Krewe of Hermes' Diamond Jubilee Exhibit

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An exhibit at The Presbytère showcases seventy-five years of sumptuous design

When a cluster of savvy New Orleans businessmen launched their own Mardi Gras krewe in 1937, their aim may have been more commercial than cultural. Looking for ways to boost the Depression-battered local economy, the new Krewe of Hermes planned to parade on the Friday evening before Mardi Gras to lure weekend visitors—and their dollars—to the city.

But this year, as Hermes celebrates its seventy-fifth anniversary when it parades on February 28, an exhibit at New Orleans’ Presbytère museum reveals that what might have begun in service of commerce now leaves an opulent legacy of Mardi Gras culture at the highest level.

Krewe of Hermes: The Diamond Jubilee is an intimate and sumptuous collection that provides a glimpse of the highest expressions of Mardi Gras design—from gowns, crowns, and scepters to ball invitations, krewe favors, and float sketches. The exhibit, painstakingly curated from Krewe of Hermes members, the Louisiana State Museum Carnival Collection, and artifacts from New Orleans’s renowned Kern Studios, not only reflects the high art of historic parades and balls, but also reveals a renewed embrace of the classical as exemplified by the Krewe of Hermes.

“It’s exciting to be in this age of Carnival, when the artistic integrity is so high,” said Wayne Phillips, curator of costumes and textiles and the museum’s Carnival Collection. Phillips’s assertion couldn’t be better demonstrated by the showstopper behind him: a stunning pair of gowns that bookend Hermes’s history. Queen Marjorie Lee Smith’s 1937 gown and Queen Taylor Rees’s 2013 gown are both divine silver interpretations that strike a perfect balance between grandeur and elegance.

Sweeping regally from Smith’s gown, a vast, blue velvet and ermine mantle adorned with a glittering silver symbol for Mercury (the Roman iteration of Hermes), reminds that the aspirations of early Carnival ritual emulated the royal. Backdrop to both gowns, a blown-up photo bought at auction just last year of Smith posing with her court looks every bit like a royal reception and provides a rare look at the detailed pageantry of early tableau balls (as does a captivating seven-minute video of film highlights from a Hermes ball in the 1950s). Phillips, who oversees the museum’s fifteen thousand Carnival artifacts, including hundreds of costumes and thousands of photographs, is thrilled to showcase Smith’s historic gown. “Hermes is the only krewe in Louisiana for which the Louisiana State Museum has a costume from its first year,” he said, and while the gown was donated by the Queen herself to the museum’s Carnival Collection in 1976, this is the first time it has been exhibited.

This is the museum’s second krewe-specific exhibit (the first featured Zulu’s Centennial in 2009), and Phillips likes to emphasize the historic importance of Hermes in the Carnival landscape. Not only founded with the intention of drawing tourism with its Friday evening spectacle (and named for the Greek god of commerce and trade), Hermes opened its membership to citizens with means and standing in the community, certainly, but not necessarily old-line ancestry. “It was the democratization of Mardi Gras,” Phillips said, in contrast to old-line krewes like Rex and Comus, whose members came only from the uppermost strata of New Orleans society. Today, with nearly seven hundred members, Hermes still culls its members largely from the arenas of commerce, law, and medicine. (Remaining a mystic organization, the membership of Hermes is generally kept secret. Even its annual King appears masked at all events, and his name is kept out of any press.)

From its inception, Hermes also broke new ground in design. The founders took an inventive approach to parade artistry by holding its parade at 6 pm (and therefore in the dark), and it pioneered the use of colored neon lighting in its second year. Hermes is the oldest continually night-parading krewe at Carnival.

But even lit by neon, Phillips insists, the krewe’s aesthetic hewed to the classical—it quickly became a Hermes signature, and one that has been taken to new heights in the hands of Henri Schindler, Hermes’s artistic director and guest curator of the Diamond Jubilee exhibit. Schindler might be the closest thing to a Mardi Gras impresario in modern-day New Orleans. Not only the artistic director of Hermes for the last eight years, he also directs the vision of Rex, Comus, and Le Krewe D’Etat. Dapper, articulate, and passionate, Schindler explains the event’s history and pageantry every year to platoons of interviewers and has appeared in many documentaries over the years. He’s the author of Mardi Gras Treasures, a four-volume series showcasing jewelry, ball invitations, and float and costume designs. His latest project, a seventy-fifth anniversary history of the Krewe of Hermes, is what inspired him to propose the Diamond Jubilee exhibit to Phillips.

“He was leery at first,” Schindler said, as highlighting one New Orleans krewe might create a clamor for equal representation by the city’s Carnival rivals. But, Schindler said, “he soon realized the importance of this forgotten history, and that we would have enough artifacts to mount a marvelous show.”

Indeed they did. In addition to several more resplendent costumes of queens and kings, the Hermes exhibit features never-before-exhibited costume designs from the late 1940s by Helen Clark Warren—glamorous and detailed works of art in their own right. They were a discovery for both men, and Phillips (who tracked down Warren’s niece in Florida to obtain the loan) is working on documenting Warren’s role as the first official costume designer for Hermes. It’s a hunt for historic detail he relishes.

But Phillips has clearly relished most his partnership with Schindler, and perhaps the ultimate realization of this is an entire gallery set aside as exploration of (and tribute to) the 2011 Krewe of Hermes parade, “At The Court of the Great Mogul.”

“That parade was literally forty-five years in the making,” Schindler said. “When a dear friend gave me the book of that title in 1967, I dreamed of turning it into a spectacular night parade. It was an enormous thrill to finally see it done.”

For those who weren’t on the streets of uptown New Orleans to witness the grand embodiment of Schindler’s vision in 2011 (or be invited to the ball), many of the most decorative elements are gathered together at the Presbytère. Among the highlights: breathtakingly complex ball invitations, printed on both sides to be folded up and slid into envelopes as a kind of event unto themselves. “Getting one of these is like opening a gift,” Phillips said, adding that Hermes is one of the only krewes that hires what he called “important local artists” to design the invitations.

Under the artistic guidance of Schindler, Hermes also does its float design in the old-school manner—a pen and ink artist sketches floats based on Schindler’s overall vision, and those approved sketches then go to a professional colorist for the development of the palette (by contrast, many krewes now use computer-rendered float designs). From there, Schindler works with only certain builders and painters at Kern Studios (where he himself apprenticed as a teen) to transfer the artistry of two dimensions into three. The 2011 float designs on display make for fascinating viewing, but it might be the one float artifact itself, a twelve-foot high, bright orange, papier mâché “Hand of Attis” that tells the companion story to the exhibit’s elegant gowns. Vibrant, dramatic, and so much larger than life, the gargantuan hand is painted with extraordinary nuance and detail—so much of it impossible to see, much less appreciate, from the street.

But that’s the arcane and divine mission of Hermes and krewes like it. Every year puts art at the center. Every year creates a masterpiece. And, like the sand mandalas wiped away by Tibetan monks, the life of that masterpiece is stunningly brief. It’s Ash Wednesday, Mardi Gras becomes a memory, and the slate is wiped clean.

But for 2014, the design, the details, and the décor are alive at the Presbytère. It’s a show worth catching.

Tracey Minkin is an award-winning writer based in Providence, Rhode Island. Her work appears regularly in national magazines and online.

Details. Details. Details.

Krewe of Hermes: The Diamond Jubilee, through December 2014.

The Presbytère

751 Chartres Street

New Orleans, La.

(800) 568-6968

crt.state.la.us/museum/properties/presbytere/