Collection: The Chocolate Edit

Collection: The Chocolate Edit

Chocolate brown has quietly taken the job black used to do. It is the colour our customers now build outfits around, so we gave it its own collection page. 

Is brown the new black?

Close to it. Chocolate brown is warmer against skin than black, so it softens a face rather than draining it, and it photographs as a richer colour in daylight. Black is still the sharper option for evening. For everything else, a chocolate brown outfit does the same job with less severity, and it does not fade to that tired charcoal after 20 washes.

That is why the chocolate brown trend has outlasted the season it arrived in. Brown behaves like a neutral, which makes it the easiest colour to build a capsule wardrobe around.

What colours go with chocolate brown?

More than people expect, which is why this edit is not brown from end to end. The shades that work hardest beside it are cream and ivory, denim blue in any wash, sand and camel, blush, and red. Gold jewellery over silver, every time.

Can you wear brown and navy together? Yes. It reads as considered rather than clashing, as long as the two pieces are clearly different tones rather than almost matching. How about brown and black together? Also yes, and it is no longer a rule worth worrying about. It works when the brown is the warmer, softer texture of the two, say a chocolate brown knit under a black blazer. It fails when both pieces are the same weight and finish.

How to style chocolate brown

Tonal is the look doing the rounds, and the trick is to mix the depths rather than match them. Espresso with cacao with tan reads deliberate. Three pieces in the identical shade read like a uniform. Break it with one lighter piece, a cream shirt or a sand shoe, and the whole outfit lifts.

Texture does the same work. Suede beside a knit beside a smooth trouser gives the eye something to do when the colour is doing very little.

What's in the edit

The whole outfit in one place: a chocolate brown top for under a blazer, chocolate brown jeans and chocolate brown pants for the base, a knit for the layer, a brown maxi skirt when you want movement, a brown trench coat over the top of all of it, then footwear and women's brown sunglasses to finish. Alongside them sit the creams, sands and blues that make brown work harder. We add to the edit as new pieces land.

Shop now

Shop the edit today. If you want a second opinion on whether chocolate suits you, or which shade to start with, message us or come and see us in store in Oamaru. It is the kind of question that is far easier to answer with the piece in your hand.