I settled the brown shirt dress argument in my apartment lobby, in front of my mail cubby, holding two dresses on hangers like I was presenting evidence. My position for two years had been that brown reads muddy on almost everyone in almost any light, that it’s the color equivalent of a beige rental car, and that anyone who tells you it’s “the new black” is trying to sell you something. My neighbor’s position was that I had only ever bought bad brown. So she produced a counterexample, a chocolate colored shirt dress she’d had for three years, and made me hold it up under the actual hallway light, the terrible yellow kind that makes everyone look faintly ill. It didn’t go muddy. It went warm, almost like a coffee with too much cream in it, and I stood there in my coat holding my mail like an idiot, conceding an argument I’d been winning in my own head for two years.
Most of the brown shirt dresses I own now pass that hallway test, and I mean that literally, I have started checking new ones under my own terrible hallway light before I let myself get excited in the store’s better lighting, because store lighting lies to you and it lies to you on purpose. A dress that looks like caramel under a boutique spotlight can turn into cardboard the second you step outside, and outside is where you actually live. Wind matters more than anyone talks about with this shape, a lot of these come with some kind of tie or wrap front, and I have had one come completely undone walking to my car in a parking lot in March, arms full of groceries, nothing to grab it with. Stairs are fine, most of these fall at a length that doesn’t require thinking about your feet, which after a decade of tripping on hemlines feels like a personal victory.
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I’m not going to pretend every one of these works for every body or every closet. There’s a rust colored version out there right now, more terra cotta than brown honestly, that I love and that made my sister look like she was headed to a Renaissance fair, not in a good way, in a specific way. That’s the gamble pick. It’s gorgeous on the right person and a costume on the wrong one, and I’d rather tell you that upfront than let you find out in a fitting room mirror under bad lighting with no one there to talk you down.
Not everyone in my life has come around on brown. My mother still calls it a sad color, unprompted, usually while I’m wearing one. I’ve stopped arguing that part. But the hallway test stands, and I lost that one fair.
