The Year Brown and Beige Ate the World
"Mocha mousse" is the color of 2025, but brown is the color of the decade.
This week, Back Row is taking a special look back at the major trends of the 2020s. Yes, we’re somehow halfway through this harrowing decade! Today, we’re looking at its most important color (pairs well with purple). Earlier in this series:
Many of us are having a hard time getting excited about “mocha mousse,” Pantone’s color of the year for 2025. We’re just not conditioned to get too excited about brown. There’s even that saying in retail, “If it’s brown, mark it down.”
It seemed like such a sad, drab way to end the year that gave us: another Trump term; the Deadpool Wolverine red carpet; a back-from-the-dead Victoria’s Secret fashion show; Mark Zuckerberg’s hypebeast glow-up; and that December/January Vogue cover that was as exciting to look at as waiting in line at a CVS.
But brown and its neutral siblings beige and gray have dominated fashion all decade. Vogue has been plugging brown outfits for years in stories like “Why We’re Wearing Brown This Season” (2021) and “Brown Is the Unexpected Spring Hue That Celebrities Love” (2022). Who What Wear has declared chocolate brown “Expensive-Looking.” An Elle writer who used to be against brown is now obsessed. I realize many of these stories include affiliate links and are designed to get us to buy stuff, but that’s another thing about brown: prior to the 2020s, a lot of people didn’t own much brown, giving the industry a reason to promote it. Skims just launched a skiwear collection with North Face in shades of beige and brown. “I see black and white and zebra and bright colors to stand out,” Kim Kardashian told the Wall Street Journal. “But I think you’d actually stand out in these tones.”
But these stealth wealth shades of brown and beige also represent something refreshing. They’re not just about looking unidentifiably rich in an age of exacerbated income inequality. They represent an appreciation of the natural world, the allure of craftsmanship, and consumers being more thoughtful about how they spend money.
Earlier this year I interviewed Laurie Pressman, VP of Pantone Color Institute, about the emerging palette we’re seeing of deep browns paired with airy pastels, purples, and greens — a new juxtaposition of lights and darks. The gravitation toward brown, a color of nature, was a long time coming. We have been drowning in severe tech-related stress since the 2010s, when things like social media-induced anxiety and misinformation (the “word of the year” in 2018) became a mass concern. “People didn’t trust information. They wanted something more organic” that they could trust, Pressman told me. Something similar happened during the pandemic, when we couldn’t go anywhere but outside, creating a new appreciation for nature.
The last time brown was this major was in the 1970s, when the environmental movement began, explain Leatrice Eiseman and Keith Recker in the book Pantone: The Twentieth Century in Color. The first Earth Day took place in 1970, the same year the Clean Air Act was signed. In 1972 came the Clean Water and Pesticide Control Acts. The “Crying Indian” ad, launched in 1971 by nonprofit Keep America Beautiful to promote Earth Day, depicted a Native American rowing his canoe through a trash-filled river, a single tear rolling down his cheek at the end. Ad Week later named it one of the hundred most important campaigns of the century. Of course, as fashion today co-opts movements like feminism, it appropriated this aesthetic back then. “Feathers, fringed suede, and worn leathers telegraphed a lack of pretension, and sometimes even an advanced sense of spirituality,” wrote Eiseman and Recker.
Pressman pointed out that, decades back, brown was seen as the color of craftsmanship, a big marketing tentpole of luxury fashion, which constantly tries to convince us that the handbags cost so much because they’re made so well (but, you know, psyche). With luxury fashion sales slowing this year, as the industry relies on brand, logo, and merch more than innovative design to sell us stuff, consumers will naturally crave actual craftsmanship. This is what gives stealth wealth brands like Hermès and The Row an edge. They’ve convinced consumers their exorbitant prices are commensurate with quality. (According to my reporting on The Row, the Olsens actually are striving to create some of the best-quality clothes money can buy.)
Also, consumers have internalized research that shows that spending on experiences leads to greater happiness than spending on material goods. During the pandemic, such experiential spending was restrained, which was great for LVMH and Kering, as people bought bags and shoes and brand-vague cashmere. But now that our ability to interact with the world has normalized, consumers aren’t impulse shopping in the same way. They’re thinking harder about what they’re buying, and investing in items that are versatile, which explains the explosion in neutral colors like brown that span seasons, situations, and years.
Finally, there’s something to be said for the visibility of neutrals in the celebrity realm. The neutral palette has been synonymous with Kardashian’s look since the 2010s, when Kanye was dressing her in Yeezy. She and Kanye also became known for turning their extravagant homes into bizarre homages to colorless-ness. They bought a “dark Mediterranean” place for $9 million in Bel-Air, removed every last shred of character and speck of color, and sold it for $17.8 million in 2017. They did the same thing again with their next place, which is so cream-colored you need stain remover just to look at the pictures. If she was learning anything from this, it’s that cold, stark, color-free minimalism is a fast track to both profits and public intrigue.
Kardashian launched Skims in 2019 as a shapewear line with neutral, skin-colored hues, then expanded into loungewear in time for the pandemic, which helped the brand quadruple sales. Skims went on to include bright colors in its range, but has remained synonymous with beige and brown tight stuff. It’s unclear if Kardashian had a crystal ball that foretold of mocha mousse, but betting on a simple, beige-y palette was one of the best moves she made with Skims, which now has a $4 billion valuation — four times that of The Row.
I think of browns and gray colors as non confrontational. They say nothing, they don’t offend, have no point of view, and a little bit of color enlivens them. They are “safe” colors, they don’t comment on politics, who is wearing what, where you live, how much money you make, or critique your lifestyle or friends. The colors are just quietly desperate, never uttering a silent word.
Many moons ago (let's say around 1994), one of my wisest and funniest friends told me that "Brown is the color of stability." Sadly, she is no longer with us but I remember her fondly every time I wear brown.