Mr. Pink:
"Why can't we pick out our own color?"

Joe:
"I tried that once, it don't work. You get four guys fighting over who's gonna be Mr. Black."

—Quentin Tarantino, Reservoir Dogs

Men's clothes went black in the nineteenth century. Dickens, Ruskin and Baudelaire all asked why it was, in an age of supreme wealth and power, that men wanted to dress as if going to a funeral. The answer is in this history of the color black. Over the last 1000 years there have been successive expansions in the wearing of black—from the Church to the Court, from the Court to the merchant class. Though black as fashion was often smart and elegant, its growth as a cultural marker was fed by several currents in Europe's history—in politics, asceticism, religious warfare. Only in the nineteenth century, however, did black fully come into its own as fashion, the most telling witnesses constantly saw connections between the taste for black and the forms of constraint with which European society regimented itself.

Concentrating on the general shift away from color that began around 1800, Harvey traces the transition to black from the court of Burgundy in the 15th century, through 16th-century Venice, 17th-century Spain and the Netherlands. He uses paintings from Van Eyck and Degas to Francis Bacon, religious art, period lithographs, wood engravings, costume books, newsphotos, movie stills and related sources in his compelling study of the meaning of color and clothes.

Although in the twentieth century tastes have moved toward new colors, black has retained its authority as well as its associations with strength and cruelty. At the same time black is still smart, and fashion keeps returning to black. It is, perhaps, the color that has come to acquire the greatest, most significant range of meaning in history.

Mr. Pink:
"Why can't we pick out our own color?"

Joe:
"I tried that once, it don't work. You get four guys fighting over who's gonna be Mr. Black."

—Quentin Tarantino, Reservoir Dogs

Men's clothes went black in the nineteenth century. Dickens, Ruskin and Baudelaire all asked why it was, in an age of supreme wealth and power, that men wanted to dress as if going to a funeral. The answer is in this history of the color black. Over the last 1000 years there have been successive expansions in the wearing of black—from the Church to the Court, from the Court to the merchant class. Though black as fashion was often smart and elegant, its growth as a cultural marker was fed by several currents in Europe's history—in politics, asceticism, religious warfare. Only in the nineteenth century, however, did black fully come into its own as fashion, the most telling witnesses constantly saw connections between the taste for black and the forms of constraint with which European society regimented itself.

Concentrating on the general shift away from color that began around 1800, Harvey traces the transition to black from the court of Burgundy in the 15th century, through 16th-century Venice, 17th-century Spain and the Netherlands. He uses paintings from Van Eyck and Degas to Francis Bacon, religious art, period lithographs, wood engravings, costume books, newsphotos, movie stills and related sources in his compelling study of the meaning of color and clothes.

Although in the twentieth century tastes have moved toward new colors, black has retained its authority as well as its associations with strength and cruelty. At the same time black is still smart, and fashion keeps returning to black. It is, perhaps, the color that has come to acquire the greatest, most significant range of meaning in history.

As a color, black comes in no other shades: it is a single hue with no variation, one half of a dichotomy. But what it symbolizes envelops the entire spectrum of meaning—good and bad. The Story of Black travels back to the biblical and classical eras to explore the ambiguous relationship the world’s cultures have had with this sometimes accursed color, examining how black has been used as a tool and a metaphor in a plethora of startling ways.

 

John Harvey delves into the color’s problematic association with race, observing how white Europeans exploited the negative associations people had with the color to enslave millions of black Africans. He then looks at the many figurative meanings of black—for instance, the Greek word melancholia, or black bile, which defines our dark moods, and the ancient Egyptians’ use of black as the color of death, which led to it becoming the standard hue for funereal garb and the clothing of priests, churches, and cults. Considering the innate austerity and gravity of black, Harvey reveals how it also became the color of choice for the robes of merchants, lawyers, and monarchs before gaining popularity with eighteenth- and nineteenth-century dandies and with Goths and other subcultures today. Finally, he looks at how artists and designers have applied the color to their work, from the earliest cave paintings to Caravaggio, Rembrandt, and Rothko.