The tulip did not begin in the Netherlands. It began in the mountains of Central Asia, and travelled through Persian gardens and Ottoman courts long before a single bulb reached a Dutch canal.
By the sixteenth century, the flower had become an obsession in Istanbul, prized in miniature paintings and palace gardens, its name drawn from the Persian word for turban — a description of its shape, misheard and kept. It was diplomats and botanists who carried it west: first to Vienna, then to Leiden, where a botanist named Carolus Clusius planted the bulbs that would, within a generation, become the most Dutch of all flowers.
Today the tulip fields of Flevoland and Noordoostpolder are printed on tea towels and postcards as though they had always been there. They had not. The tulip is a migrant that arrived, took root, and was claimed so completely that its origin was forgotten — which is, in its way, the most successful kind of belonging.
We think about this often. Edition 01's hero design, Peyvand, carries a tulip joined at the stem, its leaves filled with the checked pattern of a shirt carried from somewhere else. The flower did not need to hide where it came from to become, eventually, entirely at home. It simply grew.
Every life begins somewhere else. So, it turns out, does the flower we now call Dutch.