Mr. Pink: "Why can't we pick out our own color?"
Joe: "I tried that once, it don't work. You get four guys fighting over
who's gonna be Mr. Black."
--Quentin Tarantino, "Reservoir Dogs"
Men's clothes went black in the nineteenth century. Dickens, Ruskin and
Baudelaire all asked why it was, in an age of supreme wealth and power,
that men wanted to dress as if going to a funeral. The answer is in this
history of the color black. Over the last 1000 years there have been
successive expansions in the wearing of black--from the Church to the
Court, from the Court to the merchant class. Though black as fashion was
often smart and elegant, its growth as a cultural marker was fed by
several currents in Europe's history--in politics, asceticism, religious
warfare. Only in the nineteenth century, however, did black fully come
into its own as fashion, the most telling witnesses constantly saw
connections between the taste for black and the forms of constraint with
which European society regimented itself.
Concentrating on the general shift away from color that began around
1800, Harvey traces the transition to black from the court of Burgundy
in the 15th century, through 16th-century Venice, 17th-century Spain and
the Netherlands. He uses paintings from Van Eyck and Degas to Francis
Bacon, religious art, period lithographs, wood engravings, costume
books, newsphotos, movie stills and related sources in his compelling
study of the meaning of color and clothes.
Although in the twentieth century tastes have moved toward new colors,
black has retained its authority as well as its associations with
strength and cruelty. At the same time black is still smart, and fashion
keeps returning toblack. It is, perhaps, the color that has come to
acquire the greatest, most significant range of meaning in history.
