A woman sat next to me on a flight to Phoenix last spring, glanced at the skirt I’d worn for the sheer inconvenience of proving I could travel in leather, and said, “that’s not beige, that’s just tan that got lucky with the lighting in the store.” I laughed because she wasn’t wrong, and I’ve been thinking about it ever since, because that’s the whole problem with this color and this category and I did not need a stranger on a plane to hand it to me so directly.
Here’s what nobody tells you about a beige leather skirt until you own one. It reads completely different depending on where you’re standing. In daylight, the good ones look like something between sand and butter, expensive, a little bit French. Under the yellow lighting in my own bedroom at night, the same skirt can look like it’s auditioning for a completely different, much sadder decade. I have one that photographs beautifully and looks faintly like a hospital curtain the second the sun goes down, and I keep it anyway because when it’s right, it’s genuinely right, and that ratio is apparently good enough for me.
The waistband is where I lose people, or where I lose myself, depending on the lunch. A leather skirt with any structure at all is a garment that has an opinion about how much you eat, and mine has made that opinion known at more than one holiday meal. There is a version with enough give at the waist that I’ve worn it through a full Thanksgiving without incident, and there is a version I bought first, cheaper, stiffer, that I had to unbutton in a bathroom at my sister’s house like I was committing a crime.
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She didn’t say anything about that one either, which, as I’ve mentioned before, is its own kind of verdict.
The pieces that earned their price are the ones I’ve reached for enough times that I’ve stopped counting, worn with a plain sweater on a Tuesday and dressed up exactly the same way for dinner on a Saturday, no drama either time. The pieces that never got there are sitting in a bag for donation, still with tags, because I convinced myself in a dressing room that I was a person who wears a mini skirt in beige leather to the office, and I am not that person, and haven’t been since roughly 1994.
I’ll say the honest part plainly, this is not a safe pick for everyone. On the wrong body, in the wrong light, it can look like upholstery. On the right one, it looks like you’ve been doing this a long time. I have. That’s the whole review.
