James Mitchell guides you through his Hero Hue, with lessons learned from clothes and cars, and stars in bars...
If you’re going to drive a Ford Granada through a plate glass window to the strains of blaring brass, a funky bassline, and a Nile Rodgers-approved choppy rhythm guitar, you will get my attention. The Professionals opening titles gave fair warning of the extravagant crime-fighting that was to follow, all done in the very best of late 1970s taste. Top CI5 operatives Ray Bodie (dark brown leather bomber jacket with a luxuriant chestnut bubble perm) and William Doyle (favouring a closer crop up top, along with sideburns and a tan leather blazer) took down the bad guys and defiantly demonstrated that confident men can wear Brown in Town.
Meanwhile their boss, Major George Cowley, masterminded operations, issuing orders in his brusque Scots brogue. And he was no slouch in the style stakes either. His apartment, as described in one of the novels inspired by the series, had a smoked glass coffee table, a vertigo-inducing hi-fi stack, a dark brown velvet sofa and a well-worn leather armchair. Apparently, it exhibited “perfect masculine taste”. Cowley’s chosen ride? A Sahara Beige Granada 2.0 Ghia mark 2 – powerful, elegant, discreet. Bodie and Doyle both drove three litre Gold Ford Capris in the later series. It’s just possible the producers had struck a deal with their friends in Dagenham: Ford. But this brings us on to an important point that is equally applicable to cars and clothes.
There are many tonal variations in the Brown section of the spectrum, get it right and you’ll look Golden, get it wrong and you risk becoming just another Clown in Brown. A car example first, Andy Warhol owned a Brown two-tone (dark and milk chocolate) 1974 Rolls Royce Silver Phantom. A very famous motor, it was sensational to look at and very comfortable on longer journeys – anything over 15 minutes really; perfect for cruising between New York and the Hamptons.
Meanwhile, British Leyland were experimenting with parts of the paint chart that others rightly feared. Their advertising slogan, “There’s more Vroom in an Allegro”, featuring the car and a row of showgirls’ legs may or may not have been true. But in either Sand Glow or Harvest Gold you ran the risk of making your Tardis look more like a dog turd.
By the late 1980s fashion had moved on. The gritty appeal of Bodie and Doyle was replaced by the far more exotic and expensively dressed Crocket and Tubbs in Miami Vice. They were undoubtedly cool cats, as they battled drugs and prostitution by land and sea in South Florida. They did this while wearing implausibly well-ironed, pastel coloured Armani linen suits. Incredibly they would even wear them with just a T-shirt underneath and the sleeves rolled up to elbows, mainly when in deep-deep cover in a bar or at a party. Dishevelled elegance. And the boys accessorised very smartly too, no product placement deal with Ford for them, Crockett and Tubbs favoured Lamborghinis and Ferraris.
But you can’t keep a good brown down. It’s a natural neutral in any ensemble, often bestowing an earthy cosiness on to the wearer. As the popularity of Miami Vice waned, another duo was preparing for the spotlight… Mitch and Pat. I was the Mitch part of the equation, and my very good friend Pat had the Pat bit covered. We met in the first week of our university careers and any suspicions I may have harboured about his personality were quickly dissipated by his outstanding personal style. A freshly acquired deep brown suede blazer made a warm opening impression, and this was built on by the addition of a casually swung bottle of Cinzano – immediately putting his fellow students at ease. His Shane McGowan smile could light up any room, and he wasn’t afraid to unleash it. Fate and a beautiful brown jacket had flung us together.
But over the years we’ve weathered sartorial lows as well as the highs. By the mid-90s, as we made our first tentative steps in the world of work, we were sharing a house together in Hammersmith. Weirdly, the fully furnished living room came complete with a smoked glass coffee table, brown velvet sofa and a priapic hi-fi stack. I was working as a Producer for Carlton TV on a public access slot that went out just before the early evening news, resulting in the strange mix of subjects we covered often having more than a million viewers. We had been gifted some incredible archive footage of the original Routemaster buses circulating London’s iconic sights back in the 1950s and 60s. Their modern equivalents, though, were being threatened with what felt like a very premature obsolescence. All I needed was a willing presenter who felt passionately enough about the Routemaster to call out the bus baddies (Transport for London).
To my utter amazement, Pat valiantly put his hand up and offered to voice the concerns of Routemaster fans everywhere. The crew and I arranged to meet him at Tottenham bus depot where his links would be filmed on a fallow Routemaster. But when my star arrived, he was wearing a carcoat in such a lurid hue, dog with a stomach-upset brown, that I had to intervene. It was a very cold day, and at first Pat was insistent that the coat stayed in the picture. A stand-off of several minutes ensued before sanity prevailed and the offending item was removed. He may have shivered between takes, but his performance was flawless and the Routemaster was granted a stay of execution until 2005. For clothes, just like cars, there are good browns and bad.
With such a rich heritage, it’s no surprise that Brown has reappeared as a fashion favourite in the current decade. Brown is now officially back! And in a big way. So much so that fashion writers have inevitably been declaring, ‘Brown is the new Black’. What does this actually mean, aside from there being a huge amount of brown clothing in the shops? For starters it’s more than just a transient nod to late 70s style. Although, when GQ saw the actor and trendsetter Donald Glover salute the 70s in snug brown trousers teamed with a virulent lime green and blue silk shirt open to just above the navel, they swooned that, “it’s time to buy brown pants”. Good luck carrying that particular look off, chaps. What has happened is that brown has been used much more frequently as the backdrop, or neutral colour in many different kinds of outfits which would have traditionally been built around black or safer staples such as navy blue or grey.
So whether it’s tailoring, t-shirts and jeans, coats, jumpers and jackets at the moment you can have all of it in any colour, so long as its brown. We’ve talked about the importance of the particular shade you plump for, but you’ll know it when you see it and then try layering it; brown on brown. And if you switch the textures up too you can get surprisingly bold yet refined looks. A mocha brown silk shirt under a camel hair coat? Fantastic. Want something to break up things up a bit? Brown looks great with a few splashes of turquoise or fuchsia pink thrown on to it. Try it, it may sound wrong, but it looks very, very right. We are not looking to go greige here.
But have we already reached Peak Brown, summited, and begun to roll down the other side? The Pantone Colour of the Year 2025 was Mocha Mousse which is, according to House Beautiful magazine, “a warming rich brown... a sophisticated, nurturing shade that challenges perceptions of the colour brown from being humble and grounded to more aspirational and luxe”. Ah, stealth wealth and quiet luxury poking their noses in yet again. Meanwhile Cloud Dancer has drifted serenely to the top of 2026 rankings – it’s off-white and it’s not going to change your life. This month’s cover of Vogue magazine might though, with the headline: Brown is the new Red. Further investigation revealed they were only referring to lipstick, a mere ripple from Brown’s current impact – I would never leave you looking ‘so last year’.
I still see Pat, and we often meet up for a coffee in Branca, an Italian restaurant and Jericho gem on Walton Street. We favour a discreetly positioned table, with low slung brown leather armchairs and a clear view of the floor to ceiling plate glass windows which form the corner of the building. As Pat sits there in a dark brown needle-cord blazer and mocha mousse polo shirt (another stunning combination) he stairs into my burnt cocoa eyes framed with tortoiseshell rims and laughs. In my toffee jumbo-cord trousers, cream sweatshirt and sand suede bomber jacket, I laugh too. It’s preposterous to the point of absurdity to fear that a vintage Ford Granada will smash through the vast glass wall to join us. About as likely as a well-chosen Brown ever letting you down.
