the same home audio range is listed at over $360,000 and the matching speakers at close to $33,000. Make of that what you will.
What interests me is what this says about where the DJ booth has ended up. Not long ago it was a flight case in the corner, functional and ignored, the bit of the room nobody photographed. Now it is the centrepiece. There are whole social accounts devoted to sound systems as design objects, and brands have noticed. Hermès is not the first fashion house to wander into music culture, but it is the one with the most to say about taste, so it carries more weight when it does.
The approach is the giveaway. A lot of recent booths go for the raw, brutalist, Berlin warehouse look. Hermès has gone the other way entirely, all controlled luxury and leather you would think twice about touching with club hands. The two could not look more different, yet they arrive at the same place. The booth has stopped being a tool and become a statement about the person standing behind it.
That is really the product here. Hermès is not selling a way to play records, it is confirming that the DJ booth now belongs to the world of objects people own to signal who they are. The kit works, genuinely, but whether it ever gets used is almost beside the point. For those of us who came up on the same SL-1200s now hidden under all that leather, it is a curious thing to watch and I kinda want one.
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