Brown on Brown: Classic or Dud?

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.