Black and White Is the Medium

Black and white is not a filter we reach for at the end. It is the medium the brand is made in, the same way a sculptor is in stone. Everything — the photography, the films, the packaging, the two colors on this page — is built inside that decision and does not get to leave it.

There is a tradition behind it, and it is worth naming. Gordon Parks, who understood that patience is a technique. Roy DeCarava, who refused to light his people brighter to make them legible to an audience that was not looking carefully. Teenie Harris, who made tens of thousands of exposures of ordinary Pittsburgh afternoons and, in doing so, produced the most complete portrait of a Black American community anyone has.

Color tells you when

A color photograph is always partly about its own year. The film stock dates it, the processing dates it, the paint on the car and the print on the dress date it. You read the decade before you read the face.

Take the color out and the dating slows down. What is left is bone structure, posture, hands, the way the light falls across a jaw. The man stops belonging to a decade. He simply is, and that is the exact quality we want the brand to have.

The brand exists outside of time, just as the elder it honors does.

From the Foundation

The foundation does not move

Jet and bone. Two values, every product, every page, every season. Not warm black and not white — a black with weight in it, and an off-white that has the temperature of paper rather than the temperature of a screen.

A future capsule may bring one accent color in for a specific reason, use it honestly, and then leave. That is allowed, the way a guest is allowed. What is not allowed is the foundation drifting, because the foundation is the thing a person recognizes across ten years without being able to say why.

Restraint photographs well. It always has. The temptation in a young brand is to prove range, and range is exactly what makes a brand look like every other one. We would rather be recognizable in a thumbnail, at a distance, in low light, in ten years.