More than just a color – exploring the intersection of fashion, culture, and humanities by tracing attraction of black in the tapestry of western fashion history
Fashion history black: The color black and its relationship with Western culture and fashion
Throughout the last few centuries of Western fashion history, the color black has been a chameleon and barometer, following and incarnating the coming of socioeconomic changes and technological innovations. In its relatively short history, this light-catching color went from being a marker of wealth to a culture and counter-culture icon to arguably the easiest color to wear for people all over the world.
From full suits to the ‘little black dress’, from work uniforms to mourning attire, black was and still is synonymous with several fashion items, but this famed versatility doesn’t stem from a lack of connotations. On the contrary, the color black is rich in meanings and associations amply recorded in the humanities, from authoritativeness and respectability to death and mystery, sensuality and sophistication. This color has an intricate relationship with our culture and is worth exploring, much like fashion.
A trip down the rabbit hole – the origins of the use of the color black in fashion
While reaching for black clothing might seem like a no-brainer for us, the color black has not been a feature of humanity’s wardrobes since the dawn of fashion history. This color has, popped up in Western fashion history in the thirteenth century.
At that time, though, access to clothing in the color of the night was far from democratic, as it was an apparatus of the fashion-conscious aristocracy and clergy people. In medieval art, upper-class people donned black clothing in the Limbourg brothers’ illuminated prayer book Les Très Riches Heures du duc de Berry crafted in the early 1410s. Later in that century, we can see black clothing in Bruges-based painter Jan van Eyck’s (1390-1441) famous oil on oak painting, the Arnolfini portrait (1434).
1440s fashion icon Duke Philip the Good of Burgundy (1396-1467) wore predominantly black clothing and has been portrayed clad in black in multiple works such as those by Roger van der Weyden (1399-1464) and his atelier. His son and daughter-in-law, Charles the Bold and (1433-1477) Isabelle De Bourbon (1434-1465), are also portrayed wearing black in several surviving portraits.
The aristocracy kept donning black clothing past the traditional end of the Middle Ages into the modern era, with black garments featured in the portraits of widely known historical figures and fashion icons. Among them, the Queen of England Anne Boleyn (c.1500-1536), François I of France (1494-1547), Holy Roman Emperor Charles V (1500-1558), Philip II of Spain (1527-1598), and Elizabeth I of England (1533-1603).
Fashion history – the color black as the apanage of the upper class
The fact that we see so much pictorial evidence of wealthy people wearing black garments is no coincidence. While being an art patron was a privilege of the most affluent, hence their prevalence in portraiture, in real life, we would have also been likely to see only well-off people donn black clothing.
Perhaps more than now, clothing was a class indicator in the Middle Ages and the Modern era for multiple reasons. In different forms and at various times across Europe, the so-called sumptuary laws regulated which fabrics, clothes, colors, patterns, and accessories people from certain social groups were allowed to wear, creating visual demarcation lines between the people of specific regions.
In addition to the law, the costs of clothing and its manufacturing also reinforced these divisions. In our era of fast fashion and delocalization, people tend to underplay the value and amount of the labor and resources behind our clothes. This reality was more apparent to people of the past who couldn’t shop off the rack.
Fabrics in rich and saturated hues like black had a more complex production process, which made them more expensive than the muted or undyed ones.
How the color black became a culture – twentieth century fashion through the humanities
In the world of womenswear, the meaning of black garments were the protagonists of some culture-defining fashion moments during the so-called ‘long 19th century’ (1789-1914).
At a time when womenswear, unlike menswear, was colorful lesbian fashion icon and diarist Anne Lister (1791-1840) wore black all the time, as she announced in her famous secret diary on the second of September 1817: «Went in black silk, the 1st time to an evening visit. I have entered upon my plan of always wearing black».
The dress worn by socialite Virginie Amélie Avegno Gautreau (1859 -1915) in her portrait by American artist (1856-1925) John Singer Sargent Portrait of Madame X (1884), which scandalized Parisian society was black. Black was also the early-twentieth-century sportswear-inspired ‘ ‘riding habits’’ and French designer Georges Doeuillet’s (1865-1934) famous beaded evening dress.
Our perception and the popularity of the color black in fashion underwent a clear shift after World War I. French designer Coco Chanel created her menswear-inspired ‘little black dress’ (LBD) in 1926, which was dubbed the ‘Ford of Fashion’ by Vogue U.S.
The color black had made its way into counterculture fashion
A few decades later, the 1961 American film Breakfast at Tiffany’s the much-sanitized adaptation of Truman Capote’s homonymous novella, cemented the LBD as a social institution, thanks to its famous opening featuring British actress Audrey Hepburn in a now iconic sheath black dress designed by Hubert de Givenchy.
Black was also the famous Christina Stambolian dress Diana Spencer, Princess of Wales, wore in 1994 at a dinner at the Serpentine Gallery in Kensington Gardens, which was soon dubbed and went down in fashion history as the ‘Revenge dress’.
In those same decades, the color black had made its way into counterculture fashion. With its place in subcultures like Goth and Punk, black was as popular in mainstream fashion as it was among those with underground sensibilities. An example of this duality are the now decade-defining punk-grunge-inspired black outfits worn by 90s fashion icon American actress Winona Ryder.
Why is humanity so obsessed with the color black?
While some more niche associations still persist, such as those to cities like New York and Berlin, during what we have lived through of the twenty-first century, black has arguably been the most ‘basic’ color of them all.
In the 1960s comedy sitcom The Addams Family, the titular family matriarch Morticia Addams gleefully declared her love for the color black with the famous line «Black is such a happy color», and though it is safe to say that most wouldn’t define it as such, it is the color countless people across the globe feel the most comfortable in.
Given its rich history and present value, it comes to wonder what the root of humanity’s long-standing love and fascination for this eclectic shade is.
An answer could come from the Ecological Valence Theory (EVT; Palmer & Schloss, 2010), according to which people’s aesthetic preferences for specific colors are strongly and positively correlated with their emotional responses to items they associate with those colors, while how colors aid in the achievement of particular symbolic or conceptual objectives may be another element influencing this on-going trend.
Meaning of black and collectivist culture
Yet with its ubiquity in humanity’s wardrobes, one can get the sense that rather than the historical association that the humanities have recorded, what draws us to the color black is a desire to conform, not to stick out or draw too much attention, while still abiding by the unspoken societal rule of certain degree of sartorial presentability. In a way, a black outfit matches the Swedish concept of Lagom, which can be roughly translated as ‘not too much, not too little’ or even ‘less is more’ and speaks of the cultural significance placed on consensus.
Though it is safe to rule out that the widespread presence of black clothing in people’s wardrobes all across the planet is an early sign of a global shift to a more collectivist culture, it could be a sign that, though we might not see it, from our disadvantaged position as our own contemporaries, our century might already, like the ones before, have some of its characterizing fashion elements. While that is for future historians to figure out, we can already see that now, as it was centuries ago, fashion is more than fabrics: it is a material incarnation of ever-changing cultures and the people who shape them.
Jan van Eyck
Jan van Eyck (before c. 1390 – 9 July 1441) was a painter active in Bruges. One of his most known paintings is the ‘Arnolfini Portrait’ (1434). He is considered one of the greatest Flemish artists.
