Trends are loud and don't survive January. Black keeps quiet and remains.
There is a specific, granular type of sadness that hangs over fitness centers in the third week of February. It is the olfactory presence of failed self-optimization, of trends ignited in January like beacons of hope (or at least hope for a tauter gluteus) now fizzling out quietly when confronted with the brutal reality of human inertia.
Statistically speaking, the majority of cultural undulations - be it a keto-adjacent diet, a fashion hue of the moment, or the collective resolve to simply be more „mindful“ - do not survive the first calendar month.
We never designed for this first month.
Designing for the trend is, at its core, an act of calculated obsolescence; it is the attempt to inject an object with a relevance that possesses a lifespan roughly equivalent to the attention span of a Golden Retriever in a room full of squirrels.
When we say we design for those who endure, we are referring to an almost defiant refusal to participate in the hysterical circulation of the New. We are talking about objects that possess a certain gravitational density. Craftsmanship here is not merely a marketing term printed on a hangtag to justify the price, but a process of resistance against entropy. A well-made object is an anchor. It says: I am staying here. Even if you break your resolutions.
And then there is black.
One has to understand that black, within the realm of aesthetics, constitutes a sort of paradox. Technically, it is the absorption of all light, which - if you really think about it - makes it the most selfish and simultaneously the most generous of all colors. It takes everything in and reflects nothing back but pure form.
Black is poetry without words. Why? Because words are almost always insufficient. Words are loud. Trends are loud. Colors (consider the Pantone „Colors of the Year“) scream for attention like a neglected toddler in a cereal aisle.
Black keeps quiet.
In this silence lies a nonconformist quality that seems almost radical in our visually hyperactive culture. Black demands the observer focus on the structure, on the material, on the stitch, on the Thing in Itself. There is no distraction via decoration. If something is black, it has to be perfect, because the shadow forgives no errors in texture.
We address the Endurists. These are not necessarily the people running marathons (though they could), but those who understand that quality is a form of time travel: possessing an object that is good today and will still be good in ten years is the only way to effectively slow down time. The world is full of things for January. Loud, colorful, ephemeral.
We prefer the rest of the year. We prefer the silence. We prefer what remains when the lights go out.
