Hello Scarf Sage community 
I’m Swiss_Gems, newly arrived from Basel, Switzerland — where silk has its own deep story (the city was the centre of the European silk ribbon trade for centuries, a tradition UNESCO recognises to this day). I collect Hermès carrés at the intersection of art history and investment, with a particular obsession for vintage twills, jacquard constructions, and the stories behind the artists.
But I come bearing a question that has been haunting me since I joined.
Nobody actually knows how many Hermès carrés exist in private hands.
Hermès has issued somewhere between 2,000 and 2,500 distinct designs since 1937. Some estimates put global private collection size in the hundreds of thousands of pieces. But what about this community — the people who actually care enough to know a damassée from a printed reissue, who can spot a pre-1967 piece by the absence of a © mark, who lose sleep over first-edition colorways?
So here is my proposal: The Great Scarf Sage Census.
Reply with three things:
-
How many scarves do you own? (Honesty required. No judgement.)
-
Your single grail piece — the one you haven’t acquired yet that keeps you up at night.
-
The piece in your collection you would never sell, no matter the offer.
I’ll start.
-
71 pieces and growing.
-
Brides de Gala 1957 first issue, pre-© mark, in a colorway that has never disappointed me in photographs.
-
À la Gloire de la Cuisine Française (Dumas & Pittner, 1945/46) — the oldest piece in my collection by date of design, acquired in wartime France, and too personally significant to the story I am telling with this collection to ever let go.
I suspect this community holds more art history in its closets than most museums would admit. Let’s find out.
Swiss_Gems 
