Honey Camo Came From Nina Muro's Peanut Butter Toast

Honey camo started as breakfast. Nina Muro, a graphic designer at Brain Dead, took a picture of her honey and peanut butter toast and turned it into the new camouflage pattern for Brain Dead Equipment, the label's outdoor line. It comes on two pieces, a cropped hunting jacket and a utility overshirt, and both are out online and in Brain Dead stores now.

It sounds like a bit. It's also a pretty sharp read of what camo is.

Nina Muro Shot Her Breakfast

Brain Dead put it plainly. Its graphic designer "developed our Honey camo pattern for Brain Dead Equipment using a picture of her honey and peanut butter toast."

That's the whole brief, and it's a good one. Honey and peanut butter sit in the family of colors hunters wear in the fall, amber, tan and a darker brown where the two run together. A spread on toast also does something a camo designer usually has to fake. It pools, streaks and breaks up into irregular blobs with soft edges, which is what a pattern needs to hide a body against a background.

The toast did the hard part.

That's also very Brain Dead. Kyle Ng and Ed Davis started the Los Angeles label in 2014, and it has always run on graphics that lead, with the idea that if the artwork is strong enough, the clothes sell themselves. A staff designer turning her own kitchen into a print is that idea at its most literal.

Two Hunting Pieces Carry the Print

Brain Dead picked two shapes that make sense for a hunting pattern. The cropped hunting jacket is a silhouette the brand already sells. In its tan version, HBX lists it as nylon with a water repellent finish and a cropped fit, and it sold out there. Slam Jam stocks the tan one too. Putting Honey camo on a shape that has already moved is the safe call, and the right one.

The utility overshirt is the lighter layer, the piece you'd wear over a tee in October and under a shell in January.

My take is the jacket is the one to get. A cropped hunting jacket in a field camo reads like workwear from a distance and like a joke up close, which is the Brain Dead sweet spot. The overshirt will get more wear.

Brain Dead hasn't treated camo as a one off this year. Spring Summer 2026 brought a custom brushstroke camo on smocks and overpants, and the Fall Winter 2026 Cyber Primitivism collection put a Flocked Leopard Camo on a Hooded Chore Coat and a Jungle Overpant. None of those started on a plate.

Realtree Began With a Backyard Oak

Hunting camo has a long habit of starting from something a person stared at up close. Bill Jordan built Realtree in 1986 after sitting in his parents' yard with paper and colored pencils and drawing the bark of a big oak. His idea was to lay leaves and twigs over a vertical bark base so the pattern would read in three dimensions. Realtree is marking 40 years of that oak in 2026.

Production was Jordan's problem. His first version was too complex for standard production, and he could only get one sample garment made.

Streetwear has been borrowing that hunting logic all fall. Carhartt WIP's feather tree camo layered bark, leaf and feather details over black and then stone washed the whole thing soft. Honey camo goes the other way. Instead of a forest floor, it's a kitchen counter.

The pattern still has one job. Break up the shape, sit in the brown and gold of a dead field, and look like it came from somewhere.

Equipment Keeps Moving Past the Crag

Brain Dead Equipment has spent most of its life as a climbing line, and Kyle Ng helped build it himself for the climbers already around the brand.

The line goes back further than this year. Brain Dead's own archive shows Equipment climbing backpacks, chalk bags, cross bodies and utility bags, then a Climbing Collection in October 2025 that opened with an event at Long Beach Rising.

In July, Brain Dead ran climbing sessions on the 200 foot Golden Gate Wall Traverse under Highway 24 in Oakland and gave away an unreleased adidas Five Ten NIAD to the climbers who finished it.

That shoe reached Brain Dead Equipment on November 6, with apparel alongside it.

Honey camo lands a week later and points somewhere new. A hunting jacket isn't climbing gear. It's the line stretching from the wall into the field, with a print nobody outside the building could have made.

The NIAD needed adidas. The chalk bags needed a canvas supplier. Honey camo needed one designer, a slice of toast and a picture of it.