Hermes Kelly Mini 2424 24/24 Bag 21CM Handmade In Evercolor and Swift Calfskin Leather Gold Hardware 1P Colvert

Colvert is French for mallard, and the colour earns the name: a dark duck-blue with green in its wings. On overcast days it leans petrol; in sunshine the green comes up, and the bag looks like a different animal entirely. I have stopped trying to predict it and started enjoying it.

Twenty-one centimetres across the base, in Evercolor with Swift at the folds, and the gold hardware is the right call here, because warm fittings keep the duck-green from going cold. The proportions are compact enough to hold in one palm while the strap hangs down.

What lives inside: my phone, keys and a flat card case, with the flap closing on the first pin. I take it to galleries and to dinners where nobody brings a large bag, and Colvert has matched every room I have walked it into, from a kitchen table to a candlelit dining room, with the same stubborn confidence. The leather has a softness that matches the paint-like depth of the colour, and it creases gently at the flap where I hold it open.

The honest warning is about photography. Colvert refuses to sit still for a camera, and half the photos I take of it read as navy or black. Buy it if you trust your eyes more than your phone; you will be rewarded every time you lift the flap.

It is also the colour that taught me a blue bag can be a neutral, provided the blue keeps some weather in it.