Temporary Fashion Museum
Dressing in Black
Dressed in a fluid black skirt and a sweater adorned with silk ribbons, and clad in pearls and heavy bracelets, Gabrielle Chanel poses for Man Ray in 1935. The image is carefully produced: it presents a profile view that Chanel - then in her 50s - favours, along with some recognisable attributes of the modern independent woman: the masculine hat and a cigarette, along with the accessories that identify the Chanel look: a black outfit cut in soft fabrics, and costume jewellery. Chanel is credited for turning black into an essential colour for the modern, active woman's wardrobe in the mid 1920s. Looking at this picture today, however, other aspects of what makes black clothing so distinctive come to the fore. Here, as we see, black reduces the body to a silhouette, it is casual and smart and it lets the face speak. Above all it its impossible to place socially: is this daywear or evening wear, and is this the image of a realist singer, a Hollywood star, a grande bourgeoise, or an artist?
Fragments of a History
In his history of the colour black, Michel Pastoureau explores the shifting symbolism of a colour produced and used since ancient Egypt. Over time, black has been in turn identified as the colour of the devil and that of the penitent, the colour of death and of life after death. In the late Middle Ages, black denotes humbleness and is adopted by the Benedictines; it also becomes the colour of choice for the civil servant whose function was to serve the prince. After 1300, when a growing system of colour prescription is adopted across Europe, black is the colour of choice for merchants, who are forbidded to wear other colours, according to a rigid, but changing set of laws and decrees. And as the more successful merchants come to use the rarest and most precious materials for their outfits, they endow black with an elegance that princes themselves aspire to make their own, especially as black could also be used in the most visible way to affirm modesty, probity, devotion to God and to one's kingdom.
Moreover, Pastoureau points out, one cannot underestimate, as early as the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, the power of fashion, that makes princes from all of Europe adopt what they have seen in the then most sophisticated courts and societies of Northern Italy. In a brilliant passage Pastoureau proposes that the invention of the printing press by Gutenberg around 1450 introduced a new black: the thick, greasy ink used for printing on white paper. According to him, this black is responsible for a new set of values attributed to the colour: replacing polychrome medieval manuscripts, knowledge circulates throughout Europe in black and white and these two terms are set apart, defined as non-colours. To push this idea further, it is possible to imagine that the printed page, turning ideas and images into texts, just like engraved images transcribe colour paintings into black and white images, (as in 19th-century photography and later film) require imagination on the part of the reader and viewer. This imagination, this process of translating black signs back into the real world of things introduces the fundamental quality of black as abstraction. And abstraction is one of the key ideas associated with black in modern clothing.
The diffusion of Protestantism in the sixteenth century plays an important role in the spread of black clothing: again, probity, modesty and honesty are the values it conveys. The use of black as the colour of mourning is generalised throughout Europe in the seventeenth century and is the subject of specific codes. The century that follows is usually thought of as an epoch in which colour returns: the discovery of the colour prism identified by Isaac Newton kicks off an enthusiasm for light, bright and subtle colours that eighteenth-century painting, from rococo to neo-classicism luminously transcribes, while black returns, this time in the literary imagination, in early nineteenth-century romanticism.
Victoria and Charles
While traditional histories of costume recall that Queen Victoria's choice to wear mourning black for the forty years following the death of Prince Albert plays a significant role in popularising this colour in parts of Europe, in Paris, the remarks of the poet and critic Charles Baudelaire offer more fruitful elements to conceptualise the idea of dressing in black. Reviewing the Salon of 1846, Baudelaire deplores that not enough painters take the here and now as their subject matter. He then proceeds to evoke the beauty of the ubiquitous black suit:
"&has not this much-abused garb its own beauty and its native charm? Is it not the necessary garb of our suffering age, which bears the symbol of a perpetual mourning even upon its thin black shoulders?...the dress-coat and the frock-coat not only possess their political beauty, which is an expression of universal equality, but also their poetic beauty, which is an expression of the public soul - an immense cortege of undertaker's mutes (mutes in love, political mutes, bourgeois mutes). We are each of us celebrating some funeral."
Baudelaire describes a trend that can be observed in men's clothing from the 1830s on: the progressive disappearance of colour. The mourning Baudelaire evokes here and elsewhere in his poetry and criticism can be read as nostalgia for Romanticism and the idea that the contemporary epoch does little more than carry on its shoulders the weight of a glorious or epic past (the Napoleonic Empire and before that the French Revolution). Yet at the same time, it is precisely this pining that fuels what will become the most powerful description of modernity that Baudelaire formulates in his 1863 essay "The Painter of Modern Life" (Le Peintre de la vie moderne) as 'the transient, the fleeting, the contingent; it is one half of art, the other being the eternal and the immutable.' While those lines are dedicated to explaining the work of the artist Constantin Guys, they are often, with reason, used in order to read the work of another of his painter friends, Edouard Manet.
Manet's 1872 portrait of Berthe Morisot captures a modern idea of beauty in black, as does his large painting of Parisian society La Musique au Tuileries (1862) in which he has represented himself alongside poets and artists all attired in black and scattered throughout the crowd. Amidst these, just above the woman facing us with her blue bonnet, the profile of Baudelaire can just about be identified, in motion in the crowd like the flâneur that Walter Benjamin, inspired by the writings of Baudelaire, will describe several decades later.
There is a literary imagination to the colour black: It could be summarised as mourning the epic times of the past in a present time, the beauty of which requires to be constructed in a new, contemporary fashion.
The Modernity of Black
Damia (Louise-Marie Damien, 1889 - 1978) was the first singer of the realist tradition in France to adopt black clothing for the stage, in around 1920 in the form of a simple, black, sleeveless shift dress. She paved the way for Edith Piaf, Juliette Greco, Yves Montand, Barbara and many others who, following her example, would perform dressed entirely in black, alone on a darkened stage lit only by a spotlight directed towards their face. The abstracting quality of black is what prevails here, enabling the body to disappear, while the expressive face carries alone the interpretation of the song. Steichen's portraits of Greta Garbo (1928) similarly evoke theatre lighting in which the face, as Roland Barthes described it in Mythologies, becomes a mask. Striking pictures of Damia in her stage dress convey well the abstracting quality of black along with its poetic value and the modernity that Baudelaire pointed out.
Chanel adds something to these qualities when a design for a simple black dress is released in October 1926, in the United States, in Vogue. The article likens the dress to a car, calling it "Chanel's Ford". It is black, like all the cars designed and produced by Henry Ford, who refused to make cars in any other colours, following in this a tradition of modern industrial objects (like the telephone and the photo camera) which Pastoureau argues, following Max Weber, reflect the protestant ethic of capitalism. Chanel's black dress, made of jersey (a fabric not used until then for the woman's wardrobe) conveys an idea of industrial beauty, efficiency, modernity and a certain idea of egalitarianism. To the classlessness of the black dress Yves Saint Laurent adds, in 1966, the unisex quality of the tuxedo, photographed in 1975 by Helmut Newton.
Yamamoto, Kawakubo: a 1980s Watershed
Perhaps the most important precedent for the infiltration of black as the favourite colour for men and women in cultural circles today is the work of Japanese designers Rei Kawakubo and Yohji Yamamoto. After establishing their maisons, respectively in 1976 and 1972 in Japan, they each presented their collections in Paris for the first time in April 1981. Black dominated their work from the beginning, creating new silhouettes in which some of the major characteristics of black: unisex, classless, poetic and literary are undeniably present. Alongside these characteristics, their work incorporates 1970s street fashions and subcultures such as punk, Goth and new age. Yamamoto's influence on the cultural sphere is far-reaching: Wim Wenders evokes it in his film on Yamamoto, _Notebooks on Cities and Clothes _(1996). Yamamoto creates the new wardrobe for the professional man, a wardrobe in which the black shirt worn with no tie and a flowing, soft black suit establishes itself as the replacement of the traditional suit and tie. If Kawakubo's Comme des Garcons and Yamamoto can be credited with a key role in establishing black as the colour of choice in cultural circles it is largely because their use of black recapitulates a history of the colour that foregrounds its poetic and literary value: by isolating and inviting a focus on the face and its expressions, black abstracts the body and lets the mind become visually prevalent. It evokes literary associations that go back to Baudelaire and his idea of modernity (hence the recurrence in their collections of frock coats and long full skirts that evoke the 19th century). Black is the colour of the intellectual; it is a cerebral colour, the colour of ideas.
That is of course, not to say that everyone wearing black is an intellectual. Yet the black of Yamamoto and of Comme des Garçons carries forth these values, it has a modesty that signals something like: my thoughts and ideas are more important than my appearance. This what Yamamoto suggests in an often quoted but rarely dissected sentence: "Black is modest and arrogant at the same time. Black is lazy and easy - but mysterious. But above all black says this: I don't bother you - don't bother me."
Conclusion: Doubts and Certainties
In 2011, journalist Rebecca Wills wrote:** **
"Black has become a distinctly urban uniform. It speaks of the city and the dirt and darkness of the industrial age--oil, smoke, tar. It has become, depending on your tribe, a signal that says slick, streetwise, businesslike, official."
Aside from its clear echoes of Baudelaire and nineteenth-century industrial revolution, her reference to tribes raises the question of the challenges to black today. Indeed, in a populist and conservative mainstream culture, such tribe-like quality cannot not go unchallenged. The strangely titled 2008 book _Why do Architects Wear Black?_ testifies to this climate of contestation. The book invited architects to write down in a few words how they interpret the unofficial all-black by dress code of their profession. Such a request of justification signals a change in the perception of dressing in black, that fashion and lifestyle blogs seem to confirm: Today, wearing black is no longer unquestionable, and requires some explanation. While for those who were around in the 1980s, it lives on without hesitation; younger generations need to defend the all-black look.
Although this might be because of its1980s associations with the cerebral and the poetic, I would like to propose another possible explanation for this distrust of black, that takes into consideration the massive diffusion of black in the twentieth century, the century of social mobility in Europe. Like Gabrielle Chanel traversing all social groups and classes throughout her career, like the mask of Garbo and the frock coat of the Baudelarian flâneur, black carries, more strongly than anything else, the possibility of becoming an other. Yamamoto's quip says it all: I don't bother you - don't bother me". The story of black shows us that it is at once a stable reference and a shifting signifier. More than that of the poet, is it not, ultimately then, the colour of the interloper?
Sources and Further Reading
Rau, Cordula, Why do architects wear black?. Ambra Verlag, 2008.
Willis, Rebecca, "Why Black is Addictive", INTELLIGENT LIFE magazine, November/December 2011.
Picardie, Justine. Coco Chanel: The Legend and the Life. It Books, 2010.
Pastoureau, Michel_. _Black: The History of a Color. Princeton, Princeton University Press, 2008.
Baudelaire, Charles. Art in Paris, 1845-1862: Salons and Other Exhibitions, Cornell University Press, 1981.
Menkes, Suzy, Fashion's Poet of Black : Yamamoto, The New York Times, 5 September 2000.
Rapazzini, Francesco. Damia : Une diva française, Librairie Académique Perrin, 2010.
Barthes, Roland. Mythologies. Seuil, 1970.
Marra-Alvarez, Melissa. "When the West Wore East: Rei Kawakubo, Yohji Yamamoto and The Rise of the Japanese Avant-Garde in Fashion" DRESSTUDY VOL.57 2010 SPRING.
Kondo, Dorinne, "Through Western Eyes: Japanese Fashion in the 1980s". DRESSTUDY VOL.57 2010 SPRING.