Oat

Beige is sand with the life taken out of it. The difference is about two points of warmth and a trace of pink, and it is the whole reason one looks like linen and the other looks like a filing cabinet.

Oat is mixed on the warm side deliberately. Against the gold titanium frame it holds; against the natural frame it reads as a considered non-colour rather than an absence of one. It is the most neutral thing in this catalogue that is still a colour.

Where it appears

Oat carries every print family, which almost nothing else does. That is not a coincidence: a warm mid-neutral is the ground that a drawn line, a woven check, a rosette and a vein all sit on legibly, which is why textile houses print their archive on it.

It is the ground under Ocelot, under Estate Check, under Travertine and under Dune, and in each case it is doing the same job — giving a pattern somewhere to be without arguing with it.

It is the ground that ages best

A mid-tone warm neutral is the surface a mark has the least to say on. On ivory a transferred denim mark is a grey patch; on oat it is a slightly deeper oat. Nothing about the material is different — the print sits under the shell surface either way — but the colour is doing work that a cloth would otherwise have to do.

If you have owned a pale case and given up on it, this is the one to try before giving up on pale cases.

Oat or ivory

Ivory is lighter, colder by a shade, and reads as paper. Oat is warmer, absorbs a mark instead of showing it, and reads as cloth. If the case is going in and out of a bag all day, oat is the one that still looks new in six months.