Mirevoir: to look, and to see again
Where the name came from, why a farewell is buried inside it, and what a house commits to when it writes an ending into its own word.
Mirevoir is not a French word. It is two of them, pushed together until they hold: mirer, to look at something closely, to hold it up to the light and examine it — and revoir, to see again.
Revoir carries something else with it. It is the second half of au revoir, which is not really goodbye. It is a promise to see one another again, offered at the moment of leaving. The French reach for it precisely when something is ending.
That double meaning is why we kept it. A mirror and a farewell in one word are the two halves of what happens here. You look, closely, at one piece for one month. Then it is finished, and the only route back is the first of the next month.
Names in this industry tend to reach for permanence: a founder’s surname, a house, a maison, a year of establishment — something implying the thing will still be here. We wanted the opposite. A name that admits the ending it is built on, and treats that as the good part.
The pronunciation is the French one, more or less: meer-uh-VWAHR, with the weight at the back. We are not precious about it. Nobody has yet said it wrong in a way that mattered.
What the name commits us to is simple, and we would rather be held to it. If we ever quietly reissue a drop because it did well, the name stops being true. It is a small piece of discipline written across the front of the building.
So the whole brief is in the word. Look at it properly, while it is here. Then say the other half.
In praise of running out
Scarcity is usually a tactic. We would like to make the case that it can also be a way of making things — and that a house which runs out is telling you something true about how it works.
4 min
A shade is made for one month of light
Colour is not a property of a pigment. It is a negotiation between a pigment and whatever light happens to be in the room — and the light in the room changes twelve times a year.
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