Shira Tarlo | VoxOur world has too much noise and too little context. Vox helps you understand what matters.2025-03-04T16:23:19+00:00https://www.vox.com/authors/shira-tarlo/rsshttps://platform.vox.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2024/08/vox_logo_rss_light_mode.png?w=150&h=100&crop=1Shira Tarlo<![CDATA[Home Planet]]>https://www.vox.com/climate/3324/home-planet-earth-day-climate-change-solutions2024-04-22T09:20:38-04:002024-04-22T07:00:00-04:00
The climate crisis is increasingly disrupting our fundamental sense of where we belong and what we consider home as extreme heat and climate disasters displace more people around the world. We’re faced with difficult questions every day about how to ethically exist on our planet, often navigating these challenges in our lives from moment to moment.
Confronted with alarming headlines, it’s easy to lose sight of the dynamic and interesting — dare I even say beautiful — ways the planet is changing and how we’re changing right along with it. It starts in our homes.
We believe there should be some space to explore that.
Home Planet is a collection of stories that celebrates life on Earth: It shows the meaningful ways our lives are entwined with the natural world and how humans can adapt to preserve our planet and deepen our connection to our shared home.
Some of these stories unfold within the literal four walls of home, such as our feature on our fraught relationships with our household appliances or our story on the New York City apartments teeming with the city’s most despised pests.
Others explore the theme of community and the unexpected places to find it, be it among a troupe of squirrel-obsessives or through the comfort and spiritual nourishment of plant-based foods.
These stories delve into some of the most intimate aspects of our lives, too, like this refreshing and heartbreaking tale about one mother’s struggle to raise her preteen daughter, a member of Generation Alpha, amid climate-change acceleration and the pervasive distractions of social media and tech. While each will play out in a personal way or within the ecosystems of our homes, all of these stories tap into bigger questions about how climate change will impact our daily lives and what we can do to make life better.
Even the smallest shifts, the most subtle changes in our orientation, can make a huge difference in how we exist on our planet. As humans on Earth in 2024, there’s still a lot to be hopeful about. This package illuminates many paths to begin forging a more attuned, sustainable, and ecological relationship with our home planet. —Paige Vega, climate editor
CREDITS
Editorial Lead: Paige Vega | Project Manager: Lauren Katz | Editors: Alanna Okun, Izzie Ramirez, Lavanya Ramanathan | Reporters: Marina Bolotnikova, Umair Irfan, Benji Jones, Keren Landman, Brian Resnick, Tracy Ross, Allie Volpe | Style & Standards/Fact-checkers: Elizabeth Crane, Anouck Dussaud, Kim Eggleston, Sarah Schweppe, Madeleine Vasaly | Art Director: Paige Vickers | Illustrators: Rachel Victoria Hillis, Christine Mi, Danielle Kroll, Mary Kirkpatrick | Audience: Shira Tarlo, Gabby Fernandez | Editorial Director: Bryan Walsh | Special Thanks: Bill Carey, Nisha Chittal, Jorge Just, Swati Sharma, Elbert Ventura
At Future Perfect, we’re primarily concerned with ideas — ideas that can change the world, ideas that can make it a better place, ideas that might seem utopian but are actually doable. But ideas only matter so far as they have people behind them, the people who can transform those ideas into the raw materials of a more perfect future.
For this year’s Future Perfect 50 list, we consulted our writers, our sources, and our audience to come up with a collection of the people who exemplify the principles and work we are most excited about. (Read more about how we did it here.)
From researchers grappling with AI risks to activists fighting for animal welfare, from the thinkers pushing the boundaries of progress to the climate advocates protecting the planet, the Future Perfect 50 is a cast of true world-changers. At a moment of global darkness, they are the points of light. —Bryan Walsh
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Shira Tarlo<![CDATA[The rise of artificial intelligence, explained]]>https://www.vox.com/?p=25162025-03-04T11:23:19-05:002023-07-10T16:10:43-04:00
Artificial intelligence is suddenly everywhere — or at least, that’s what it seems like to us at Vox. Even in its current form and with its limitations, the tech is already shaping everything from text and image generation to how we live and work.
Generative AI tools, like ChatGPT, Stable Diffusion, and DALL-E, are systems designed to produce something new based on its previous experience. Some of these can be accessed online for free or for a low-cost subscription.
It’s only the beginning of this tech, so it can be hard to make sense of what exactly it is capable of or how it could impact our lives, but so far, it’s impressive. We’re committed to answering the biggest questions surrounding it, and sharing what we know.
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Rebecca JenningsGabriela FernandezShira Tarlo<![CDATA[Every song on Taylor Swift’s Midnights, explained]]>https://www.vox.com/culture/2022/10/21/23416464/taylor-swift-midnights-lyrics-explained-anti-hero-video2022-10-21T15:12:47-04:002022-10-21T14:54:17-04:00
How I feel after listening to all 20 songs on Midnights. | Taylor Swift
As of October 21 at midnight, Taylor Swift’s 10th studio album, Midnights, is officially out in the world, and besides the obvious question (is it more like Reputation or more like Lover?), fans can finally dig into all the lyrical hints and Easter eggs characteristic of a much-hyped Swift release in their standard manner: fanatically.
Of course, there have already been fun little gems for Swifties to enjoy; for one, Midnights came out as Swift turned exactly 12,000 days old, alluding to the numbers around a clock, a present motif in her earlier work (and especially in this album). She’s already shared that the album is made up of “the stories of 13 sleepless nights scattered throughout my life,” and in her pre-release teasers on Instagram and TikTok, Swift revealed that “Anti-Hero” will be the lead single, a song about her struggles with fame and biggest insecurities. “[It’s] a real guided tour throughout all the things I tend to hate about myself,” she explains.
The rest of Midnights — plus its seven bonus tracks that Swift surprise-released at 3 am — feels equally personal; gone are the fictional stories woven throughout her pandemic indie rock albums Folklore and Evermore. Rather, Midnights is a return to an intensely autobiographical Taylor, making it extremely ripe hunting material for sleuthing Swifties. Let’s get into it.
1) “Lavender Haze”
Gaylor theorists (Swifties who believe Swift is bisexual and has dated several of her female friends) may have been convinced that the “lavender” mentioned in the title was referring to the historically queer connotations of the color, but the first song on Midnights appears to be about Joe Alwyn, Swift’s boyfriend of six years. The singer has said as much in talking about the song on social media: “My relationship for six years, we’ve had to dodge weird rumors, tabloid stuff, and we just ignore it, and so this song is sort of about the act of ignoring that stuff to protect the real stuff.” She specified that she came across the phrase “lavender haze” while watching Mad Men, and that it described the feeling of being in love; Gaylors, naturally, were not pleased.
Swift and Alwyn have frequently dodged rumors and questions that they’re engaged, and this song seems to address that speculation head-on as Swift sings, “All they keep asking me (all they keep asking me) is if I’m gonna be your bride. / The only girl they see (the only girl they see) is a one night or a wife.” This sentiment is also referenced by the line, “I’m damned if I do give a damn what people say.” The lines suggest that Swift is tired of this line of questioning, and signals an interest in subverting gender roles and a desire to be seen as more than a wife or girlfriend.
2) “Maroon”
If you thought “Lavender Haze” would be the only song on the album to reference a very specific color, you’ve clearly never listened to an album by Taylor Swift, noted inventor of the color red. Everything here points to this song being about a short-lived relationship — possibly the one she shared with Tom Hiddleston in 2016. We know that it’s referencing a failed romance (“How the hell did we lose sight of us again? / Sobbin’ with your head in your hands / Ain’t that the way shit always ends?”), and the pair met at the Met Gala (“the one I was dancing with in New York, no shoes”). But one “Maroon” mystery remains: When the hell did Swift have a roommate, not to mention one who buys “cheap-ass screw top rosé”?
3) “Anti-Hero”
The first single release on Midnights pits Swift against herself: The music video features Swift in a ’70s wood-paneled den, trapped with all of her insecurities and self-loathing. In the song, Swift describes herself as the “problem,” singing, “I’ll stare directly at the sun / But never in the mirror / It must be exhausting rooting for the anti-hero,” suggesting she can endure almost anything besides coming to terms with her own problems.
“This song really is a guided tour throughout all of the things I tend to hate about myself,” Swift previously said about it, adding, “I really don’t think I’ve delved this far into my insecurities in his detail before.”
It’s an honest portrayal of self-hatred, and the lyrics reveal as much as Swift pokes fun at her height while also nodding to an iconic, albeit odd reference from the television show 30 Rock: “Sometimes I feel like everybody is a sexy baby / And I’m a monster on the hill.” She also says she has “covert narcissism disguised as optimism” and hints that she has trouble sleeping at night due to her struggles with depression and fraught relationship with food; in the music video, she steps on a scale and the number reads “FAT.”
4) “Snow on the Beach”
Despite the fact that Lana Del Rey is featured on this song (barely), it’s actually a happy one! “Snow On the Beach” describes the “weird but fuckin’ beautiful” sensation of falling in love at the same time as someone is falling in love with you. There’s also a fun callout to Janet Jackson’s iconic 2001 single “All For You” (“Now I’m all for you like Janet”).
snow on the beach is so good that lana is speechless
“You’re On Your Own, Kid” is possibly the oldest “midnight” out of the 13 midnights we hear described on the album: The song describes a girl waiting for a boy to notice her, but she eventually gets tired of waiting and runs away to play songs. When she finally achieves fame and fortune, however, she realizes she’s still on her own. “I hosted parties and starved my body / Like I’d be saved by a perfect kiss” recall several pieces of Swiftian lore: her very public “girl squad” during her 1989 era, the eating disorder she spoke about in her Netflix documentary Miss Americana, and waiting for a new love to save her. The song ends on a rather comforting note, however: You may be on your own, but you always have been, so there’s nothing to be afraid of.
6) “Midnight Rain”
Warning: The intro to “Midnight Rain” might be a jump scare. It begins with a distorted, deep voice: “He wanted it comfortable, I wanted that pain / He wanted a bride / I was making my own name / Chasing that fame, he stayed the same / All of me changed like midnight.” But the rest of the song is pure Taylor, alluding to the heartbreak of breaking someone else’s heart by putting one’s career ahead of a relationship.
Mentions of rain in her lyrics are famously sprinkled throughout her discography, from her self-titled debut to Evermore. It also references the themes of starting over, a woman with big dreams escaping her small-town life (see “’Tis the damn season” and “Dorothea”). It’s the only track with “midnight” in the title, suggesting that the song is both an experiment and an ode to revisiting and reinventing “old memories and midnights past.” But who is the man who stayed the same? Theorists are guessing Taylor Lautner and Hiddleston, two men she’s suspected of having dumped for being, among other things, too nice for their own good.
7) “Question …?”
The lyrics may literally begin with the line “Good girl, sad boy,” but Gaylors are convinced that the “question” in question is directed toward Swift’s former best friend, and possible (?) kissing partner Karlie Kloss. The evidence? Frequent usage of she/her pronouns (“Do you wish you could still touch her?”) and the line, “Did you ever have someone kiss you in a crowded room?” which some think is a reference to the lines in Reputation’s “Dress” (which Kaylor stans believe is also about Kloss): “Our secret moments in your crowded room / They’ve got no idea about you and me” and “I don’t want you like a best friend / Only bought this dress so you could take it off.” Theories aside, “Question…?” includes a classic Swiftian homage to the color of feelings: “Before you painted all my nights a color I’ve searched for since” recalls lyrics past, such as the “Illicit Affairs” lyric “You showed me colors you know I can’t see with anyone else” and, well, the entirety of Red.
obsessed with taylor swift starting “question…?” off with “good girl sad boy” and then proceeding the describe the experience of kissing karlie kloss at a 1975 concert in explicit detail
“Vigilante Shit” is all the evidence we need to know that “Karma” (Swift’s rumored album that was scrapped and reworked into Reputation in the wake of her feud with Kim Kardashian and Kanye West) is real, except this time it’s also loaded with references to Scooter Braun. The heavy bass mixed with the bad-girl persona she adopted for the Reputation album cycle is on full display: “I don’t start shit, but I can tell you how it ends / Don’t get sad, get even / So on the weekends, I don’t dress for friends / Lately I’ve been dressing for revenge.” (A Princess Diana reference? Who knows!) It’s also Swift’s second song about ruining a man to avenge a friend (following in the tradition of Evermore’s “No Body, No Crime.” The plot here is, essentially, that an evil man cheated on his wife and did some white-collar crimes, and Swift helped the ex-wife get revenge, and both of them looked really hot. Could be about anyone, really, but we’ll likely get more clues once the “Vigilante Shit” video drops, which Swifties are already convinced will happen.
9) “Bejeweled”
“Bejeweled” is a song about a woman in a relationship who feels used and taken for granted by her partner, but who can still “make the whole place shimmer” when she walks into a room. By the end, she realizes she’s worth more than some guy’s arm candy (“a diamond’s gotta shine!”), and for some reason, I’m personally convinced this song is about Swift’s ex-boyfriend “Calvin” “Harris,” also referenced in the Reputation lyric, “If he drops my name, then I owe him nothin’ / And if he spends my change, then he had it comin’.” I rest my case.
10) “Labyrinth”
Another Alwyn love song! This one appears to be about the anxiety Swift faces when falling in love, expecting the worst, then being pleasantly surprised that it worked out. “Oh, I’m falling in love / I thought the plane was goin’ down / How’d you turn it right around?” Planes are an often-used motif in Swift’s discography, seemingly symbolizing the conflicting set of emotions that come with falling in love but the fear of crashing and burning it all to the ground.
“Last Kiss” (Speak Now): “I do recall now the smell of rain fresh off the pavement, I ran off the pane.”
“Come Back… Be Here” (Red): “Spinning faster than the plane that took you.”
“Out Of The Woods” (1989): “Two paper airplanes flying, flying, flying, and I remember thinking…”
“Getaway Car” (Reputation): “We were jet set Bonnie and Clyde.”
“Call It What You Want” (Reputation): “My baby’s fly like a jet stream high above the whole scene.”
Swift appears to try to quash her anxieties about getting hurt from this relationship as she sings, “Breathe in, breathe through, breathe deep, breathe out.” Swift quoted this lyric in her commencement speech at New York University months before Midnights was released, saying, “Hard things will happen to us, we will recover, we will learn from it, we will grow more resilient because of it, and as long as we are fortunate enough to be breathing, we will breathe in, breathe through, breathe deep, and breathe out.”
11) “Karma”
To understand the song “Karma,” you also have to understand the album Karma — an album that never actually existed, but that theorists believe would have been released had Kim Kardashian not “exposed” Swift in the wake of her feud with Kanye West (read more about that here). When “Karma” the song was announced on the track list for Midnights, fans assumed it would be a diss track aimed at West, who has recently been under fire for antisemitic comments and racist fashion shows.
In an interview with Apple Music about Midnights, Swift explains that the song “is written from a perspective of feeling like, really happy, really proud of the way your life is, feeling like this must be a reward for doing stuff right and it’s a song that I really love because I think we all need some of those moments. We can’t just be beating ourselves up all the time.” The bridge also recounts and affirms Swift’s long-term planning and determination to have a lifelong career: “Ask me what I learned from all those years / Ask me what I earned from all those tears / Ask me why so many fade, but I’m still here.” Also: “Karma is a cat purring in my lap ’cause it loves me” might just very well be Taylor Swift’s most Taylor Swift lyric yet.
12) “Sweet Nothing”
Add “Sweet Nothing” to the list of Taylor Swift songs that would be appropriate on a wedding playlist. It’s for hopeless romantics and Folklore lovers. The lyrics “you’re in the kitchen humming” evoke past references to the casual intimacy of being at home with a romantic partner. To name a couple, remember the dancing around the kitchen visuals in “All Too Well”? Or being barefoot in the kitchen with sacred new beginnings in “Cornelia Street”? Rather than the painful outcomes of the former and the anxieties rippling throughout the latter, “Sweet Nothing” portrays the comfort of Swift finally being with someone who feels like home.
What makes the song even sweeter is that it’s the sixth song Swift has co-written with Alwyn. While the “industry disruptors and soul deconstructors / And smooth-talking hucksters out glad-handing each other” seem to nod to Swift’s feelings of being used for her money and fame, critics of her work and personal life, and her battle to gain ownership of her masters, it is refreshing to hear lyrics suggesting Alwyn doesn’t add to those stressors. “I’m just too soft for all of it.” Me too, Taylor.
13) “Mastermind”
This one’s definitely going to be playing in all your group fitness classes for the next six months. From lyrics on deliberation to a reminiscent bridge, “Mastermind” is a portrait of reclamation and self-analysis. The lyrics “what if I told you it was accidental” draw a parallel to Lover’s “Paper Rings,” where she sings “I hate accidents / Except when we went from friends to this.” Hi again, Joe Alwyn.
Many past public criticisms have painted Swift as a master manipulator. The lyrics “What if I told you I’m the mastermind? And now you’re mine / It was all by design” reframe her as a clever puppet master, but her intentions are actually coming from a place of anxiety. “I’ve been scheming like a criminal ever since to make them love me and make it seem effortless” also seems to call back to “I’ve never been a natural / All I do is try, try, try” from “Mirrorball.” Full of references to classic Swift motifs like youth and stars, this song makes clear she might very well be a mastermind.
14) “The Great War”
It’s not the first time Swift has referred to her relationship as a battle, but it’s certainly the first time she’s compared it, literally, to World War I — though, like, a proper Anglophile, she uses the British term. It’s a song about the regular trials of being in a relationship: trying not to let the past creep in and sabotage what you’ve built, and the relief that you can survive even the worst fights. “I will always be yours ’cause we survived the Great War,” she sings. One can assume we know who this one’s about.
15) “Bigger Than the Whole Sky”
She might be in a serious long-term relationship, but “Bigger Than the Whole Sky” is a reminder that Swift can still write a deep cut about the one that got away. It’s not clear who the song is about (some on Twitter have posited that it could be referencing a miscarriage, possibly a friend’s), though anyone who’s ever had someone taken too soon can relate to the lyrics “Goodbye, goodbye, goodbye / You were bigger than the whole sky / You were more than just a short time.” No surprise that this is the biggest waterworks-inducing track on the album.
Swift evokes the city of love while describing the early stages of being in a relationship, the feeling of being so infatuated that every place you go feels magical and even if you’re drinking cheap wine, it tastes like champagne. Again, she says that romance is sweeter “if you keep it just yours,” and, in a possible reference to “Mastermind,” she sings, “I want to brainwash you into loving me forever.” Normal!
17) “High Infidelity”
“Do you really wanna know where I was on April 29? / Do I really have to tell you how he brought me to life?” Swift sings on the track. This date is important because on April 29, 2016, Swift’s then-boyfriend Calvin Harris released the song “This Is What You Came For” with Rihanna, a song that was later confirmed to have been written by Swift under a pseudonym, Nils Sjoberg.
At the time, Swift and Harris, who had been dating for more than a year, kept their professional collaboration under wraps. But that same day, Harris was asked in an interview whether he planned to collaborate with Swift and he responded, “You know, we haven’t ever spoken about it. I can’t see it happening, though.” The couple broke up roughly a month later, and TMZ reported then that the track was the “breaking point” in the pair’s relationship, with Swift reportedly feeling “disrespected” by Harris during the song’s release.
So where was Swift on April, 29, 2016? That remains unclear, but we do know that on April 28, she was photographed celebrating BFF Gigi Hadid’s birthday in Los Angeles, and images surfaced of Swift leaving the party in the early hours of April 29. It’s not known what she did the rest of the day, but by May 2, she was attending the Met Gala in New York City, which is where fans believe she met Tom Hiddleston, whom she dated after Harris.
“I bent the truth too far tonight / I was dancing around, dancing around it,” Swift sings. “Do you really want to know where I was on April 29? / Do I really have to tell you how he brought me back to life?” Fans think Swift previously sang about leaving Harris for Hiddleston on the 2017 track “Getaway Car.”
18) “Glitch”
This one also appears to be inspired by Swift and Alwyn. In it, Swift sings of an unlikely relationship: “We were supposed to be just friends’’ and “I thought we had no chance,” and seems to suggest that they’ve endured longer than she (and, perhaps, her critics) expected. “But it’s been two thousand one hundred ninety days of our love blackout / The system’s breaking down,” she sings; 2,190 days is equivalent to six years, which is roughly the amount of time that Swift and Alwyn have been together and is thought to be her longest relationship.
In the past, Swift has come under scrutiny over her romantic history, particularly for having many ex-boyfriends. In “Glitch,” Swift appears to internalize the criticism she has received as she sings “I was supposed to sweat you out in search of glorious happenings / of happenstance on someone else’s playground / but it’s been two thousand one hundred ninety days of our love blackout.” The fact that her relationship has endured for this long appears to surprise Swift, who sings it “must be counterfeit / I think there’s been a glitch.”
19) “Would’ve, Could’ve, Should’ve”
Move over, Jake Gyllenhaal, the Swifties’ new Enemy No. 1 is John Mayer, whom fans think “Would’ve, Could’ve, Should’ve” is about. The song refers to a relationship between a 19-year-old Swift and an older man (they dated when she was 19 and he was 32, Swift’s current age). “Now that I’m grown, I’m scared of ghosts / Memories feel like weapons,” she says, acknowledging that even though “the pain was heaven” at the time, she regrets it ever happened.
20) “Dear Reader”
“Dear Reader” is part apologia, part disclaimer: We may have been listening to Swift’s music for the past decade and a half, but here, she warns us not to trust too much of it. “Never take advice from someone who’s falling apart,” she says in the chorus, after she’s just given us a whole verse-ful of advice, then adds in the outro, “You should find another guiding light, but I shine so bright.” Like in the rest of Midnights, Swift is reckoning with celebrity and a life that’s become too unwieldy for one person to bear. In “Anti-Hero,” she wonders whether she’s even learned anything from her fame (“I have this thing where I get older, but just never wiser”), and “Dear Reader” feels like a callback. It’s a fitting end to an extremely retrospective album, a sad but sweet reminder that Swift is, at the end of the day, human.
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Shira Tarlo<![CDATA[Why brown is so on trend in fashion and design]]>https://www.vox.com/the-goods/22394287/brown-clothing-design-poop-nature2021-04-29T14:48:38-04:002021-04-28T09:30:00-04:00
Patricia Wirschke, fashion blogger, art historian, and CEO, wearing brown in April 2021. | Mathis Wienand/Getty Images
Welcome to Noticed, The Goods’ design trend column. You know that thing you’ve been seeing all over the place? Allow us to explain it.
What it is: Brown is having a renaissance. From deep chocolate to buttery toffee, brunette hues have returned from fashion exile to become one of the most sought-after shades of the year. Long considered dated, dull, and unsophisticated — especially when compared to fellow neutrals like black, white, and gray — the color seems to have rehabilitated its public image and emerged as a mainstay in the homes and wardrobes of celebrities, models, designers, and influencers. Even Gen Z is on board.
Why you’re seeing it everywhere: It’s possible that we are living in an elaborate computer simulation programmed by people or beings who are running a process back to the 1970s — the most recent decade in which brown had a significant presence in the color palettes of American living rooms and closets. The more likely explanation, however, doesn’t require an understanding of quantum physics or proof of time travel,but a look at the current appetite for minimalism, sustainability, and natural beauty.
Brown has been waiting for its moment for quite some time — and the creamy, natural color has quietly come of age in the past year. It’s a blatant foil to the perky, bright, and highly saturated shades that seeped into the worlds of fashion, advertising, and decor in recent years.But after a year in which widespread disease, death, and social inequities tormented the global consciousness,leaning into muted colorsmay have only felt fitting. (Many people consider design and styling intrinsic to their self-expression.)
“It wouldn’t feel right to wear pink and purple given the year that we’ve had,” says Alyssa Coscarelli, a style influencer and former fashion editor at Refinery29, who is perhaps better known by her Instagram handle @alyssainthecity. “I went through my closet and got rid of a lot of the more showy, Fashion Week-type pieces and gravitated towards the sweatpants, the outdoor gear, the practical, the comfortable.”
New York-based designer Robert McKinley, whose eponymous studio is behind Montauk’s Surf Lodge and many Sant Ambroeus restaurants, suggests brown’s rebirth is rooted in a broader resurgence of earthy, toned-down neutrals.
“We came from a time where there were lots of jewel tones and really rich colors. People just get tired of it and want a 180 on something,” says McKinley. “There’s a kind of rebellion that happens.”
McKinley comparedthe pandemicto the financial crisis of 2008, which prompted a pushback against extravagant, embellished styles and an embrace of minimalism.
“It’s not bling. It’s not fancy. It’s accessible. Who can’t find something brown?” says Eve Ashcraft, a renowned color expert who famously helped Martha Stewart develop her inaugural paint collection based on the bluish-green hues of her chickens’ eggs. “There’s a kind of back-to-basics aspect of brown. It’s like the comfort food of color.”
In the aftermath of the financial crisis, millions of Americans lost their homes to foreclosures, the unemployment rate peaked at 10 percent, and a generation of young people found the doors to the job market shut in their faces. More than a decade later, the world is again confronting a surreal crisis that has upended life as we know it, leaving people increasingly isolated and lonely, struggling financially, and itching for some semblance of normalcy, though what that means depends on who you ask. Along the way, it’s changed consumer behavior, boosting the sales of loungewear, ergonomic goods, and pajamas.
“The last year was totally overwhelming. If it could go wrong, it went wrong, and it went wrong in such a big way that you couldn’t even make it up,” Ashcraft tells me. “Brown has got to be one of the most underwhelming parts of the palette, and I think of it as a counterpoint. It’s neutral. It’s safe. There’s something decidedly understimulating about it and, to me, that makes perfect sense.”
Brownhas been known to humankind since the earliest civilizations, but history suggests our relationship with it can be considered on and off at best. The color can be found in pre-historic tomb and cave paintings, on vases produced by the Greeks and Romans, and in oil paintings used during the Italian Renaissance. From the 16th century until the early 1900s, painters favored “mummy brown,” a burnt umber hue produced from the rendered remains of ground-up Egyptian mummies. The corporeal pigment is believed to have been used by the likes of Rembrandt van Rijn, Johannes Vermeer, and Eugène Delacroix.
Still, throughout history, the dark neutral has been used to symbolize modesty and simplicity, with members of the working class wearing plain clothes in browns and beiges, while nobles and aristocrats sported extravagant garments in deep blues, purples, and reds. In ancient Rome, the term for plebeians, or the urban poor, was “pullati,” which literally translates to “those dressed in brown.” In the Middle Ages, Franciscan monks donned espresso-colored robes as a tangible symbol of their vow of poverty.
The color became more widely usedin the late 19th century, as major armies began outfitting their soldiers in khakis and light browns for camouflage amid the emergence of trench and aerial warfare. It was notoriously adopted in the 1920s by the Sturmabteilung (SA), or the “Brownshirts,” a paramilitary group attached to the Nazi Party in Germany.
Between the 1920s and 1940s, attitudes toward brunette shades became more positive, thanks in part to the proliferation of Art Deco, a design aesthetic that embraced taupes and creams, metal finishes, and bold geometric patterns. It was during this era that light, washed-out browns were praised as elegant, luxurious, and comforting. This didn’t last, and brunette hues quietly went out of fashion.
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It’s not just history that has a tumultuous relationship with brown; science does, too. In 2009, a study found that, on average, people dislike the color because it’s often “strongly associated with objects they dislike (e.g., browns with feces and rotten food).”
“Although the present evidence is correlational, it seems unlikely that causality runs in the opposite direction,” wrote researchers Stephen Palmer and Karen Schloss. “If object preferences were caused by color preferences, then chocolate and feces should be similarly appealing because they are similar in color. Clearly, this is not the case.” (In other words, people find brown unappealing because it reminds them of poop; they don’t dislike poop because it is brown.)
In 2012, researchers in Australia deemed a shade of dark brown the “world’s ugliest color.” Their findings prompted roughly a dozen countries, including the United Kingdom, Belgium, and France, to pass legislation requiring all cigarette packages to be sold in the off-putting hue (Pantone 448 C) to discourage smoking.
John Maule, a color psychologist and researcher at the University of Sussex, notes that while studies have found brown is generally unpopular, individual color preferences are “flexible.” He explains, “If there are objects in your life that you like and they are a particular color, then that will boost your preference for that color across all circumstances.”
Maule suggests brown’s newly found coolnesscould be the result of people spending more time outdoors amid the pandemic, where they’re “experiencing more brown.” He says an individual is more likely to like a certain color (brown) the more enjoyment they receive from experiences with objects of that color (trees, leaves, dirt).
This has some precedent. Preference for earthy neutrals emerged from the shadows in the ’70s, as the hippie movement spawned widespread concern about the environment. The growing interest in conservation — coupled with a general rejection of materialism and consumerism — was reflected in many homes and closets at the time. Many kitchens featured an ochre and brown color palette combined with lots of natural woods and stones, while cinnamon-colored blouses and auburn leather knee-high boots were considered wardrobe staples.
Carter Altman, a young designer who runs his own label, Carter Young, alongside his day job designing menswear at a mainstream retailer, confirms the natural world has inspired fashion brands and designers. He says this can be seen with the surge of technical, outdoors-inspired clothing — like chunky hiking boots, fuzzy fleeces, and cloudy puffers —on the runways of high-end brands like Gucci and Prada.
The camping chic style, christened “gorpcore” in 2017 by the Cut, has even inspired collaborations between luxury labels and outdoor clothing companies, with Gucci teaming up with the North Face and Comme des Garçons partnering with the nearly 75-year-old trail shoe brand Salomon. The trend has prompted brands to embrace neutral earth tones, like browns, taupes, and greens, because they reflect natural elements.
“There’s a desire among a certain type of consumer to appear connected to nature,” explains Altman, who is a friend of this author. “Brown is a very utilitarian color. It’s economical. It’s more historically minded and easier to achieve by hand-dyeing techniques. It’s opposed to the traditional sex appeal that comes from bright colors or blacks as the grounding center of the wardrobe.”
Altman says trends like gorpcore have nudged the fashion industry to reckon with the environmental impact of mass production, as concerns about the health of the planet are at the heart of retailers like the North Face and Salomon. They’ve also inspired brands to minimize waste by leaning into eco-friendly materials, like organic and recycled fabrics, natural dyes, and deadstock materials (clothing inventory that didn’t sell) — similar to the ’70s.
Ethical and sustainable fashion production has been championed by designers like Altman, as well as Evan Kinori, Emily Adams Bode, and Camiel Fortgrens. Kinori, a San Francisco-based designer, creates his clothing by hand in small, numbered batches, and Altman aims to reimagine classic American silhouettes using deadstock textiles and natural textures. Adams Bode constructs pieces from Victorian quilts, grain sacks, and bed linens, while Fortgens produces deliberately unpolished, gender-neutral styles using sustainable materials. The designers’ finished products aren’t cheap, but they’re intended to be timeless looks that can be worn over and over.
“What they project is not so much the color brown, but the idea of soberness and interconnectivity with the natural environment,” Altman says of the color trend, which he calls a “return to nature, a rejection of screens and fine spaces.” The end product, he explains, feels “closer to the raw materials,” and tries to avoid the wasteful manufacturing processes of fast fashion, which typically include outsourcing production, the use of toxic materials, and a focus on quantity rather than quality.
“True luxury now is feeling closer to the source of production,” he tells me. “For so long, we’ve prized the idea of removal and standardization as true luxury. Is it imported? Where’s it from? How far away can I get this luxury item brought to me from that no one else can have it? Now, the paradigm has turned.”
