The Story of Black

by John Harvey

  91 Benito Mussolini speaking in Rome, c. 1932.

  92 Fred Astaire and Joan Leslie dancing in The Sky’s the Limit, 1943.

  This constancy is so unusual in the history of fashion that one asks, is the dinner jacket some sort of ultimate garment, with nowhere else to go? Certainly it demonstrates the finality of black, and insofar as it has sometimes been midnight blue, this has been because midnight blue gives a better black in electric light. Not that one should omit the importance for the dinner jacket of black’s opposite, white. For if black is one kind of ultimate colour, black-with-white looks to be, by this point in history, the ultimate colour contrast. Will games of chess or piano keys – or the pages in a book like this – ever leave black-and-white for red and green?

  The latter decades of the twentieth century – now into the twenty-first – have seen a return of black to menswear, alike in the leather jacket and in top-of-the-range designer suits. And still the dinner jacket is not dead. In the 1970s and ’80s it came to look like a classic book which few people read, and now again it is in demand. Men have long been drawn or driven into uniforms – as soldiers or servants, as senators or executives – and the dinner jacket perhaps is the ultimate uniform, shorn of all duty but impersonal smartness. Often it was the uniform of inherited money, but James Bond has helped to change that – somewhat. As the first black president of the United States, Barack Obama could be said to be historic change personified – though he also wears a tuxedo, and wears it well. But perhaps the classic icon still is Fred Astaire, near the mid-point of the tuxedo’s century. He danced in tails so the coat-tails flew, but he sometimes danced in tuxedos too (illus. 92). In his black-and-white outfit his movements are as clear as a matchstick man dancing, while his lithe swoops show there need be nothing stiff in the way tuxedos move.

  If, however, black has returned to menswear, one could not say now that the black style is led by men. On the contrary, men’s black seems simply the men’s department in a general movement of fashion which, if anything, is led by women’s styles. For it was to women’s clothes especially that the colour black moved when it took leave of men’s.

  IN THE PAST women had sometimes worn black for its smartness rather than from grief. There are those Roman statues where the limbs are of white marble and the swirling gown of black; we do not know whether black marble, here, signifies a gown which we would call black. And in the court of Burgundy in the fifteenth century, where black styles flourished, both old and young women sometimes wore luxurious black gowns when apparently not in mourning. The velvets have disappeared, but their pictures survive in Books of Hours and the leaves of triptyches. And when Rubens visited Italy in the early seventeenth century, he painted one of his hosts in a tall black hat (see illus. 33), and his host’s wife (Veronica Spinola Doria) in a tight-waisted jet-black velvet dress which fills a third of the picture space, setting off her bright, cold, young face.

  In the twentieth century, while black steadily withdrew in menswear, in women’s fashions it did not withdraw. Rather, black came to centre stage. In 1922 the fashion house Premet brought out, with success, ‘a plain, boyish-looking little slip of a frock, black satin with white collar and cuffs’; and in 1923 Madeleine Vionnet designed a sleeveless black dress with a black dragon outlined on it in red. Then in 1926 Coco Chanel designed a light black dress with long sleeves but a knee-length skirt, with no dragon and no white collar, though there was a small zigzag at the cuff (illus. 93). Even now its simplicity is striking, and its slender black arms have still an impact – for in exposing the calf but hiding the forearm Chanel vivaciously controverted the trend of two centuries. The design was publicized by a drawing in Vogue in October 1926, though how much the design was made up and worn is now hard to know. The photograph shown is not of the original, but of a reconstruction made in 1990, and so far I have found no photograph of the dress, or its wearers, from the 1920s. This is perhaps odd, since Vogue called it ‘the frock that all the world will wear’ and I have toyed with the thought that a fashion may have been launched by a Little Black Dress That Never Was. Vogue says, however, that it was ‘imported by Saks’, the Fifth Avenue store, so mostly likely it was made and traded, but caught on much more slowly than Vogue had predicted. Other Chanel outfits that are little and black survive from the 1920s, for instance in the collection of the Fashion Institute in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and other designers took up the style. Later, sleeve length varied or the sleeves disappeared, and the skirt extended or rose, but the concept of a dress that was jet-black, light and easy to move in became – though not immediately – the archetype of women’s fashion.3

  Most of the century’s leading designers, often known for their brilliance with colour, still gave pride of place to black. The black of Cristóbal Balenciaga ‘hits you like a blow’, Harper’s Bazaar put it in 1938, and Christian Dior said he could write a book about black. If the black style faltered it was quickly revived, by Yves St Laurent in the 1970s, by Vivienne Westwood in the 1980s – drawing now on the street black of punk. The style was fed also by the age-old tradition of Japanese black: Rei Kawakubo announced in 1983, ‘I work in three shades of black’, and Yohji Yamamoto noted at the launch of his evening line, ‘Noir’, that the ‘samurai spirit is black’. The stage was set for Gianni Versace to call his deep-rent safety-pin dress, worn by Elizabeth Hurley at the premiere of Four Weddings and a Funeral in 1994, ‘just a boring old punk classic’.4

  93 A photograph of a model wearing Coco Chanel’s ‘little black dress’, designed in 1926, 1990.

  Instantly dramatic, the black dress made its mark in the performing arts. Edith Piaf and Juliette Greco sang in black, and Martha Graham danced in a form-fitting black dress. The black dress co-starred in films: it was worn by Marlene Dietrich, with a mantle of spiky black feathers, in Shanghai Express (1932); by Rita Hayworth, with a leg-length slit to the skirt, in Gilda (1946); and by Ava Gardner, with one striking diagonal shoulder-strap, in The Killers (also 1946). Best-known now, perhaps, is Audrey Hepburn in the opening shots of Breakfast at Tiffany’s (1961), loitering by the jewellery shop windows in a high, long, slender, bare-armed dress designed by Hubert de Givenchy and worn with similarly slender, long black gloves. This is a highly elegant version of the ‘slim cool black dress’ which her character, Holly Golightly, had worn – with black sandals – in the original novella by Truman Capote. If black’s popularity dipped in the 1960s, with the fashion for whites and ‘neon brights’, still Twiggy showed Biba’s ‘deep black tragedy’ minidress, Jean Shrimpton wore black with a tall black hat and Diana Rigg in The Avengers sent bad men flying while wearing a black leather catsuit. And the geometric, black-and-white, Op art shift dress is iconic from that period, popularized by designers such as Mary Quant, John Bates and André Courrèges.

  Away from the catwalk, the screen and the microphone, black was worn to parties and in the street, when working at the till or when presenting to the boardroom. There was ultra-smart black, but also fun and casual black. Especially there was professional black, worn by women lawyers and women executives, and it is in the professional arenas that black has been smartly worn by women where in the past it was worn by men. In history black had often been the colour of insurgents, of groups making their way from a disadvantaged starting point. Black was worn so in the ‘dark ages’ by the Church, as its clerks moved into government; by merchants and by Jewish communities rising in the sixteenth century; by engineers and industrialists rising in the nineteenth century. And black, with its gravity, its discretion, its determination, has an advantage for a group that is quietly overhauling a profligate ruling elite. Both the conspicuous and the inconspicuous blacks that women have worn in the twentieth century are indices of independence, of importance, of emergence from the shadows cast by men.

  A key moment came in 1966, when Yves St Laurent launched Le Smoking, a tuxedo for women, of velvet or wool. There had been experiments in this direction in the early 1930s: in 1930 Marlene Dietrich
wore a top hat, tails and trousers in Joseph von Sternberg’s film Morocco, and in 1933 the New York firm Zuckerman and Kraus began to manufacture women’s tuxedos for eveningwear. Trousers were still a stride too far, however, and smart evening fashion reverted to the sheath dress, worn with a tailored jacket such as in designs by Elsa Schiaparelli of 1936. In August 1966, however, the world, the women’s movement and also men, were ready. At first with shocking impact but quickly with success and verve, Le Smoking arrived. It was worn with a white shirt with frills or simply with ruffled cuffs, and the cummerbund was optional. In September a lower-priced, younger version sold furiously, and in December the Washington Post announced in a headline: ‘Le Rage in Paris Is Le Smoking Jacket’. Other designers followed and in 1972 Chanel produced their own smoking, with a white organdy blouse and black sequined trousers.

  Le Smoking, and the accompanying daytime trousered fashions, were daring, empowering and glamorous together. In general, women’s black fashions have been more mobile than men’s and have moved easily between authority, responsibility and fun. Men’s biker jackets may have had their style, but there has been no male equivalent for the little black dress. And if women’s black fashions relate in part to empowerment, another aspect is the growing association, in Western culture especially, of the colour black with sex. For black clothing was not in the past identified greatly with sexual excitement. Pining lovers wore black in the late Middle Ages, but from grief, not desire. And when women posed as Venus in the sixteenth century, in paintings intended for the cabinets of gentlemen, their few brief garments or ‘zones’ were rose or white, not black. Pornographic copperplates of the eighteenth century show ingenious copulations in impatient half-undress, but their frisson derives from a birch brandished above bare buttocks, or from a papal crown worn while whoring, rather than from any play with black accessories. There are strong blacks in Japanese erotic prints of the same century, but their blacks – in hair, sash, a lacquered cabinet – reflect the smart blacks of Japanese culture, and are not in themselves erotic. It is true that during Carnival black was used ambiguously, and the seventeenth century had sexy black fur masks. Otherwise, to see the development of erotic black dress, one must wait for the black stockings, black corsets and black neckbands that were worn (not at the same time) by otherwise naked models in nineteenth-century erotic photographs.

  In discussing pornographic black I am moving to the blacks men place on women, as against the blacks women choose to wear. As to the nineteenth century, it is hardly surprising if pornographic black expanded in an age that became famous both for black goods and for repression. But while black was not uncommon in nineteenth-century erotica, one could not say it was common. It is in the twentieth century that black has become the erotic colour, extending beyond the use of mascara, together with black bras and panties, to arm-length gloves, thigh-length boots and high spike-heels – shading, by even gradations, towards the fetish extreme of whole-face hoods and whole-body straitjackets in glittering PVC.

  Erotic black relates to the danger-loving side of sexuality – perhaps ultimately to the dream, mixed in with a death wish, of a meltdown of being in the cauldron of coitus. And if men, especially, relish erotic black on women, this may relate to the inclination of men to demonize women, in a mix of fear and excited temptation. The femme fatale, even more than the prostitute, was shown wearing black in nineteenth-century paintings. There is an element of this dangerous black demonism in the black-clad, sexually attractive girl who seems oddly interested in antiquarian books on Aubrey Beardsley’s cover for The Yellow Book (see illus. 78).

  It may be that behind the demonic-sexy ‘femme fatale’ there lurks the older black form of demonized woman – the witch in black. But actually, though witches date back to the sixteenth century and earlier, their black outfit does not go back so far. To digress for a moment: the black cats of witches date back to the Middle Ages, and their steeple-crowned hats to the seventeenth century, when both men and women wore high black felt hats. But in pictures of witches from before the nineteenth century, only a minority wear pointed black hats, and extremely few a black gown; it is the devils with whom they carouse and mate who are black from head to foot. The witches themselves, though arriving on broomsticks, are often withered, naked hags. Nor would they have worn black, since that would make them widows, when witches were understood to be elderly ill-willed single women.5

  In the nineteenth century the black hat, but not the black gown, becomes the regular wear. In ‘The Witches’ Frolic’ in The Ingoldsby Legends of 1837 we are told of three witches,

  On each one’s head was a steeple-crown’d hat,

  On each one’s knee was a coal-black cat;

  Each had a kirtle of Lincoln green –

  It was, I trow, a fearsome scene.

  Even so, in an accompanying illustration by George Cruikshank, only some of the witches wear black, pointed hats, while the others wear some sort of cowl. Their dresses are made of old, patterned cloth.

  As with erotic black, one must wait until the twentieth century to meet, in full force, the all-black witch. She arrives with a clap of sound and smoke, in her trailing gown, played by Margaret Hamilton in the film version of The Wizard of Oz (1939, illus. 94). In the still shown here, she and her black shadow seem the equal of each other – our shadow being our doppelgänger, which in art and film is often black, for in imagination the shadow we cast is our dark side made visible. Both she and her shadow are, however, inventions of the film, for in the original story by L. Frank Baum (1900) she was scarcely described, except for having one all-powerful eye; and in the original illustrations by W. W. Denslow she wore a light-coloured hat, jacket and ruff over a black skirt covered with frogs and snakes. Since then a horde of pointed, black-clad witches have ranged through the realms of visual imagery – most charmingly in the illustrations to Jill Murphy’s Worst Witch books, of 1974 and after. If this digression on witches has seemed a detour, still it leads back to the twentieth century. The witch in black is our witch – a highly popular version of our knowledge that formidable women may dress in black.

  Witches may also be glamorous in black. In the Reverend Barham’s Ingoldsby Legends, just quoted, two witches were hags, but the third ‘was young, and passing fair, With laughing eyes and with coal-black hair’. In film and television series, witches may be hideous or they may be sexily attractive. Demonized stereotypes are hardly stable. Nor should one forget the ancient association of black with fear of the feminine. The Furies of the ancient Greeks wore black. Both the classical and the Nordic worlds had black goddesses of night, and Hel, the Nordic goddess of the dead, was half white as a corpse and half black as the decomposition in death.

  94 Margaret Hamilton as the Wicked Witch of the West in The Wizard of Oz (1939).

  I have travelled far from the little black dress. But the black dress too was aware of the dark side. Chanel’s rival, Elsa Schiaparelli, commended her clients for their taste in ‘severe suits’. The black of Balenciaga was ‘a night without stars’. Yohji Yamamoto said of his blacks and his almost-black indigoes that ‘the samurai must be able to throw his body into nothingness, the colour and image of which is black.’ Rolf Snoeren of the Dutch design firm Viktor & Rolf said, at the launch of their ‘Black Hole’ ready-to-wear collection in 2001: ‘We were inspired by black holes, which absorb all light and energy.’6

  The dark vibration is not, however, the main point of long or little black dresses. Their black has a particular visual value, because black is the colour which accentuates shape. A black dress is an eye-dress. The texture of the wool crêpe or silk-jersey knitwear, or the detail of laser-cut, fine black leather, may be hard to make out, but a black dress often will happily accentuate the mobile body and limbs of the wearer. Much as they are mocked, modern catwalk creations can be halfway to abstract art, while being at the same time both theatre and dance, with a value as a kind of visual poetry to which their dark side values are secondary.

 
More quietly, there are the famous photos by Bert Stern of Marilyn Monroe, in black, pensive and clasping herself for support. Their soft black brings out an insecurity, screen goddess though she also was.

  IN THE SECOND half of the twentieth century the black dress led, but has not been alone in, the slow return to black of both men and women, not only in haute couture but also in the street. Rockers in the 1960s wore studded black leather, Mods neat black suits. In the following decades punks had gelled crests which often were jet-black; Goths favoured the vampire look, with dead-white faces and all else black. Some of these styles might recall the cult of the masquerade in the eighteenth century, with its passion for disguises that played with fear. One could say the demon and corpse style then, and the vampire, zombie and fetish styles now, are Gothic-lite and superficial. Or one could say they escape the social straitjacket, and enhance sex appeal with daring games. Heroin chic again was white and black. Apart from such eye-catching, ominous styles, one may count today, on any Western city street, the variety of black tops, black trousers, black snoods, that give style to young and old in the twenty-first century. My granddaughter, aged ten, wears emo black. More worryingly, far-right and fascist black has begun again to flaunt itself, in the black banners and outfits, and swastika and Iron Cross designs of neo-Nazism, and also in the streamlined, swastika-like logo and black t-shirts, leathers and suits of the Golden Dawn party in Greece.