I’ve had chocolate on my mind recently. I’ve been thinking a lot about Burberry’s chocolate leather pencil skirt, worn with a cream lace-edged slip peeking out. Also Prada’s stiff deep-brown satin cocktail-hour Bermuda shorts (so much better than they sound, trust me) and Max Mara’s one-shoulder cotton sundress-alternative jumpsuit. And Rejina Pyo’s cream-on-brown polka dots, and Zimmermann’s low-rise trousers the shade of a bar of 90% cocoa chocolate.
I mean, I have to acknowledge that the degree to which I have had chocolate on the brain over the last, ooh, six-and-a-bit weeks might not be entirely down to fashion. It is just possible that it has something to do with me having given up chocolate for Lent. Six weeks turns out to be a long time to go without so much as a tile of Green & Blacks. I have missed chocolate; I’ve been sating my cravings with the non-edible kind.
That’s how it happened that I reached into my wardrobe one day and pulled out this leather jacket the colour of Dairy Milk, bought a few years ago from Boden. I’ve had a few leather jackets over the years, but this one has been the most successful. I love the idea of a black leather biker jacket, but it gets muddled in my head with the idea of being Claudia Schiffer, with lots of bouncy hair and lipgloss and possibly a pastel Vespa. I am, in fact, me, with hair that falls flat and a season ticket, which means that the black biker jacket never quite flies.
This jacket, though, is a keeper. It doesn’t need a Vespa. It’s happy on the train. Hey, it’s happy on the bus. It’s snug, but in a cool, Steve McQueen kind of way, rather than a cutesy, dolly sized kind of way. It’s an excellent summer holiday jacket because you can wear it on a plane but can also wear it with a black cotton dress and flat leather sandals for an al fresco dinner.
Chocolate brown, it turns out, goes with pretty much everything. With white or cream you get a softer, sepia-toned, more laid-back take on monochrome. Chocolate looks excellent with blue – navy, cobalt, baby blue – but above all it works with all the edible shades of brown. Coffee, caramel, cream and toffee are taking over from the greys (charcoal knits, silver skirts) that have been everywhere the past few years, and there are some delicious combinations. Chocolate looks almost as good as it tastes. Happy Easter, fashion bunnies.
• Jess wears jumpsuit, £79, warehouse.co.uk. Brown bomber jacket, Jess’s own. Sandals, €250, aeyde.com. Styling: Melanie Wilkinson. Hair and makeup: Samantha Cooper at Carol Hayes Management using Mac cosmetics and OUAI
