Chartreuse or Mustard - Which is More Splashy?

Chic or ick? The two colors divide opinion but designers are giving it the green light.

Chartreuse is a polarising hue, either praised for its sophistication or detracted for its ickiness. It’s not a shade a designer chooses lightly. It adds a sharp, modern tension, it’s a little irreverent and it speaks to a woman who understands the legacy of style but expresses it with a contemporary edge.

The off-kilter colour has turned out to be a popular tone with other luxury designers too this season, use of chartreuse on the catwalks surged for autumn/winter 2025, up 93 per cent from the same season a year ago.

At Prada it was found most distinctly in a voluminous drapey dress in a technical fabric with a fuzzy brown fur collar. At Marni a faux fur cape was chartreuse, worn with a stripy knit, brown skirt and snakeskin boots. At Roksanda it was the colour of the visible lining of a deep brown coat, a draped silk gown and the giant paillette sequins of a pencil skirt just visible under an oversized grey tailored blazer. In New York, Christopher John Rogers used chartreuse for a striking voluminous shirt and as one of many vibrant shades in his fiesta of striped big skirts and dresses.

Can that translate to our wardrobes? Chartreuse might be a tricky colour for those with pink complexions, particularly when worn directly against the skin, but for dark and olive tones it will likely cast a gold glow. The runway shows offered clues on how to make it wearable: a key takeaway being to ground chartreuse with an earthy neutral. Roksanda and Emilia Wickstead teamed it with charcoal grey and chocolate brown to elevate the shade into something mid-century yet modern.

Fruits and plants have inspired many colour names but Chartreuse is the only liqueur to have done so. Legend goes that the botanical drink — made by Carthusian monks near Grenoble in south-eastern France — comes from a recipe created in the 17th century for an aqua vitae, or elixir of life, so highly prized that even today only three monks at any time know its precise combination of 130 ingredients.

I recently spotted a woman heading to an event in a satin chartreuse gown that looked great against her sun-tanned skin. Disgust didn’t seem to be what she was exuding, but whatever the emotion behind it, chartreuse’s powerful elixir is already out of the bottle.