Swap Black for Chocolate Brown: Why Fashion’s Humblest Shade Is Now Its Chicest

Fashion has a problem with the word brown. This season’s most talked-about colour is being sold as espresso, chestnut, cacao, ganache, truffle, mocha, caramel and hazelnut, and almost no one wants to use the plain name. Yet according to Guardian fashion columnist Jess Cartner-Morley, deep, glossy chocolate brown is probably the chicest thing you can wear right now.

From wheelie bins to the catwalk

The rebrand is needed because brown has never had glamour on its side. Red suggests passion, black suggests chic, pink romance and blue serenity. Brown, Cartner-Morley jokes, is the colour of wheelie bins. Its history explains the stigma. Brown dyes and raw brown cloth were cheap, practical and good at hiding dirt, so the shade became associated with poverty. The urban poor of ancient Rome were known as pullati, literally “those dressed in brown”, and medieval English sumptuary laws confined peasants to russet, a coarse reddish-brown fabric.

Traces of that attitude linger, she suggests, in the way brown still feels grounded and real. It had an earlier fashion moment in the 1970s, when it seemed earthy and authentic after the theatrical 1960s. Today it tends to turn up at the more alternative labels rather than the razzle-dazzle ones. There is little of it at Versace, but brown and green is very Marni, and Prada has long loved it as part of its “ugly chic” vocabulary, precisely because it is not an obviously pretty colour.

Why chocolate brown, and why now?

The edible vocabulary is probably no accident. When Pantone named Mocha Mousse its colour of 2025, it tied brown’s popularity to the “food-ification” of culture, the idea that coffee and chocolate are small, affordable comforts in anxious times. Food has become lifestyle content, and the bakery something close to a cultural institution, with younger consumers queuing for particular croissants and debating online where the best ones are made.

Cartner-Morley admits that colour trends rarely have one tidy origin story, but they do capture a mood. Chocolate brown is cosier than jolly, luxurious rather than flashy, nostalgic without being sugary. It is also emphatically analogue: a smartphone is never brown, while leather, wood, coffee, earth and suede all are. In her reading, it is the colour of real life offline, which may be why it is having an aspirational moment.

How to wear brown this autumn

Her simplest advice is to substitute it wherever you would normally reach for black. Boots, handbags, trousers and coats are categories where black feels like a no-brainer, but swapping in chocolate brown makes the same outfit look more considered. Her examples include chocolate leather boots with jeans and a navy jumper, or a dark-brown handbag with a grey coat.

There are practical arguments too. Brown, she says, is less draining against many skin tones than grey, and less corporate than navy. It pairs well with black and with colour, and is “terrific” with pale blue, butter yellow, pale pink or burgundy. Mixing different browns, such as conker with caramel and espresso, also works.

The takeaway is that the trend does not demand a new wardrobe, just a rethink of the black default. A colour long linked with thrift and practicality has become, for now, the quiet signal of an outfit that looks chosen rather than reflexive.

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