Black Dot Diary

Johnny Cash once sang, “I wear the black for the poor and the beaten down, /​Livin’ in the hope­less, hun­gry side of town…” I love Johnny Cash but that’s not why I wear black. I don’t wear black because I’m depressed either. Or to look thin. Or to look mysterious.

I wear black because when I’m wrapped in it, I feel authen­tic. I love its inky mys­tery, its sub­tlety, its rebel­lion con­trasted with its chaste dark­ness, its time­less­ness. When I wear black, I feel ener­gized, per­haps because this non-​colour absorbs all light in the color spec­trum. It’s all there.

In West­ern cul­ture, black has an unde­served bad name as the colour of mourn­ing, melan­choly and evil. But in ancient Egypt, black rep­re­sented life and rebirth in homage to the black soil of the Nile val­ley. In parts of Africa, black is asso­ci­ated with rain clouds, a sym­bol of pros­per­ity and life. The medieval Cathars saw black as a color of per­fec­tion. So did Renoir who said, “I’ve been 40 years dis­cov­er­ing that the queen of all col­ors was black.” Viva le noir.

Oh, I’ve tried to wean myself away from black, mostly under duress. Back in the 80s, when colour pro­fil­ing was in, I was diag­nosed as a “spring” and con­demned to wear vapid pas­tels. I felt like an imposter. I felt like a flower. No won­der I began to sneak black into my wardrobe again. Car­bon. Onyx. Char­coal. Smoke. Ebony. My mother couldn’t believe it. “Black, black, black,” she mourned. “What is it about you and black?”

She tried to recon­vert me. She bought me coloured pat­terns and coloured stripes and lots of clothes in peach, but all I wanted was black (and maybe a lit­tle bit of pur­ple or pink for good mea­sure). I wasn’t mor­bid. I wasn’t a depressed teenager suck­ing the light out of rooms. I just wanted to wear my own colour.

Firstly, black is easy. It goes with any­thing although you have to be care­ful because one black doesn’t always go with another. There are many shades.

Sec­ondly, black is always in fash­ion. Think of Chanel’s Lit­tle Black Dress (LBD), intro­duced in 1926 as the go-​anywhere, do-​anything dress at a time when her arch rival Paul Poiret was tout­ing colour. Ninety years later, the LBD is still a fash­ion must. Inter­est­ingly, Chanel was raised by nuns and it has been spec­u­lated that being sur­rounded by women in black may have influ­enced her designs.

Thirdly, black is a state­ment about what is essen­tial. It has a purity to it. You can wear it plain or wear it with frills but it never looks frivolous.

“The most pop­u­lar and the most con­ve­nient and the most ele­gant of all colours,” said fash­ion designer Chris­t­ian Dior. “And I say colour on pur­pose, because black may be some­times just as strik­ing as a colour. You can wear black at any time. You can wear it at any age. You may wear it for almost any occasion.”

I do plan to keep wear­ing black as I get older, despite warn­ings from styl­is­tas that black is aging. I don’t care. I’m not inter­ested in being one of those women who become more peacock-​like as they age, wear­ing brighter and brighter colours to avoid becom­ing invis­i­ble. I admire women like Geor­gia O’Keefe who donned black because it was sim­ple. As an old woman, she stalked the New Mex­i­can desert like a shadow.

I know, crit­ics of black cloth­ing will talk about hid­den depres­sion, a macabre nature, a dark out­look, but I’m not sure those labels apply to me — at least half of the time. I have to admit to being some­what of a closet goth.

But I’m enough of a fash­ion lover to under­stand the value of pair­ing black with chunky sil­ver jew­elry, colour­ful pashimas and vibrant fuch­sia camis. I have no designs on being nunlike.

I do think some black is tacky. Fake leather in black looks, well, fake. Many poly­esters in black look down­right cheap. So I choose my black care­fully, and as I go out into the world in my black boots, black coat and black skirt, I can still hear my mother chid­ing me, “You look like you are going to a funeral.” But, as Baude­laire said, “We are all attend­ing one funeral or another.”

This entry was posted on Monday, November 16th, 2009 at 10:55 pm and is filed under Mind. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.