I had a whole argument with myself last week about whether brown is a neutral or a decision, and then it snowed four inches on a Tuesday in April and the whole thing became academic, because the only question that mattered was whether I could get tights and boots on before the bus came. That’s usually how these debates get settled around here. Not with anyone winning. With Denver doing whatever Denver does and the closet just adapting.
I own a brown A line skirt that hits mid calf, wool enough to matter, and I have worn it with black tights and a black turtleneck so many times that my sister once asked if it was a uniform I’d taken a job requiring. It’s not a uniform.
It’s just the easiest yes I own most mornings, which is its own kind of tyranny, honestly, because easy yeses are how a person ends up wearing the same four things for a decade and calling it a personal style.
The real morning routine is this. Skirt on. Turtleneck on. Something over the turtleneck, a vest usually, because I run cold and refuse to apologize for it. Then I look in the mirror, decide I look like I’m chaperoning a school trip, and take the vest back off. This happens more mornings than I’d like to admit, and I’ve stopped pretending it’s a one time thing. It’s a system. A slow, mildly ridiculous system, but a system.
Where it earns its keep is the color pairing, and I’ll say this plainly because I don’t think it gets said enough: brown next to a genuinely bright blue, cobalt, not navy, is one of the better combinations I’ve worn in years, and it took me until my fifties to actually try it instead of reaching for black again out of habit. My younger self, the one who owned that skirt in 1994 and only ever wore it with beige, would find this whole discovery insufferable. She was wrong.
You Might Also Like
I’m telling her so now.
Waistband is where I’ll be honest with you, because pretending otherwise would be dishonest and I don’t have the patience for that at my age. After a big lunch, an elastic waist is a relief and a real one, a fitted waistband with a button is a small ongoing negotiation, and I have unbuttoned mine under a restaurant table more than once like some kind of fugitive. That’s not a design flaw. That’s just what a button and a large plate of pasta do to each other.
The gamble is the exact shade. Go too orange and it reads costume, go too dark and it just reads like a black skirt that’s confused about its own identity. Find the actual right brown and you’ll wear it until it needs replacing, at which point you’ll spend an unreasonable amount of time hunting for the same one again.
