Courtesy of Balenciaga SS20.
Maggie Nelson’s Bluets (2009), a train of thought about just one colour in numbered sections, starts, “1. Suppose I were to begin by saying that I had fallen in love with a colour”, and goes on to explore blues, the blues, blueness, blue things and herself. Anne Carson’s Autobiography of Red (1998), on the other hand, follows a red-winged monster named Geryon and starts, “He came after Homer and before Gertrude Stein, a difficult interval for a poet.” In each colour, though, we see in unity, the guardrails humans have created in order to name colours, a watery depth, an arbitrary assignation (why is sadness blue, anger red?), and the isolation of tone from meaning.
Dracula, 1931, Universal Pictures.
1. The word black has meant so many things, just like the colour has, and the clothes. In much of the world, black has historically represented death and uniform – a pious class.
2. Back when wealth was best represented by materials, brighter, cleaner hues easily informed their fineness, whereas black could hide anything. Eventually, though, high fashion became a new kind of elitism, and black was prioritised. The innovation of haute couture was explained with a garment’s structure more than its make-up, and to the human eye, black is best for seeing silhouettes.
3. In small cities, black is a scary colour to wear, a sign of outside interests. Visiting large cities like New York or Chicago or Berlin, one is struck by the amount of black everyone wears: professionals, writers, tech people, designers, security guards, waiters, even children. (Back home, maybe the only people who wear monochrome black are hairdressers.)
4. Something about having to move around this big set in all black makes sense: stage-hands wear black so they can disappear behind scenery, unlike the actors, vying for attention. The goal is to look like one is part of this place, integral to the show.
5 .“Venice,” as Peter Ackroyd writes in Venice: Pure City, is “not so much a city but a representation of a city”, an “endless drama”. In 17th-century Venice, black clothing was “a costume with which to express uniformity … the colour of gravity. Black was the colour of anonymity. Black also held elements of intimidation. It represented death and justice.”
6. There is blackness and there is blackness and there is blackness, but we are focused for the moment on this season’s BBD (‘big black dress’) that comes in all volumes: graduation gown, layered ‘Goth Lolita’, corseted period piece, mouse-ear-topped t-shirt dress or shapeless shift-in-felted-something.
7. Saying anything is the new black is déclassé now, an empty adage because it never worked – nothing ever replaced black as black, even when black was the new black, meaning something racial, and then something not racial, ad infinitum.
8. At some point, each subculture owned black: bikers wore black leather, gallerists wore black linen, the upper crust had black tie events, single women claimed the little black dress. But because it is everything, it is nothing, and so reclaiming black as subcultural today feels almost satirical, an echo of naiveté.
9. Even when Morrissey (not known for wearing black) sang, “I wear black on the outside because black is the way I feel on the inside”, he was mimicking a type of melodrama, and when Lana Del Rey (also not known for wearing black) later sang, “I paint the house black, my wedding dress black leather, too”, she was pandering to a depressive, hoping to point out the absurdity of her song’s subject’s lifestyle. The Rolling Stones’ ‘Paint It Black’ is sped up and slightly hysterical; its lyrics feel distant from Mick Jagger (never one to exclusively wear black, either) as if he is quoting someone.
10. It is imbued with more meaning than the others, but it is still a tone, a nameable one, with varying depths and warmths: black denim is washed. Black iron absorbs. An oil spill is iridescent. A tattoo fades to green.
11. The English word ‘black’ sometimes means evil: death’s cloak, a bad witch’s cape, a bad luck cat, immoral magic, a plague, the darkest humour, the great beyond, the deep unknown. But black is a symbol of simplification, too. Black and white means an easy binary, a heightening of contrast, a yes or no answer.
12. When we say “black people” – a fraught construct – we refer to a giant spectrum of origins, ethnic descents, and experiences, which is de ned differently in different countries, eras, communities and contexts.
13. Black is at once all colour combined and the absence of all colour: the most and the least. A ‘blackout’ means the lack of something (power, light, memory) and a ‘black eye’ means a bruise that looks like a rainbow trout.
Black hole. Courtesy of Event Horizon.
14. A travelling exhibition of Cristóbal Balenciaga’s black dresses, Balenciaga, l’oeuvre au noir was recently curated to show the designer’s capacity for impressive construction by directing the focus away from his wild colour choices.
15. Looking at the Fall/Winter 2019 runway shows, black palettes look particularly dark, as in nightmarish: Prada’s Anatomy of Romance collection, Balenciaga’s Asphalt showspace, Bottega Veneta’s quilted leather, Comme des Garçons’s all-black poofs, and Rick Owens’ models’ blackout contacts look more creepy than formal, answering the Anthropocene with supernatural villains.
16. Vampires – because they are nocturnal and elusive, or because they turn into bats, or because they were first seen in black-and-white movies—wear black, and therefore black is a goth colour, the gothest colour.
17. For all of its cultural cache, its darkness and metaphorical darkness, its ‘absence of’, its ability to stand in for the whole as a hole – as in Malevich’s Black Square, viewed as the ultimate conclusion to a breaking down of visual codes that went from Cubism to Abstract Expressionism to primary-coloured grids and then the shape of a painting in pure black, framed by white and the white of a gallery – black is an intellectual colour but it is also, in every sense of the word, the most basic.
18. When black is not standard, the cover of a notebook, it is dramatic, the colour of wrongness, a reversal. As Anne Carson writes in “Totality: The Colour of Eclipse”: “The sun quits us, we are forsaken by light. Yet people who experience total eclipse are moved to such strong descriptions of its vacancy and void that this itself begins to take on colour. What after all is a colour? Something not no colour.”
19. Black is a mask for high-octane emotion. It is the veil worn over tears at a funeral, the ski hat worn by a thief, the top hat tipped by the master of ceremonies. Black is a turned-off screen, the end of a movie, a relief for eyes sensitive to light, a cool cover after hours of daytime strain.
20. It is the colour of vacancy and no vacancies, the expression of infinity and of nothingness. When speckled with white stars, or ribbed with the reddish caves of bodily interiors, or dappled with the blue reflection of the sky that can survive the pressures of watery depths, a black eld looks beyond our existence.
21. Style advice: imagine the staying power of black shoes and undergarments. Imagine blackness, true blackness, the expanse and depth of it, if you can, if it is possible, and layer it.
Sleeveless by Natasha Stagg is out now from Semiotext(e)/Native Agents.