What the hell is taupe?
I’ve had the strangest aversion to the color brown for so long now that it has become second nature for me to just ignore everything brown in every store I visit. I look terrific in dark, earthy neutrals — especially black, charcoal gray and olive drab – but wearing brown just didn’t seem like me.
A few weeks ago I was discussing the color brown with a young man who wears black almost exclusively — a “Goth” type. He made a point of telling me how much he loathes brown shoes. Having lived through the early 80s once already, I didn’t give much credence to his argument. Why would I trust a guy who was dressed like I used to dress more than twenty-five years ago when the style was fresh?
The conversation stuck in my mind. A few days later I was walking through a boutique where I noticed some shoes that I thought were black. I picked them up and realized that they were very dark brown — almost black. I immediately took them to the counter and paid for them.
Last week I was shopping for some pants. I found a pair that I thought was gray at first and I took them to the fitting room. The lighting there was quite different than the lighting on the sales floor, and I noticed that the pants were more brown than gray. I immediately thought of how smart they would look with my new shoes, so I bought them, too.
I wore the combo out yesterday, where I saw my Goth friend. I told him that brown was my new signature color, and that he had singlehandedly inspired me to get over my irrational fear of the color. He told me that my pants don’t count, since they are “more taupe than brown.” I told him to kiss my ass.
Anyhow, that incident made me ask myself if I really knew what taupe was. So I looked it up on Wikipedia. Taupe, it seems, is the color of the European Mole, which can be many different colors. I’ve always considered taupe to be the color of mud puddles, which may be correct according to the article since it cites several examples of the color.
Taupe is a lot like personal style, it seems: It’s whatever you want it to be. Now that I’ve realized that, I’d like to make taupe the signature color of antifashion. What better represents the movement than the color that can’t be defined? How could it possibly be affected by the trends when no one really knows what it is in the first place?
So rise up, you rebels! I want to see legions of you on the streets in head-to-toe taupe. Power to the people! Stick it to the man!
On second thought, just wear whatever you want. And if you want to wear pink and call it “taupe,” go ahead. Who am I to stop you from being yourself?
