Embracing the colour brown, fashion’s most underrated hue

Dare to write off brown as drab at your folly. Its very majesty is in its sedate unobviousness and its warm earthiness. The fact that its charm can be found in a tree trunk, a Marni fringed sandal or a chocolate-coloured gown worn by Tilda Swinton in the 2018 remake of Suspiria underlines its breadth of character.

Sure, it’s a beauty that is definitely in the eye of the beholder. Miuccia Prada sent out an infamous women’s collection for S/S 1996 that featured murky browns often credited as the beginning of fashion’s love for ‘ugly chic’. ‘The colour of water as it stagnates over a long, steamy summer’, was how one critic summarised the situation at the time.

The designer has since made brown a recurrent theme in her own wardrobe and Prada collections. The A/W 2025 menswear show opened with a caramel brown, short-sleeve knit with jewellery punched into it, worn with chocolate-hued tailored trousers. In June, the brand’s 2026 take on short-shorts for men was duly paraded around Fondazione Prada in a wondrous deep coffee.

The colour brown: fashion’s most underrated hue

Brown is also a bit queer, a bit avant-garde. The American writer Gertrude Stein was a fan of brown velvet, in particular, a 1946 two-piece skirt suit designed by Pierre Balmain. In a 1894 oil painting by Roger Fry, the early gay rights activist Edward Carpenter wears a brown coat, which Fry described in a letter as Carpenter’s ‘anarchist overcoat’.

In fashion, Prada is not alone. Brown is a total mood. An Hermès duffle coat in a glossy taupe looks particularly desirable styled with beige and black. The Row’s dark mahogany suit blazers or cashmere overcoats, paired with round-toe lace-ups in coordinating shades, are autumnal catnip. Meanwhile, for next spring, Saint Laurent’s tailored shorts in a soft brown – inspired by a pair Yves Saint Laurent wore in 1950 – were styled on the runway with an orangey-red shirt, a gentle reminder that brown is a brilliant neutral, and works gorgeously with a strong colour.

Fall for the charms of brown and its appeal swells; its appearances multiply. A recent exhibition by Julien Nguyen at Matthew Marks featured a painting of his muse Nikos in a brown coat, the shade of which gloriously offsets pale skin and yellow-blond hair. And at Rick Owens’ ‘Temple of Love’ retrospective, currently on at Paris’ Palais Galliera, you’ll note there are plenty of clothes on the brown spectrum, and that, yes, the gallery’s floor-to-ceiling curtains do come in a slash of elegant brown brushed velvet.

A version of this story appears in the September 2025 Style Issue of Wallpaper*, available in print on newsstands, on the Wallpaper* app on Apple iOS, and to subscribers of Apple News +. Subscribe to Wallpaper* today