No brown in town? The new rules from a bygone era
As a lawyer warns trainees to ditch brown shoes with blue suits, Stephen Doig asks if it is really that wrong
The humble brown shoe has been relegated to the dusty hinterlands of the shoe cupboard; an unnamed lawyer speaking at a Thomson Reuters event on how to get ahead in the legal world has advised against wearing brown shoes with a blue suit. Reported on social media, the style instruction was recommended for “unsuitably dressed trainees”. With such stringent guidelines, you’d think Anna Wintour had retrained as an HR exec. A few years ago, a survey found that job interview applicants who wore brown shoes had it counted against them. Clearly, there’s a sartorial stigma to these fairly innocuous items.
The tired adage “no brown in town” has been a well-worn phrase for centuries, dictating a sense that brown shoes – like tweed jackets and cords – are best suited to country pursuits and that coming “up to London” calls for something as black and polished as Mayfair’s Georgian railings. It’s a charmingly quaint ideal, harking back to a time when a fellow might have had a place in the Home Counties and a set of rooms at Albany, perhaps tasking his very own Jeeves to polish his Oxfords before heading to work. But in an era where dress codes and stylistic mores are more fluid than ever – this year Goldman Sachs relaxed its rules around what their staff could wear – doesn’t it seem a tad archaic?
“The saying harks back to a time when brown was for weekends in the country and black shoes were for city,” says Tim Little, creative director and CEO of Grenson, the long time go-to footwear brand for the working man. “But as menswear
dress rules have been obliterated over the last 20 years or so, only a few last bastions hold on to them, mainly lawyers, bankers and accountants.”
It’s a rule that has its roots in the traditional British class system, with brown being a signifier of the proletariat, worker attire and black lending itself to something more gentrified and professional. In the 18th century, it was de rigueur for brown boots to be worn for country pursuits and black variations for city life; the gentlemanly Athenaeum Club, of which the Duke of Wellington was a founding member, even threw him out once for wearing his eponymous boots in town.
There are certain situations, in the world of formal dress where brown shoes don’t match. With a black suit, for example, they look jarring. But with a navy suit?
I might not have vast experience of the social anthropology of a Magic Circle law firm, but I’d wager that brown shoes with a navy suit is fine. More than fine; it allows for a greater degree of self-expression in the otherwise standard issue of suit/shirt/tie. There’s a very simple reason; the patina of brown shoes allows the detail and craft to show up in a way that black doesn’t. See, for example, a handsome pair of Church’s brogues in a chocolate tone – the sculpting and perforations are made all the richer. If you’re paying a not inconsiderable amount for a beautifully crafted pair of shoes, taking pleasure in the details is part of the appeal; the hardware on a pair of monkstraps shows up all the more against a coffee shade.
“To wear brown shoes, the golden rule is to get a pair in good leather, because it’s far more visible than black. Generally, they look their best when they have a lovely burnished, antique patina,” says Little. “A bad pair of brown shoes can look awful, so if you’re unsure, stick to a darker shade of brown.”
Such rigorous ruling also brings with it other queries: if you’re relegated to an all-black shoe roster, does your belt have to match? What about your man bag? Generally speaking, keeping your leather accessories to one tone is advisable and taking a tip from the sprezzatura style of our Italian brothers is a wise choice. “The Italians wear brown shoes because they want to be noticed as they spend a lot of money on them,” says Little. With the age where time split between town and country is on the wane and the dividing line between the two blurred, perhaps it’s time for hard and fast wardrobe rules be assigned to a bygone era, too.