Choosing a Colour You Will Still Want in Twenty Years
What changes across two decades is rarely the colour, and almost always the appetite for it.
A well-made leather colour does not fail in any meaningful sense. Dyed through the skin rather than painted onto it, and kept out of prolonged direct sun, a shade will comfortably outlast the person who chose it, which means the question worth asking is not really about the dye at all. The usual formulation, which colour is timeless, is unanswerable in advance, since timelessness is a description applied to things twenty years after somebody bought them and never something that can be established on the day. The more useful version is whether a colour will go on agreeing with the clothes you actually own as those clothes are gradually replaced, and whether it will still hold your attention once the novelty of a new object has gone, and those two questions can be worked through before any money changes hands.
A colour has to agree with a wardrobe rather than with an outfit
Most of the colours that disappoint were chosen against something specific, usually a dress or an event or a particular season, and they were entirely correct for that occasion without ever having been asked to do anything else. The exercise that prevents it takes about a minute and involves a small piece of honesty: think of the six things you wear most often rather than the six you like best, and then work out how many of them the shade sits with comfortably. If the answer is fewer than three, you are looking at a bag for occasions, which is a perfectly reasonable thing to buy so long as it is what you intended to buy.
Temperature settles more than the colour itself
Every wardrobe has a temperature, and most people have kept the same one for years without ever having named it. A warm wardrobe tends toward camel, cream, chocolate, olive and tan, and the jewellery in it is usually gold; a cool one runs to black, charcoal, navy, grey and white, with silver or white gold at the wrist. Genuinely mixed wardrobes exist but are less common than people assume, and temperature turns out to be far more stable across a lifetime than any preference for a particular colour, which is why matching a bag to the temperature rather than to a garment is the single most reliable way of ensuring it survives the garments being replaced.
Within this collection the warm side holds Havane, Espresso, Terracota, Champagne and Palais Rouge, while the cool side holds London Ash, Monaco Blue, Platinum, Caviar and Crème Royale. A handful were developed to sit deliberately across the line, among them Truffle, which spends its life between brown and grey according to the light it is given, and Prunelle, which reads brown in a dim room and unmistakably purple in daylight.
Complexity lasts longer than neutrality
The received advice is to buy a neutral on the reasoning that a quiet colour cannot be tired of, and in practice the opposite is closer to the truth, because a flat colour is understood completely on the first day and has nothing further to offer on any of the days after it. A complex colour contains more than one thing at once, so what it shows depends on the light it happens to be in, and a bag of that kind is not quite the same object in March as it is in October. That is what keeps something interesting to the person who owns it over a long period, not novelty, which wears off within weeks, but a surface that continues to repay being looked at.
Several shades here were developed with precisely that in mind. Truffle carries a faint olive cast that stops it reading flat in any light; Havane moves between honey where the facets rise and cognac where they fall away; Terracota lifts toward apricot on the raised quilting and settles into rust in the folds beneath it; Prunelle has a bloom lying over its depth that changes with the hour; and Esmerald gathers in the pleats and lifts across the relief with the internal movement of a cut stone. None of them is a loud colour, and every one of them is a complicated one.
How often the bag will actually be carried
Asking how many times a year you would honestly carry a shade sorts the collection into two groups and removes most of the anxiety from the decision, because the two groups are governed by entirely different constraints.
For a bag that will be carried often, the shade wants to be a neutral with something inside it, which is the territory of Truffle, Espresso, London Ash, Havane and Terracota; each of these behaves as a neutral without being an absence of colour, and they are consistently the ones owners reach for first. For a bag that will be carried eight or ten times a year, the constraint disappears almost entirely, since the shade is no longer being asked to agree with a wardrobe but only with those eight or ten occasions, and that is where Malachite, Imperial Red, Monaco Blue and Almandine belong, and where a decisive choice tends to age better than a cautious one.
Where the pale shades sit
Crème Royale, Oyster, Champagne and Platinum are the most demanding shades we produce, and anyone considering one should understand the conditions that come with it. Pale unprotected lambskin records what it meets, and indigo denim, dyed silk and newsprint all transfer readily onto it, with the result on these four being generally irreversible. In the life of an evening bag, which is spent largely in the hand or under the arm rather than on a lap, this asks for very little, but it is a genuine factor in a decision measured in decades and it belongs in the conversation beforehand rather than afterwards.
The interior is the part you will see most
Over twenty years the exterior is what other people register, occasionally and at a distance, while the interior is what the owner registers several times a day every time the bag is opened, which makes the lining a larger consideration than it first appears. Ten of the seventeen shades are lined tonally, on the reasoning that some colours are worth running uninterrupted from the outside of the bag through to the inside; the remaining seven are lined against the exterior, which is to say chocolate inside Champagne, navy inside Crème Royale, red inside Espresso, orange inside both Havane and Terracota, brown inside Platinum and navy inside Truffle. Those seven hold something the outside does not announce, and whether that appeals is worth weighing before the purchase rather than discovering afterwards, since some owners want a composed exterior with a decided interior for the whole life of the object while others would rather the colour be one thing throughout.
First bag and second bag
If this is a first Aurea, the sensible move is the shade that agrees with most of what you already own, which in a warm wardrobe usually means Espresso, the most wearable piece in the collection, or Truffle, the neutral that repays the most attention over time; in a cool one it frequently means Caviar, the shade this collection began with and the one every other was judged against.
If it is a second, the whole calculation inverts, because the ordinary days have already been covered and the second bag is therefore free to be the decision rather than the compromise. That is where Prunelle, Malachite, Palais Rouge and Esmerald live, and the woman who chooses one of them is choosing, in part, not to see the same object again at the next table.
A note on shades that do not return
One practical fact belongs in any decision made on this timescale. Each shade is produced in a very small series, and a colour developed for us in a small dye lot cannot be repeated with perfect fidelity a year later, so rather than approximate a shade in order to go on selling it we make what the lot allows and then stop. We mention it because it is true and because it bears on the choice, not in order to hurry anyone through one; a colour chosen quickly under pressure is exactly the colour that disappoints in the fifth year, and that outcome serves neither of us.
Common questions
Is black always the safest first choice?
It is the most versatile and also the least informative, though Caviar was chosen for density rather than for darkness so that the quilting remains legible without a contrast stitch, which makes it a considered black rather than a default one. Whether it is right as a first bag depends mostly on whether your wardrobe is a cool one, since in a warm wardrobe Espresso does much the same work with less severity.
Do coloured leathers fade over time?
Not appreciably, provided the colour is dyed through the skin and the bag is stored away from direct sunlight, which is the one thing that will genuinely shift a dye. Leather does develop a patina with use, but that is a change in the surface rather than in the colour underneath it.
Will a bright colour date?
Colours chosen because they were current at the time tend to, while colours with real complexity in them, where more than one tone is present and the surface changes with the light, tend not to, largely because they were never tied to a particular moment to begin with.
How do I choose between two shades I like equally?
Two questions settle most ties: which of them you would carry in daylight as well as after dark, and which agrees with the metal of the jewellery you wear most consistently, since jewellery is worn far more predictably than clothing.
Should the interior be tonal or contrast?
Neither approach is a default here and both were decided one colour at a time. A contrast interior gives the bag a second character available only to the person carrying it, while a tonal one allows a single colour to run uninterrupted, and the choice is worth making deliberately given how often you will see it.
Seventeen shades, each made in a very small series, in hand-cut lambskin nappa quilted panel by panel and lined throughout in suede.
Written by Ioana Lavinia Marinescu
