I spent about three years thinking beige was what happened to a colour that gave up. Magnolia walls, hospital corridors, that one raincoat my mother had in 1998. Then I put on a beige mini dress for a lunch I almost cancelled and a woman on the till told me it was the best thing she’d seen all week, and I had to sit with that for a bit. So this is me, formally, apologising to beige. You were never boring, I just kept buying you in the wrong fabric.
Because that’s the actual trick with this colour.
A good beige mini dress isn’t flat, it’s got some warmth in it, a bit of gold or a bit of grey depending on your skin, and it should look like it costs more than it did rather than like a bandage. Cheap beige goes chalky under lights and does you absolutely no favours by 6pm. The good ones have a bit of weight to the fabric, something with body, so it moves instead of clinging in the places you’d rather it didn’t.
Styling wise, beige is the one colour that doesn’t fight anything, which sounds like a cliché but is properly useful when you’re getting dressed in a rush. Gold jewellery on it looks rich.
Silver looks cool and a bit severe, in a good way. A contrast bag, a red or a black or a deep green, stops it reading as one long beige smudge from across the room. Tan boots make it daytime. A strappy heel and a proper coat over the top makes it dinner. I’ve worn the same one to a work thing at 11am and a birthday at 9pm and changed literally nothing but the shoes, and my colleague Priya clocked it and just said “again?” like I’d been caught out, when actually that’s the whole point of the dress.
It’s brilliant for anything you haven’t fully decided the dress code for, christenings, engagement drinks, a lunch that might become a wander round the shops, a work do you’re not sure is smart or not. It never overdresses you and it never underdresses you either. It just sits there looking sorted while you figure the rest of it out.
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