Let me start by confessing something that will probably get me kicked out of fashion editor club: Until a few months ago, I had not one single item of brown clothing in my wardrobe. Not chocolate brown. Not caramel.
Not coffee. Not nutmeg. Not “cognac” brown, which somehow sounds luxe enough that you could pair it with a beatnik scarf and pretend you were drinking the beverage it shares a name with by a fire.
Nope. Nada.
If I wanted to wear brown, I had to mix together black and red with all the yellow I could steal from navies and olive greens to make my own; much more ugly; version of brown.
There was nothing beige-y about my wardrobe.
Unless you count black. I love black.
So naturally, when the most revolting shade of brown started showing up literally everywhere I looked; closets, runways, street style; I knew I had to investigate. Now before you tell me brown is such a basic colour that every Joe-Schmo with a podcast already knows about it, let me remind you that we are talking about one very specific kind of brown here: MUD BROWN. Like the stuff you step in when you’re hiking.
Not sexy camel. Not dark chocolate. Not “taupe.” BROWN. (As in BROWN.) I first noticed it about six months ago at a Proenza Schouler show.
They sent out a model in a slouchy suit in what the show notes cryptically identified as “umber.” To me, it read mud brown. But rather than looking muddy and sad, it looked . . . amazing. Like the model was wearing a bucket of melted gold.
I spent days thinking about that muddy brown suit, which should have been my first clue that this bog colour was going to ruin me. Then I saw it at Bottega Veneta. Then at The Row.
I started seeing it on my coolest coworker at every fashion industry event I went to all spring. The stylish friend I was dining with, Emma, caught me eyeing her muddy brown oversized jumper in disgust. “It’s just brown,” she shrugged when I asked where she got it.
And it sort of was, but it didn’t look like boring brown. It looked like someone actually tried to make brown look cool and fashionable. Like they put some thought into it, rather than just throwing something on a mannequin because they “needed a brown bag for the look.” As someone who previously wouldn’t be caught dead in beige-middleduck dye, I knew I had to know more.
Brown was my dad dressing up for work in the 90s. Brown was dads. Brown was those hideous platform flop-sandals we all had to own in 2002.
But thank God discontinued years ago. Brown was my shopping list of absolutes that said NOPE across every inch of hideous textiles. So imagine my surprise when I got home from that show and googled “what colours will be big in 2024?” and found slide after slide of muddy brown.
“Mud brown is classic,” texted my friend Katie who spent two years living with a wardrobe trunk full of only creams and browns in Morocco on a research trip. (Brown and beige are her desert-friendly jam.) “It’s really pretty in fabric,” said my extremely stylish 68-year-old neighbour Diane, who has been working in textile design her entire life. Diane actually wore me a mud- brown linen dress when I stopped by her flat to ask about this bizarre trend. “Oh this?” she said.
“I’ve had this since the 70s. Brown always comes back when people get tired of trying too hard.” When people get tired of trying too hard. She couldn’t have said it any better herself.
Do you know what Fashion Trying Too Hard looks like right now? LAST YEAR’S PIECES. Because at a certain point, every season there’s always one trend that EVERYONEOver-lavender anything?
Hell yes it was.Feature? The knee-grazing, butt-short dresses that rivaled Justin Trudeau’s shorts for Canada’s Most Grammable Jam Of Summer 2022? Oh yeah, we got that shit last year too.
The moral of the story: Trends come and go, but a classic mud-brown piece is timeless. “It goes with everything,” said Diane. And honestly, if Aunt Diane approves of something, I’m buying it.
I dug out my computer to find that article I had read months prior (!!) proclaiming mud brown to be HUGE in 2024, only to find I read this whole dumb trend was supposed to start August-ish. THREE MORE MONTHS OF TORTURE, INTERNET. When I wasn’t obsessively refreshing trend forecasts online (looking at you Pantone), I broke down and went shopping for brown things.
I started small. I bought a chocolate brown bag. I got some tan trenches.
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I even shopped for some suede browns. But I couldn’t find what I wanted. Not until I asked a sales associate at Dover Street Market to please please please help me find “the UGIEST shade of brown they had.” And let me tell you, she laughed when she understood what I was looking for.
“Oh you mean bog brown?” she replied. “Yeah that’s been selling out as soon as it comes in!” Bog brown. Let’s hope it doesn’t come with side effects.
She then directed me to the one bog brown oversized button-down I knew would speak to my soul. The irony of spending MORE MONTHS THAN I CARE TO ADMIT looking for this one specific ugly brown shirt isn’t lost on me. I ended up paying more for this stupid shirt than my first month’s rent when I moved into my first post-college flat in NYC. (HELLO FASHION EDITOR LIFE, WHERE DID THE MONEY GO?) But girl, was it worth it.
I put this thing on as soon as my suit jacket came off and headed straight to the office to show it off. “I hate your shirt,” said Jenna our 24-year-old social media manager as I walked by her desk. “It’s fine,” I replied, doing my best not to immediately stop in my tracks and interrogate why someone hates my bog brown shirt when we got matching ones (SERIOUSLY DHS WHY DO YOU DO THIS TO ME).
But then words I NEVER thought to hear FROM. Katherine made me realise this thing was gold. “This colour is perfect on you,” she said.
Katherine literally NEVER comments on anyone’s outfits. She’s never told me “that looks great” or “I love your dress!” in seven years of working together. The most she’s ever said about my appearance is “nice haircut!” when I chopped off eight inches last summer.
But she LOVED my brown shirt. It turns out bog brown is flattering on pretty much every skin tone; even if it isn’t technically “pretty” on its own. I have deep, olive skin.
So when I see something that looks “warm” like browns and camel often do, it can sometimes read as too yellow, creating an unflattering muddy green colour on me. But bog brown actually has lovely green undertones that made my skin look… healthier? I don’t know.
Just really good. On my uber-fair skinned bestie Jade, mud brown looks like a beautiful neutral. And on Emma?
It just kinda warms up her skin without being as heavy as black. Even my coworker Tyler, whose skin doesn’t always play nicely with colour thanks to dark red hair, said mud brown is now one of his go-to shades. The key is to figure out whether you want that greenish version of mud brown or the reddish version.
And how deep you want that brown to be. I actually have both and love them equally on different occasions. But once you find your shade?
Trust me. You’ll want to own everything in that exact colour. Cream/brown, ivory/brown, brown and light pink…who would’ve thought?
So here we are, months later and I own three shirts, two pairs of trousers, a skirt, a jumper, and am tragically contemplating splurging on a pair of bog brown leather trousers because yes, they exist. And THAT, my friends, is what I call a problem. I love the look of camel-on-camel outfits, but that 2020 shade of beige that everyone and their Grandmas were wearing?
Over. It. I want something a little richer.
A little darker.
A little more 2024.
Enter: Brown on brown.
Throwing together different shades of brown has become one of my favourite things to do, probably because it challenges me to mix textures and fabrics in a way that I normally wouldn’t. (Pro tip: A soft brown cotton blends SO well with a shiny brown leather purse.) But you can also do it with just about any other colour. Cream/brown, ivory/brown, brown and light pink pairing? genius. Try throwing on your favourite pair of jeans with a cream shirt, but swap your neutral trainers for brown sandals.
Or ditch your usual black sweatpants for brown ones. They exist, I swear. I even made my mum try on a bog brown shirt the other day, which she begrudgingly admitted was “interesting.” That’s_code brownemoji your girlfriend makes faces at her fashion choices.
Truthfully, I don’t see this trend going away because it’s literally the anti-trend. It’s not loud. It’s not demanding attention.
But it’ll make you look like you got dressed up with the most expensive clothing on without breaking your bank. And if that doesn’t scream autumn 2024 fashion trend to you, I don’t know what will.
