Someone on this team texted “burgundy is a neutral” into the group chat last week and I have not stopped thinking about it since. That is a lie you tell yourself after you already own four burgundy sweaters, not a fact about color theory. One of us thinks it goes with everything she owns, another thinks it only goes with the three things she bought specifically to go with it, and this argument has been running since October with no resolution in sight, mostly because we’re both right.
Here’s what nobody warns you about burgundy specifically. Depth matters more than it does with basically any other color, and I mean that as a genuine problem, not a fun fact. Get it slightly wrong and you’re wearing something that reads as brown in bad light and maroon in good light and never once reads as the rich, expensive burgundy from the product photo.
I’ve returned two for exactly this reason. Not because they were bad sweaters, because they were the wrong burgundy, which is a sentence I never thought I’d say with a straight face and now say constantly.
The static is the other thing. Pull a burgundy sweater over your head in a dark bedroom at 6:45 in the morning and you will hear it before you feel it, a little crackle right at your ears, and then you emerge with hair doing something you did not agree to. This happens with the cheaper ones more than the expensive ones, which is annoying, because it means the fix is spending more money, which is exactly the kind of thing I usually get mad about, and I’m still a little mad about it here.
One of us wears hers into actual weeks, meetings, the train, standing in line at the pharmacy, the whole unglamorous stretch of a normal Tuesday, and reports that it reads as put together without trying.
You Might Also Like
The other only reaches for hers on the two or three occasions a year that feel slightly special, a dinner, a specific kind of Sunday, and thinks that’s the correct use of the color, that burgundy should stay a little bit of an event. Neither of us has convinced the other of anything, and we’ve stopped trying.
I’ll say the honest thing now. A deep burgundy is a bit of a gamble if your closet already runs warm, camel, rust, anything orange adjacent, because it can fight those tones instead of sitting next to them, and you find that out standing in front of a mirror at 7am, already running late, already regretting a decision you made in a fitting room under flattering lighting. It looks incredible on someone with the right undertones and slightly like a bruise on someone else, and I’d rather tell you that than pretend it’s universal.
We still keep buying them. All of us. That’s the whole review.
