On Paseo de Gracia, Hermès has traded its usual quiet elegance for vertigo. From 16 September to 28 November, the Maison’s Barcelona windows host Escalera Infinita, a site-specific installation by Catalan architecture studio Mesura that turns two storeys of shopfront into a staircase with no beginning, no end and no particular allegiance to gravity.
The commission answers L’Appel du Large, Hermès’ 2026 theme — loosely, the call of the open sea, or of whatever lies beyond the horizon. Mesura’s response is landlocked but no less disorientating: a terracotta-pink structure of steps, ledges and niches unfurls symmetrically against panels of deep Hermès blue, its flights climbing, doubling back and mirroring themselves until up and down lose their usual meaning. The debt to M. C. Escher is declared rather than hidden — those compositions where staircases fold into each other and the eye simply gives up trying to reconcile them.
Look closer and the structure reveals its logic. Each stair and archway is cast from the iconography of the Maison’s carrés, the silk squares reimagined as fragments of an invented territory — half architecture, half cartography. Small apertures punctuate the plaster like windows onto other rooms, each holding an object: a Birkin, a Kelly, a scarf glimpsed as though through a keyhole. Mesura’s own sketches, all curved mirrors and pencilled elevations, show how deliberately theatrical the staging is, treating each bag as a room to be discovered rather than a product to be displayed.
Plaster is the material doing the talking. Historically bound to architectural ornament, yeso here becomes something closer to skin, recording the gesture of the hand that shaped it, developed with local ateliers and craftspeople rather than produced off the peg. The result sits somewhere between precision and reverie, and that tension is the point: Mesura describes the staircase as a metaphor for a journey that can never be fully understood while it is happening, only navigated. Getting lost, the studio suggests, is not a wrong turn but a way of eventually finding oneself.
The installation also puts Mesura in conversation with architectural history well beyond Escher — the poetic restraint of Aldo Rossi, the proportion and calm of Andrea Palladio — filtered through Hermès’ own formal vocabulary of saddle-stitching, harness leather and considered craft. It is a rare instance of a luxury window behaving like installation art rather than merchandising, and one worth a detour up Paseo de Gracia before the light changes and the staircase, inevitably, disappears.
Escalera Infinita is on view at Hermès Paseo de Gracia 81, Barcelona, until 28 November 2026.
WEB: www.hermes.com
