At 24 rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré, Hermès began with rope. Before the silk, before the Birkin, Thierry Hermès cut harness and rein in 1837, and every knot a saddler tied had to hold a horse. A century on, the house turned that tradition into exquisite ornamentation: the cordage from the Normandy quays, the sailor's knot, the anchor chain Robert Dumas sketched off a moored boat, all rendered in precious metals.
These earrings carry that lineage. Handcrafted in 18k yellow gold in 1970s France, each strand is milled, coiled, and looped into a knot that looks almost malleable. The incredible art of making metal behave like cordage and the woven, a beautiful example of Hermès' "Nœuds Marins" (Marine Knots).
Gold has been tied in knots for love since the Hellenistic goldsmiths, who set the Herakles knot, two cords gripping by friction, tighter the harder you pull, into diadems and earrings twenty-two centuries ago. Rome tied it into the bride's belt, the nodus Herculaneus, and left only the husband to loosen it. The Georgians inherited the lover's knot from antiquity and made it a language of courtship. The”true lover's knot,” an interlaced band with no visible beginning or end, descended from Roman and Renaissance betrothal rings, and by the Georgian era it was a standard token of engagement, carried in rings whose bezels were made of twisted gold wire worked into a complicated four-loop knot. Victorians built an entire coded vocabulary of love tokens, and the entwined lover's knot meant one specific thing: a bond that “cannot be untied.” It appeared on engagement rings, wedding bands, and brooches worn near the heart
Hermès' “Nœuds Marins” simply took it back to the working rope it came from. Their generous scale could only belong to the 1970s, a decade when women's lives expanded beyond old expectations, and jewellery expanded with them.
We adore the direction Hermès took. Not to mythology. Not to sentiment. Back to the rope from which it first learned to hold. A golden symbol of strength and resilience.
Designer: Hermès
Period: Mid-20th Century
Year: 1970s
Material: 18k Yellow Gold
Condition: Excellent
Made in France
