Okay so I need to publicly admit something. For like three years I called burgundy “the color that ruins photos,” full sentence, said it with my chest, told anyone who’d listen that it made you look jaundiced under fluorescent light and even worse under my ring light, which is genuinely the harsher test. I had one bad coat in college that photographed like a dried out ketchup packet and I let that single coat set policy for my entire closet. That’s on me.
Then it got properly cold in Austin, which happens for like eleven days a year and everyone loses their minds about it, and I didn’t have a real coat, just a denim jacket doing its absolute best. So I panic ordered a burgundy wool coat at eleven at night because it was the only thing left in my size and I was too tired to keep scrolling.
Wore it out the door at 6am for a shoot and it was actually the first time I’ve been warm AND felt like a person in October footage instead of someone cosplaying as cold. That’s the whole test for me honestly, not how it feels in the mirror, how it holds up on camera in bad morning light, and this one did.
Sent a photo to the group chat before I even got in the car. One friend replied “wait you HATE that color” with the exact right amount of shock, one just sent the flame emoji with zero context, and both reactions were correct, I did hate it, and it did look good, both things true at once.
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The gamble part, because I have to be honest here: this is not a color for someone who wants to disappear into a crowd. It reads. On camera it reads even harder, there’s a warmth to it that eats up the light in a way black just doesn’t, so if you’re someone who wants your coat to be invisible and let the outfit underneath do the talking, this is the wrong pick, go buy the camel one, no hard feelings.
What ended up working was almost annoyingly simple, black boots, black tights, one gold hoop, done, I tried it with brown loafers ONCE and it looked like I was trying to start a whole autumnal mood board and not in a good way. Scarf stayed home, the coat’s already doing a lot, it doesn’t need backup.
So yeah. Wrong for three years, wrong with total confidence, the worst kind. Not mad about it though, being wrong about a coat color is a pretty low stakes way to learn a lesson, and now I own the exact thing I used to make fun of, which happens more than I’d like to admit but we’re not doing a whole audit today.
