Essay · 4 min read

Why we chose obsidian

Obsidian is not black. It is glass — born of a volcano, cooled too quickly to crystallize, frozen mid-thought. Held to the light it shows green, brown, the rust-orange of an old sunset. Held away from light, it is the deepest non-color a human eye can read.

When we built the palette for this studio we wanted a primary that did the work of black without lying. Black is a printer's ink. Obsidian is an event. A piece of obsidian on the lava field is a record of a moment when the earth moved fast enough to forget its own grammar.

The garments we make are tools for movement. The color they wear should remember that movement exists.

So our black is never #000. It is #0A0A0C — a touch of cyan to keep the warmth out, a hint of weight to keep the eye from sliding off. On screen it reads as black. In the right light, on the right cotton, it reads as glass.

This is the small grammar of the studio. We are interested in colors that have a memory of where they came from. Copper for the slow heat of metallurgy. Amethyst for the violet that geologists find inside a closed stone. Malachite for the green that copper turns when it lives a long time in the open air. And obsidian — the volcanic glass — for the line that holds everything else.