Road to Adoption: The Hermes Kelly Ghillies

Happy New Year, dear readers! I did fall off the face of the earth after my last entry (October 2015!) due workload and the holidays, but I wanted to come back here in January with something worth talking about. And as you can see from the title and teaser photo, there’s definitely something to talk about today!

If you’ve been following me on my IG feed, you’d know that I have a serious addiction to men’s shoes, particularly the oxfords and the brogues. Brogues were inventions of necessity, introduced to weather the soggy terrains of Ireland and Scotland. The perforations in the shoes (known as “broguing”) assisted with the drying of shoes after outdoor use. So from the farms/bogs of the Highlands the brogue serrations and details now find themselves in boardrooms. And on my feet .

As Hermès has this habit of turning functionality into art, the brogue now has met its new match in the Kelly and Birkin bags. Affectionately called the Kelly Ghillies or Birkin Ghillies after the Irish traditional style of ghillie brogue, these bags have been introduced into our orange vernacular by Pierre Hardy (I love him btw) since 2011. Many purists prefer to not change the original designs, but as soon as I saw the delicate tooling, I was smitten. Perforations, embossings, trompe l’oeils…anything that augments flat hide to texture is a win in my book. But of course, chasing after a Ghillies Kelly or Birkin is like chasing after a black unicorn; the bar is just raised that much higher. This press photo from Hermès last year only fueled my desire even more, because they would go so well with a Ghillies bag.

Green brogues with a chunky sole–I ask you, can life get any better? Yes, absolutely. If they are in your closet. So after a worldwide hunt, my “local” store in Belgium finally tracked down the last pair from Berlin and I happily wired the funds when they were sent to Brussels. A few weeks later, the bombings happened in Paris. Then Brussels shut down. Suffice it to say, my shoes are still somewhere on their shelves waiting for me to pick them up. Fast forward a few months and I run across the same shoes in a dark blue at a boutique back in the US!

They are by far the most well made shoes in my closet. They also hurt like hell, but maybe in a couple of years I will have broken them in and will then truly enjoy them. It may also take that long to find the matching bag anyway, said the voice in my head.

But as I’d mentioned in the earlier episodes of this Adoption series, the orange gods like to toy with us mortals. Within two weeks, in two very different cities, I was offered a Ghillies Birkin 35 and a Ghillies Kelly 35. The Birkin literally slipped through my hands due to bad timing (I was flying out of the city on the day it arrived and could not work out the details), and the Kelly was too big. The SA even talked me out of it and told me to wait for the right bag to come along. Of course I kicked myself for weeks after both incidents because I didn’t think lightning could strike three times. And having seen the details with my own eyes, I was certain my next bag would have to be the Ghillies something.

Sometimes if you send a thought out into the universe, it materializes. Just like that, this vert fonce (dark green) came into my life yesterday. Funny how things work out when you are in the right place at the right time; I’ll take dumb luck any old day as a life partner. The leather of my Kelly is clemence and the trims are Evercolor (a new leather that I adore). Let’s enjoy the eye candy, shall we?

Yummy.

The tassels are lovely additions to the lock and zipper pull.

So there I go… blew out my shopping budget for the year and it’s only the third week of January. But I bet when I finally get my shoes from Brussels I will be even more ecstatic that this adoption happened. Keep dreaming, dear readers. Some do come true!

January 17, 2016