I spent an actual year of my life insisting that brown was a color that only worked on other people, the kind of person who owns a dutch oven and uses it. My coworker at the homeware brand ended that argument in about four seconds by showing up in a chocolate midi skirt with a cream sweater tucked into it and her camel coat over the top, and I just stood there recalculating my entire worldview by the coffee machine. That’s a won argument if I’ve ever seen one. Almost everyone in my circle has conceded since. My mom still thinks brown is “a shoe color,” and she is simply wrong, but I’ve stopped fighting her on it because it’s not a hill, it’s barely a curb.
Here’s the thing nobody tells you about buying a brown skirt online: it lies.
I’ve ordered three now, and the photos always show this rich, warm, coffee ground color, and then it arrives and it’s giving wet cardboard box. Muddy in a way that photographs fine but reads exhausted in person, especially under office lighting, which is somehow worse than any other lighting on earth. The one that actually worked, the one I still reach for, only revealed its real color once I stood in the doorway with natural light hitting it, and even then I made my partner confirm it wasn’t “sad.”
Layering is where this skirt either earns its keep or turns into a costume. Cream and white on top, gorgeous, easy, done in ten seconds flat. Black works if I want to look like I’m attending something serious. But navy, which I was convinced would be sophisticated, just fights it, the two colors sit next to each other like they’re waiting for one of them to apologize first. Denim on top is the gamble pick here, it can look effortlessly put together or like you got dressed in the dark, and I genuinely can’t predict which one I’m getting until I’m already out the door.
You Might Also Like
Pockets. I need to talk about pockets. Mine doesn’t have real ones, just two decorative flaps that exist to lie to me from across the room, and I have genuinely reached toward my hip mid conversation like my phone would just materialize there through sheer faith. It doesn’t. It’s in my bag, where it’s been the entire time, because this skirt provides nothing.
I paid twenty six dollars for mine at my usual spot, the one with the Tuesday restock guy who I’ve decided has excellent taste specifically when it comes to skirts and terrible taste in everything else. Worn it nine times since October, so we’re sitting under three dollars a wear, which is obscene in the good way. That’s buy number three for the good column this month, and buy number two is the reason I’m still a little suspicious of anything that photographs better than it lives.
