Vermont's Cartoonist Laureate Goes High Fashion

A still from “A Holiday Haven With Hermès,” animation by Ed Koren for Hermès Credit: Courtesy of Ed Koren

As most Vermonters surely know, Ed Koren is the state’s second-ever cartoonist laureate — but is known and beloved far beyond our borders. Koren, who has lived in Brookfield since 1987, made his name with a fuzzy, sometimes furry, and always funny comic aesthetic that has graced the pages of the New Yorker, Vogue, Vanity Fair, the Nation and many other publications. This holiday season, Koren has another feather (quill?) to stick in his cap: the video “A Holiday Haven With Hermès.”

It is one of a series on the label’s website. You might call it “a haute couture Christmas with Koren.”

“It was a lot of a fun,” Koren said in a phone conversation with Seven Days. The fashion house first contacted him early last summer. “It was a very long and complicated project that lasted all summer,’ Koren said, “and here it is, a minute and 20 seconds!”

In the animation, two of Koren’s trademark fuzzy critters — one is a reindeer — take a sled (and boat!) ride over snow-blanketed hills to deliver an adorable Christmas tree from country to city, where it finds a cozy home in the Hermès flagship outlet in Paris. Koren said his intentions were to make something that would be “hopefully kind of amusing and sweet — a little thoughtful piece on human interaction [told] with animals.

“What was weird,” he added, “was to be able to do this from little old Brookfield.”

Koren worked from his home studio to develop the characters and story for the spot, collaborating via internet and phone with the ad agency at Hermès and a team of animators. “They never saw an actual original drawing,” he said. “It’s the new creative economy of Vermont.”

Watch the short video here.