Black & Brown

In between rain showers on Saturday, while encased in dry yet unbelievably preppy surroundings, it finally dawned on me that mixing black and brown is indeed the fashionable thing to be doing in London these days. Now, I had noticed this before, but it has now finally been driven home. So yes indeed, if you want to be cool and trendy, it's time to start mixing your black and brown, but there are rules to be followed! Luckily I shall relay them, based on my keen observations. (Note: for females only!)

1. Black tights, brown shoes - the black tights remain a mainstay in these parts, and so to keep things fresh you have to alter what you wear with your black tights. Oh, and black tights are still most commonly worn with black skirts. Anyways, you change the shoes! Black tights provide a good backdrop for showing off your latest foot fashions in a wide variety of colors, which now seems to include any and all shades of brown. In fact, red is a bit too obvious, while brown seems to be the colo'u'r of choice amongst those that are fashionable without looking like they're trying to hard. But don't think that you can get away with wearing your matte dark brown pumps here, these shoes are generally somewhat glossy if of a darker brown, or in lighter shades of brown. I think if I was cooler I could wear my tannish t-straps with black tights and be somewhat cool, but I don't have the guts to even try. Oh, and they are generally heels when brown, but people will wear other colors in flats. It's all very confusing.

2. Black skinny jeans, brown belt - this is what I noticed while at the yuppie pub on Saturday, as there were two girls standing in my direct eye-line as I was sitting down both wearing very skinny black jeans and brown belts. I only saw one of their shoes, and they were black extremely flat slip-ons. Personally, I wasn't sure what to make of this. I still can't help but think that you shouldn't wear a brown belt with black pants. Of course, I also think that you'd have to be nuts to walk around in black skinny jeans so perhaps I'm not the best judge. They seemed to be at ease with what they were wearing, and the fact that two of them had made the same choice while dressing implied it wasn't a one-off sort of situation.

3. Black and brown bag - it's cheating a bit to list this separately, but one of the girls at this same table of uber-preppiness (it was someone's birthday, apparently, so there was a table with about 20 people at it and a load of empty bottles of Bulmers, which costs about £4 a pop) picked up her bag, and it was black with brown detailing and a brown flap. If the black jeans/brown belt girls didn't drive the trend home with me, then this bag did. I was like, what?? It's everywhere! Mix your blacks and brown!!

So let's say you want to mix brown and black, here are the finer points to keep in mind. Perhaps the most important thing is not to attempt to do so with your darkest browns, you want to make sure that it's obvious that you are purposefully mixing your shades and not give the impression you got dressed in the dark. And the other key thing is that you should use brown as an accent color to go with black, black is not used to accent brown. So brown shoes with black tights but no black shoes with brown tights.

Mark is secretly trying to start his own male black/brown trend by using brown shoelaces in his black work shoes. He claims to just not have noticed the color laces he was buying, but I think we all know he's secretly attempting to be seen as uber-chic!