Damson · AW 2026
For most of history, this colour cost too much.
Twelve thousand sea snails for a gram and a half of dye, and laws about who was allowed to wear the result. Then a plum from Damascus ended up in every English hedgerow, and the deep end of purple became something you could pick. Damson goes onto a speaker in about a minute — and comes off just as easily.
The colour as law. Justinian in imperial purple, San Vitale, Ravenna, before 547
I · The colour
Purple was expensive long before it was fashionable.
The ancient version came from sea snails. When the chemist Paul Friedländer reproduced the process in 1909, he needed twelve thousand Murex brandaris to make 1.4 grams of pigment — which explains why Rome, and later Byzantium, wrote laws about who was allowed to wear it.
Bolinus brandaris, the snail behind Tyrian purple. Etching by Wenceslaus Hollar, 17th century
Paul Friedländer, c. 1907. Two years later he needed twelve thousand snails for 1.4 grams of dye
Then in 1856 an eighteen-year-old called William Henry Perkin, trying to make quinine from coal tar over his Easter holiday, made a purple instead. Mauve became the first synthetic dye, and within a few years it was everywhere and worth very little. What survived that collapse was the deep end — not the lilac that could suddenly be made by the tonne, but the plum, the wine, the shade that still looks like it cost something. Damson sits at that end. The name is a fruit — prunum damascenum, the plum of Damascus, in English hedgerows for at least a thousand years and dark enough to stain your hands.
Shropshire Damson. Chromolithograph by Alois Lunzer, nursery catalogue, 1909
Archive images: Wikimedia Commons, public domain.
William Henry Perkin, 1906. Fifty years after the accident that made purple cheap
BeoPlay A9 — 70 cm across, in the deepest register of the room
A solid colour has nothing to hide behind. Every centimetre of the fabric is the design.
Beosound Shape — plum, olive and off-white, tiled until they become a wall
II · The surface
A solid colour asks more of the fabric than a pattern does.
With a print, the eye reads the motif and forgives the material. With a single colour there is no motif; what you look at is the weave itself — how flat it lies, how evenly it takes the dye, what it does when the light drops at four in the afternoon. Acoustically transparent fabric is an open, matte weave by necessity, and that turns out to be the right surface for a deep colour: there is no sheen to catch the window, so the purple reads as depth rather than as shine.
It also changes with the wall. Against pale grey or white the cover reads as a shape — a dark circle, a dark bar. Against oak, olive or a darker paint it reads as colour, and the room gets warmer rather than darker. The Shape wall above is the whole argument in one photograph: plum beside olive beside off-white, and none of the three trying to win.
Beosound Theatre — 122 cm, the widest surface in most living rooms, now the quietest
Beosound Level — the one that moves from room to room, and takes the colour with it
III · The season
Summer Beat was the loud half of the year. This is the other half.
In August we released pink against green — a pattern for rooms with the windows open. This is its counterpart: the light drops, the textiles go to wool, the oak stays, and the colour that belongs in that room is deeper and slower. Same speakers, same fabric, the next season.
We already make a lavender for the Shape and a purple print for most of the range. Damson is neither. It is the saturated, single-colour end of the family, drawn for the people who found the others too light. On the A9 it changes 70 centimetres of the room in about a minute, and the original front goes back in its box.
Beosound Stage — one long, low note under the screen
IV · The fit
Fitted, not glued.
Each cover is cut to the geometry of its speaker and fitted over the original front — no tools, no adhesive, nothing left behind when you change your mind. The fabric is the same acoustically transparent weave across all five models, so the sound passes through as if the cover were not there.
Made in Munich, to order, in 5–10 working days.
The edition · five speakers
Bring your own, with Tegrino Designer.
Every cover here started as a file. Yours can too — upload an image, or a single colour, and we cut it to the same geometry, for any Bang & Olufsen speaker we make for.
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