The control shade

Every season the dye house in Como develops one colour to our brief that will never appear in the collection. It is dyed onto three metres of the season’s principal cloth, hung in the studio, and left there. Its job is to be almost right.

“A palette is only as strong as the colour it refuses. The withheld shade keeps the others honest.”

Thirty-one seasons, thirty-one refusals

The archive of withheld colours now runs to thirty-one lengths of cloth, stored flat in the basement of the Paris atelier. Seen together they form a collection of their own — the house’s shadow palette, eleven years of near misses. We have been asked to exhibit them. We are considering it, slowly.

This season’s refusal was a red — precisely the red you are imagining. It was beautiful. That was the problem.