Navy

Navy does a specific thing that black cannot: it reads as black at a distance and as a colour in the hand. Across a meeting table it is a dark case. Held, in daylight, it is ink.

That is the whole argument for it. Everything black gives you — the shape reading cleanly, marks disappearing, a print becoming graphic — navy gives you as well, with one difference the owner sees and nobody else does.

Why navy suits a drawn print

One-colour printing on a dark ground is an old technique and navy is the ground it was invented for. Toile is printed in a single colour with all its tone coming from engraved hatching; Sun Print is a cyanotype, where the blue is chemistry rather than a choice; Constellation is a star chart with the figures drawn at very low contrast.

All three are on navy, and all three would be muddier on black, because a drawn line needs somewhere with a little light in it to sit.

Against the two frames

On the natural titanium frame navy is a clean cold contrast and the phone reads as two materials, which is the honest description of what it is. On the gold frame it is the strongest pairing in the catalogue: deep blue and warm metal is the oldest combination in jewellery and it has not stopped working.

It is also the only dark in the range that does not make a gold frame look like an accident.

The stripe case

Navy is also the Breton ground, and Regatta follows the 1858 standard of twenty-one stripes across the width. That count is not a design decision — it fell out of the rule — which is the sort of constraint that makes a pattern look inevitable rather than styled.