In a workshop in Tequisquiapan, artisans are bending strips of wicker into the shape of a crab's claw. It will end up clutching a Hermes handbag in a shop window thousands of miles from where it was woven, but right now it is just cane and hands and the kind of technique passed down rather than taught in a classroom. This is where the Hermès Mexico window displays actually begin, long before anyone in Mexico City, Cancún, Monterrey or Guadalajara sees the finished scene through the glass.
Mestiz's handwoven pieces, in progress for the Hermès display cases. Credits: Mestiz /@mestizmx
The studio behind this menagerie is Mestiz, founded in San Miguel de Allende by architect Daniel Valero. For the third year running, Hermès has commissioned Mestiz to reimagine its window displays, and the results push wicker into territory it rarely occupies: storytelling. A violet elephant stands beside a woven butterfly. Fish swim through fields of tulips that were never planted in soil. Birds perch beside bags. The forms borrow from folklore and childhood imagination, giving each display the logic of a fable rather than a retail moment.
Handwoven wicker fish, ready to swim through the Hermès installation. Credits: Mestiz /@mestizmx
What makes this collaboration worth Selvedge's attention is the process behind it. Valero doesn't run a single workshop, he works across regions, matching material to maker. The wicker comes from artisans in Tequisquiapan, and the textiles trace back to Saltillo, where the Tamayo family's workshop first introduced Valero to the sarape technique that shaped his earliest furniture. Ceramics come from Dolores Hidalgo, woodwork from carvers in San Miguel itself, including Don Javi, a local repairer of school furniture whose stories of a lizard spotted on a coastal trip became the seed for an entire zoomorphic collection.
Daniel Valero in the studio with a selection of works in progress. Image: Pepe Molina, © Mestiz.
This regional dispersal is the point. Mestiz's name comes from mestizaje, the Spanish word for mixing, and Valero treats that mixing as method rather than metaphor. Rather than importing a house style and asking artisans to execute it, he starts with what a maker already knows and builds outward through small variations, gradually inviting more experimentation. A relationship with the Tamayo workshop that began with rug weaving in 2015 has stretched across a decade.
Hermès window display's featuring Mestiz's handwoven pieces, now installed in the store. Credits: Mestiz /@mestizmx
The palette running through the Hermès windows, saturated pinks, greens and violets, comes from the same instinct that has defined Mestiz's furniture since Valero stepped away from the muted Nordic aesthetic drilled into him at design school. In Mexico, he has said, colour carries identity rather than decoration. That conviction runs through the ixle fiber rugs, the lacquered wood benches and now the woven creatures making their home in Hermès storefronts.
This is the third consecutive year Hermès has returned to Mestiz for its Mexican window displays, and the continuity shows in the details. The same wicker workshop in Tequisquiapan that shaped 2022's "Wild Awakening" installation has now built this year's flowers, birds and sea creatures. The same relationships with the Tamayo family in Saltillo and Don Javi in San Miguel continue to feed new collections. Three years of returning to the same workshops and the same hands has let the collaboration develop its own visual language, one that has moved from the wild creatures of 2022 to this year's more fable-like, storybook world.
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Further Information:
The Mestiz window displays can now be viewed at Hermès stores across Mexico.
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Image Credits:
Lead: Handwoven wicker flower and trunk, part of the pieces Mestiz created for Hermès. Credits: Mestiz /@mestizmx.
All further images as credited in captions.