Brown. Some colors migrate so imperceptibly from unacceptable to everywhere that it takes a little while to wake up to their newly fashionable status. In Paris, Jonathan Anderson set Loewe in a brown box. Ludovic de Saint Sernin led with it. It was at Louis Vuitton, Chloé, Miu Miu. And—as seen digitally this morning—Petar Petrov used it all over his collection.
“It’s funny,” he said on a Zoom call from his Paris showroom. “Ten years ago, I remember thinking ‘brown, I hate this color’! Commercial people would always say ‘don’t do brown, people don’t like it.’ But I started using it, and now it feels right—now it’s around, and it feels cool.”
Actually, the Vienna-based Petrov began showing shades of brown in his modern draped dresses and business-friendly tailoring two years ago. He doesn’t know why. There wasn’t any damascene conversion he can think of. (Although maybe it’s something to do with his Northern European sensibility, where brown-green Loden comes from? Nadège Vanhee-Cybulski said something about being inspired by that at Hermès.)
Anyway, fashion’s all about having the right instincts for the time, and customers have gravitated. His nuanced use of dark brown-russet-tan-beige-ochre worked in a sophisticated way with how he oriented his fall wardrobe towards outerwear and practicality “It’s interesting, we found that keeping softness and ease still felt relevant. We wanted to be able to put things together to create this effortless ease, with pieces that have longevity,” he said. “It doesn’t feel like time for too much show-off dressing.”
That essentially boiled down putting together a smart combination of narrow, boot-cut motorcycle jumpsuits, roomy coats with interesting volumes, great shearling jackets, and some of his signature draped, multi-viewpoint dresses.
Petrov figures out how to take the trouble out of dressing. Wrap-over dresses with side-slit skirts don’t take any fiddly tying; drop-waist belts give the illusion of the wearer having put together turtleneck tops with skirts—or shirts and jeans—when she’s actually wearing a single garment. Not everything was brown of course. A white shearling A-line ‘hunting’ jacket was a standout. He strikes a good balance between making stuff look casual while also being pulled-together—clothes with a sense of usefulness but also, definitely, for women who know which way to go in fashion.
