I spent about three years thinking brown cardigans were a punishment. A thing your geography teacher wore. A thing that said “I have given up on colour and possibly on life.” I owned exactly one, bought in 2019 in a moment of temporary insanity, and it sat at the back of a drawer until a charity bag finally took it off my hands. So it feels a bit rich that I’m now the person telling you brown is the only cardigan colour that matters, but here we are, I was wrong, and I’m addressing that jumper directly, wherever it is now: I’m sorry, you were early, not bad.
What changed my mind was realising brown isn’t one colour, it’s about twelve. There’s the flat, cocoa, slightly sad brown that does look like a staffroom.
And then there’s chestnut, toffee, a properly deep chocolate that reads almost like a neutral black from across a room. A good brown cardigan sits in that second group. It’s got warmth in it, not muddiness, and the knit itself needs enough weight that it drapes rather than clings, because a thin, flat knit in this colour tips straight back into geography teacher territory.
Styling wise, this is where brown earns its keep. It sits next to cream, white, black and every shade of green without a fight, and it makes gold jewellery look properly expensive rather than costume. My colleague Priya saw me in one over a white shirt and black trousers and said “that’s giving quiet money,” which I’ve decided to take as the highest compliment available. Worn open over a slip dress it does something for evenings that black never quite manages. Buttoned up with jeans it’s doing the school run. Thrown over shoulders with nothing buttoned it’s doing a lunch you’re pretending isn’t a big deal.
It suits the moments where you want to look put together without announcing it, work, dinners, the awkward in between weather months when nothing else feels right. Not showy, not shouting, just quietly doing more work than you’d expect from something the colour of tea.
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