Luxury fashion house Hermès has revealed its first pair of full-size wireless headphones. They look great but the bad news is you almost certainly can’t afford them.
These Hermès headphones are made by its boutique Ateliers Horizons division, and will set you back $15,000 once they arrive in the Summer.
And contrary to what you might think, these are apparently not just an existing pair given an expensive leather suit makeover.
“The idea is not to be able to replicate that 10,000 times as a big headset supplier would do. The idea is to have the few that we will do made perfectly, and that has been a very long learning process,” Axel de Beaufort Ateliers Horizons creative director says, as reported by WWD.
Ateliers Horizons is a small, roughly 50-people-strong, workshop in Paris, where some of Hermès’s most exclusive items are made.
That also tells us, though, that the headphones themselves won’t be made entirely by this team. Ateliers Horizons instead likely contributes the leather parts of the cup caps and the headband covering, as well has no doubt having worked out the sound tuning and design with their manufacturing partners.
“We need to understand the engineering of things. It doesn’t mean that we do the engineering, but we need to understand and we need to be able to push boundaries,” says de Beaufort.
He also says the headphones have a signature Hermès sound, stressing this product isn’t just about the outer look and feel.
They are Bluetooth wireless headphones, and a pair that can also be used with a classic headphone cable instead.
We don’t yet have any specifics on the tech inside, whether that’s the battery life or presence of active noise cancellation. But we can clearly see the Hermès headphones have physical buttons, not capacitive touch pads.
The grille pattern on the cups also reminds us of designs used in planar magnetic headphones, a style that tends to deliver pretty awesome sound. We’ll have to wait to see what the specs amount to, and whether Hermès really has gone next-level with the driver type.
The Hermes headphones will be available in the natural leather colour seen here, black/chocolate brown and red/blue.
Hermes has also unveiled a couple of other audio products. There’s a leather-clad wireless speaker and a wild-looking “jukebox” with a design by illustrator Elias Kafouros.
This jukebox appears to be a special edition of one of Hermes existing lines. Previous versions of the jukebox retail for 310,000 Euro. Makes the headphones seem pretty pedestrian, eh?
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