Hermès Brings Its Global Drawing Festival to Mumbai

Hermès has always treated drawing as a way of seeing before making. This December, the maison brings that ethos to Mumbai with Hermès, Drawn to Craft: Putting Pencils To Paper, a two-day open-air festival that treats the humble pencil as both muse and instrument. It’s part of the house’s annual theme, Drawn to Craft, a 2025 thread that runs through its collections and cultural programming worldwide. But unlike the cloistered ateliers of Paris, this edition unfolds in the middle of the city, at the Open Air Plaza of the National Centre for the Performing Arts (NCPA), where anyone can walk in and pick up a pencil.

Spread across 6–7 December, the event transforms NCPA into a creative playground structured around hands-on workshops and live demonstrations. Still-life illustration sessions sit alongside pattern-collage stations, while paper-marbling tables draw in both meticulous tinkerers and casual wanderers. Those who’d rather watch than sketch can catch the Speed Painter Band, a live act that turns performance into pigment. The layout stays deliberately loose: visitors drift between easels, drawing tables, colours, and caravans of activity, encouraged not to produce masterpieces but to rediscover the simple, unhurried pleasure of putting pencil to paper.

What elevates the festival beyond a weekend diversion is its framing. Hermès positions drawing as the origin story of every object it creates—an act of grounding before invention. By opening the process to the public and removing any hint of exclusivity, the maison places emphasis on the universality of the gesture: the line, the scribble, the sketch. It’s a reminder that craft starts long before craftsmanship.

For a house that has built its legacy on meticulous artisanship, Drawn to Craft in Mumbai lands as both an invitation and a quiet manifesto. Show up at 11am with nothing but curiosity and have fun!