Brown is the new black

Not too long ago, Hillary Clinton was known about town not just for being Our Lady of Pantsuits, but black pantsuits. It wasn’t until she hit the presidential trail in earnest that she switched to jewel tones and colored jackets paired with black pants — a changed noticed by New York Times writer Gail Collins, who asked her about it. Clinton reportedly laughed and said she’s gotten sick of them.

But, as Robin Givhan of the Washington Post later pointed out, it was probably a little more complex than that. Choosing colored suits or colored blazers served to highlight her femininity (and flatter her coloring), while keeping the lines of her outfits more or less, well, in line with her male competitors. Those who think the shift was merely the result of a well-timed urge to conspicuously consume are gullible or sorely mistaken.

That said, I could have sworn yesterday that Hillary’s brown pantsuit was a repeat from one of the Democratic debates. So I spent my lunch hour thumbing through pictures of Hillary’s sartorial choices (notably: I love her in lavendar, blue, and burgundy) over the past year only to discover not that it was her lucky chocolate brown suit — it was darker in person than it appears in pictures — but that it was one of nearly as many brown suits that she now owns as when she used to stick to black. So maybe she did get bored with black — it’s definitely the gateway color to brown — but she didn’t get the jewel tones to counteract that. Tina Fey may say that b*tch is the new black, but in Washington, brown is.

Alex Wong/Getty Images News