On the colour of undyed wool

Before pigment, every fibre is already a colour. The Welsh blackface is silver-brown at the shoulder and almost cream at the belly. The Mongolian goat is dust at the haunch and ash near the throat. A Tasmanian merino is bone-white where the rain hits and grey-yellow where it doesn't.

We have spent eight years learning to read those gradients — and asking, every season, what we lose when we erase them.

The first wool we ever ordered, in 2018, came from a mill in Biella that had been spinning for three generations and had never once worked with a designer who refused to specify a colour. They asked us, politely, how we expected them to fill the order. We sent them four photographs of sheep.

What came back was the colour of the sheep. Not a colour at all, by the standards of the industry — but a register, a range. A garment cut from that yarn looks different in morning light than in evening light, different against winter skin than summer skin, different in Paris than in Tokyo.

This is what dyeing takes from a fabric. It takes the conversation between the fibre and the world.