Brown on Brown: Classic or Dud?

Seems like dressing brown-on-brown gives you two options re yer look: (1) Gingerbread Man; (2) Mr. Hankee. Ergo, dressing in all- brown = not as cool as all-black.

I always make an effort not to wear just one colour, but for me it seems to end up that I am wearing varying shades of blue all the time. dammit, I'm doing it today although in a multitude of shades and stripes. How could I criticise anyone for wearing all brown then?

It's that Brownie/Girl Scouts thing. Maybe.

Brown is SO nineties. (Black is so eighties).

Moths vs Goths

man, i love dressing in brown. i have a cool brown (fake) fur coat, except my mum unaccountably mailed it to New Jersey. i'm going to be wearing my nice brown velvetine trousers to Tompaulin tomorrow night, i may wear my brown shirt, but am thinking of the trusty black polo neck instead. i am torn between brown socks and my new white, orange and brown pringle socks.

All in brown is SOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO much cooler than all in black. All in black - what, you think you look fashionable? All in black = zero imagination of colour/shade, and also = a blind adeherence to the most tedious fashion ever (not including goths - goths are interesting, sometimes).

Girls who dress all in brown are second only to girls who dress in red in ROWR appeal. Mandee roXoR.

Thanks Mark, I'm all in black today, admittedly it's more of a "what's clean" decision rather than "how shall I look cool" one.

All in brown - lovely. V. Autumnal. Esp. if person has brown eyes.

All in brown = walking turd.

Girl in brown = walking fashion victim (new black indeed)

All in black = can't be arsed mixing and matching or mindless goth puppet.

Courtesy of The Opinionator.

Get with the programme ILEers, everyone in Fashion knows that Black is the New Black.

Is that like Labour is the New Labour?

You won't catch me wearing brown. Tan, and other brown offshoots yes. But I prefer my dirty colours nearer the green end of the spectrum.

They are only dirty cos you don't wash them Pete.

The thought that an intelligent, independent-minded person could ever take a comment like "X is the new black" seriously is one of the biggest paradoxes of our age. Surely some overpaid cokehead fashion editor telling us what we should or shouldn't wear is the antithesis of true fashion? It makes me spit sometimes, as do the people who follow. Pathetic sheep.

NB - NOT an attack on Emma at all, who I wuv.

it was a dig at me wasn't it. i can handle it, *sob*

Gareth, from your earlier post you sound wuvly too. See you at the Spitz? Will I recognise you by your hair? I'll be the bald one DJing.

It's just occurred to me that I'll be wearing whatever's clean at Vicky's house, as I forgot to bring partying togs with me. Bet I end up wearing all black.

you pathetic sheep

Dressing in brown is of course classic. The thing is, brown is an excellent colour to mix 'n match with, since brown doesn't really mix with any colour, it matches with every colour. Just try it a couple of times and you'll be on your way, matching it with just about anything.

But brown+black = fashion faux pas of the highest order.

I will fite Mark C for his attack on Fashion at some future point.

is brown/black really a faux pas emma? this is distressing. does this extend to a black polo neck and brown velvetine trousers? this has been a succesful combination so far.

colour -- who's in to colour this season?! texture is the new colour, people

Successful in what sense? I was thinking mostly of brown shoes + black trousers (or vice versa) which is a common and vile error.

(I am flattered that my opinion is being sought on sartorial matters given most of the time people laff at my clothes. They do not understand.)

I'm wearing brown, black, AND red. All in brown is a little too much. Brown and black is fine, at least according to my brown skirt and black Magnetic Fields tshirt with red cardigan over top. Then again only listen to me if you really dig the thrift store indie.

Brown and black can work - black roll neck, long brown coat, black trousers, surely?

I think we are talking at cross purposes. I am on about the Real World whereas you kidz seem to be on about Indie World, whose Style Roolz are a mystery to me.

Is that the gritty social Realism as found in Vogue, Elle and iD, Emma?

ooo indie-bashing! can i join in?

Brown + brown *is* nice, so long as it's different shades of brown, I think. I also used to have some excellent brown velveteen trousers with which I persevered even after the zip was (mostly) bust, which didn't take long cause they were an extremely cheap emergency buy in NEW LOOK. I don't like to wear brown with some shades of green/khaki cause it makes me feel like a chocolate lime, an old skool boiled sweet with soft chocolate in the middle. I wish you could still get those; lime-flavor is the best, and I still mourn the passing of the Wimpy lime milkshake which was my 10 year old nectar.

brown is like. everything.

when you mix all your primary colours. or like the mass of used and re-used plasticine in primary school. although. those are ugly browns. well. the second for sure.

I like brown. as a colour.

and there's nothing wrong with wearing brown with brown or wearing brown with black. actually. there's nothing wrong with me wearing brown with brown or wearing brown with black. I don't know about anyone else.

The way i see a lot of people wearing brown with black is bad....very sleazy-ugly. Brown on brown can be ok if the shades are significantly different. I secretly believe that brown is the poor man's black, but don't mind me.

Emma this would be a very good thread to switch back to your old e- mail address and prove to your bosses that ILE is useful.

I want a brown leather jacket and a pullover so I can rock the lecherous polytechnic economics professor look.

Ellie chocolate limes are wuvly and you can still buy them. Dressing as one is probably going too far I'd agree.

Indeed Tom but I am not about to get myself into more trouble. Will, I work for Top Shop for God's sake not some ponce fashion mag. And I wuv clothes and a lot of the time I wuv fashion and I still maintain that if brown + black is the best you can manage you might want a bit of a rethink.

Emma, if you're content to be led by the nose rather than thinking for yourself...

(though it's funny how Emma always looks fine and I always look shit)

"Thinking for yourself" barely exists when it comes to cultural choices - I hardly think that Mark's typical dress-down indie-boy look (which looks fine actually) was an immaculate conception.

Hey Emma, Brown and Black are good for autumn, although at the minute I'm wearing one of my collection of zip-up tracksuit tops. I am sure that the zip-up tracksuit top will be valued by fashion historians as one of the great iconic garments of the last fifty years, along with Levis and the black-roll neck.

I bought asuit from TopMan once and it fell apart. Actually...

I should say that I have no love for Emma's employers either, at least until they drop their sexist sizeist practises and bring in Evans Pour Homme as discussed on other threads far away and long ago.

[nernernernernerner..nerner]

Yo, fashion police have arrived. Nothing to see here, folks, nothing to see here. Could you please move along and spit in the eyes of the Arcadia top brass on your way by, thankyewwwww.

As I believe Frank Zappa once said, BROWN SHOES DON'T MAKE IT. The exception to this rule is my Issey Miyake slingback trainers in brown, red, grey and black. In these shoes it is possible to wear combinations of these colours and white and beige. With very dark jeans.

A range of browns and beiges together is, if you're an oldster, very Jil Sander. If you are not it's a look Miu Miu have been working for the past two years. Japanese designers did burlappy-coloured browns combined with black in the mid-80s and if the last Issey Miyake sale is anything to go by he's doing it again soon. Also see suede buckle-up Vivienne Westwood boots worn with black rollneck by Ms K Moss and copied by all Primrose Hill fashion victims within 10 days. It's basically a restyling of the Johnny Marr rollneck/Clarks boots look, for girls. In plebland, colours in ther Burberry palette are worn together to match one's Burb key ring. In Muswell Hill, that should read 'handbag.'

Mandee, get a range of browns. Wear the darkest as trousers or skirt and pretty much anything goes on top. Browns with a dash of red is also very good.

Dressed all in black can work without being gothy. The cheat's in the makeup but that's best left for some other day.

HAHAHHAHHAAA> The fashion world is so funny...!

Tom, I wouldn't dream of saying I was stylish 95% of the time (and the other 5% it's my own...unique stylings). I don't feel I have to be a master of trend to comment on the fraud that is a huge proportion of the fashion industry. And I definitely don't have to be a fashionista to chortle at the accepted norm which states that to be fashionable you have to copy what other people do.

I have an all brown ensemble, affectionately dubbed my urine outfit (the shirt is a yellowy light brown,and don't ask what we drink over here) but I just realised that I can even accessorise in brown. I just bought a bowling bag, brown with white trim, $4 from an op shop. Its so great and seventies. what with my red hair and hazel eyes I am Autumn personified. I want to be the new spokes person for the season, i just love the biblical innuendo of fall...

Yes Mark but doing what/looking like other people do is what all subcultures do too, including yours and mine. Where's the difference?

Surely the difference is in the variation, Tom. If I turn up in diesel jeans and a Topman t-shirt I'm hardly being very original, but if I'm wearing some shoes I happened to like in a tiny French shoe shop, then I'm thinking with myself. If I bought the shoes because I wanted to look like Robbie Williams (say), then I'd be a bit pathetic.

If you buy something because you genuinely like it AND it turns out to be fashionable, then you're lucky, because people who follow fashion will think you're cool (if you think that matters). What I resent is the fact that most people (me included) have both our common and aesthetic senses skewed by what other people have decreed is cool.

the best combinations: brown + orange. or brown + navy/royal blue. or blue and orange.

however i am oftern under the impression that any colour goes with any other (eg re + green whcih is favourite, even if epope thing you are some sort of santa elf). except lilac/puce. which goes well with dustbins.

I guess Tom's taking exception to the idea that there is ever even the possibility of having the unique and pure aesthetic (in music, clothes, food, whateva) that the possibility of it being corrupted or distorted by outside influences suggests. What you're talking about Mark reads to me like a paean to idiosyncracy, having the knowledge and wit and style to magpie around and draw what's out there together in unlikely-to-be-replicated ways, but that tendency in itself has subcultural precedents and forms. I suppose I just have a problem with the idea that idioscyncracy is somehow less influenced by the surrounding style cultures. Is just influenced in a different way.

I'm sure you're right, Ellie - any aethetic judgement a human claims to have will by definition have been entirely influenced from what they've seen around them their whole life. And I am being a bit utopian, as well - I know I can't expect people to not be influenced by fashion in the slightest. However, if Vogue tells me just how essential it is that I buy the Fendi baguette, does it not make me almost anti-stylish if I'm slavishly folowing the herd? Thats' the key to what I'm trying (and, largely, failing) to say.

It does if you only do what Vogue says yeah. But nobody who pays attention to fashion does only do what Vogue says, any more than people who pay attention to music only own the NME's Top 50 records each year and no others. The fashion mags provide a playing field on which games of taste can get played - the 'rules' change every now and then to keep the players from getting bored (and to keep the industry in cash!) but the beauty of the game is that everyone is participant AND referee.

(I got sent off at age 11 though so don't listen to me.)

Blimey.

Will, if your suit fell apart you should have taken it back. Suzy, most of the fashion media wuvs Top Shop as do many many mere mortals who have not inherited their grandmother's designer wardrobe. Mark C I never buy that there designer stuff cos I am too poor and I would never (well nearly never) buy something that doesn't suit me just cos it's fashionable. I am sure this has all come up on other threads but the only reason I like fashion is cos I love shopping and clothes and dressing up and fashion means that every couple of months there is more shopping to be done.

ambrose is on the money. orange is brilliant. goes with both brown and blue.

Interesting thing about fashion, though, is that it’s not altogether possible to be sent off, at least not insofar as everyone else may assert their right to keep on refereeing you even after *you* think you’ve chucked your jumper down and marched off in a huff, or at least ambled off for a fag behind the changing rooms. There’s naturism, of course, but a) that’s not practicable 24/7, and b) constitutes a fairly basic oppositional stance to the game. The naturist is the streaker in the football match of style, if you like.

Oh no Ellie I agree - I got sent off but I'm still made to sit there in the sin bin for everyone else to laugh at.

(Turns out I'm not done yet). I don't give less of a shit about clothes as I get older, but I have sloughed off a couple of subucltural style maps and find it harder to know what I'm doing except aspiring to a kind of well-shaped minimalism; which is itself a particular kind of aspirationalism, and relies on more money than I have. Probably quite predictably in the eyes of some ILxers, I feel like a drag queen in current conventional women's attire, and not in a good way (the performative theory of gender I always find interesting: should I find it positive or negative that I sometimes don't feel like I 'pass'?).

SEcond point (I'm pondering naturism now): someone told me on Sunday that there's a public nudist park in Munich called 'The ENglish Gardens'. ANyone know about this, or the history of the name??

BTW when I say 'sloughed off' I don't mean 'matured beyond' or anything offensive (ie moved on out of trivia to higher concerns); I mean left behind more out of laziness and an unwillingness to get tangled up in certain kinds of detail than anything else.

brown is the new black. a young woman's magazine let me in on that little secret almost 6 years ago and I haven't forgotten.

Slingback trainers?

Are they brown or black?

i do hope they're brown.

or orange.

Ha Gareth I have a pair of New Balance trainers you would love! They're brown, the N is orange, and to top it off they're named: 303!!! :)

I am wearing dark green and black today. Who needs brown?

All brown = roXor just watch out that people don't mistake you for a UPS guy and start handing you packages. Hm maybe that's not such a bad idea after all.

My fashion secret: lower your standards so far that whatever you pull out of the pile of clothes on the floor "matches" the t-shirt you slept in.

I do not like brown. I do not own brown. I have one cream jumper that I've only worn about twice in the last ten years, a bone shirt that I've worn twice and a floral thing with a possibly brown background that I've never worn. That's as close as I get to brown.

I don't like green either.

Black, pink, red, blue, orange, purple - I like those. Oh, and I have a couple of white tops.

I hate everyone.

This is most distressing. I wish fashion would die horribly. I've been dressing the same way for fuX0ring years and then suddenly fashion comes along and starts debating whether I'm cool or not. I don't care, leave me alone. I like brown, I wear little else but brown (hey, that little else happens to be black, you know, sorry if this is some kind of faux pas). I wear a brown tie. Yeah, and now the Guardian has decided that this is Year Of The Tie or some such bollocks. It's like those tossers who wore Topshop Motorhead T- shirts; if I was a fan I wouldn't want to be associated with them, but why should I be forced stop showing my allegiance to a band I love just so people don't think I'm a cunt? I love my tie. I know I'm not the first person to wear one, but at least before these people were choosing that for themselves, rather than being dictated to.

GRRRRRRRRRRRRRRR.

You can thank Jeremy bloody Scott for recultifying the Mötörhead teeshirts (he's from Kansas City and very Gay Boy With Mullet, so I see *issues*). He used to sell them in Colette in Paris for 500F a go, customised slightly, and I marched up to him and asked him 'what gives?' because I thought he was being a bit of a Korine slummer but nope, he is Suburb Boy. Top Shop just ripped them off.

Anyway, my grandmother's designer wardrobe is the way I prefer to remember my grandmother, back in the days before my stepmother started stuffing Haldol down her throat, so stop sniping, Emma.

Sometimes clothes are about more than what's in the cycle for a three- month period and fashion designers and a vast majority of the writers on fashion and style realise that, even if you don't, and often that's what got them involved in fashion in the first place. Not the 'personalities', not the exact replication of the royal court and courtiers system by people who started out liberal or radical enough to know better, and certainly not because of all those perks you keep reading about. I love fashion because I appreciate (and have) style, and can cross-reference just about any look I see with a piece of art, a photograph or some bit of pop culture. That is FUN. It doesn't constitute the most important part of my life, and I'd never accept an invite to a party thrown by Donatella Versace.

Oh. The slingback trainers are a brown upper with red patent pointy tips and red at the strap and shoe back, grey trim and sole, some black edging. They ROCK.

Sorry, slingback sneakers sound awful and fashion victim-y. I also hate those slip on sneakers. They make your feet look like stuffed animals!

I don't think I've ever done all brown but it can be done well. When so, it's very 40's, quietly elegant.

naturism is i think german in origin, same as gay lib: by english gardens perhaps they mean lovesome god wot?

Actually, Samantha, the slingbacks ROCK. A few people here have seen 'em and agree, plus they were very inexpensive, like $20 despite being from Issey Miyake (I've never had any of his stuff before so I was like, YES! when I got them). As I was saying. They're not really sneakers as such and would probably go OK with 40s pieces.