So over the rainbow: why I’m wearing black

The picture is full-spectrum colour: 10-year-old Josh in the boys’ department at C&A, camper than is wise, lighting on a furry, rainbow-striped sweater. It looks like someone has trapped and skinned the Muppets, but I have to have it.

For the best part of the next 20 years, my wardrobe will be full of colour: hot-pink slacks and blue-check jackets and even, for a grim while, matching purple shirt and tie.

Today, aged 37, not so much. Black is sovereign: jeans and sweatshirts, coats and T-shirts, Doc Martens and Nike runarounds. (Shirts, though, are white, the only acceptable colour.) The prize in my wardrobe at the moment is a vast, baggy yet structured quilted coat from Simple Black, which has the sheen of a bomber jacket and the warmth of a fireside. It will see me through winter, a gleaming black cloud stalking the streets of London.

This turn to black means something, I’m certain. Only I’m not so certain quite what. It’s a 180 on earlier me and has the feel of a philosophy, or at least a mood. It’s not a mournful statement — east London’s Queen Victoria without her Prince Albert — and it’s nothing gothic, vampirical or witchy. I wanted to find out, then, about black’s rainbow of meanings.

Before the 14th century, “black clothing was made using vegetable dyes, which faded quickly to a grey or brown”, says Caroline Stevenson, head of cultural and historical studies at London College of Fashion. But then expensive new techniques — dipping silk or wool into indigo baths, followed by red dye — arose, and later the use of the logwood tree, which the Spanish exploited from their imperial possessions in central America, giving new depth to the colour.

The aptly named Cally Blackman, senior lecturer in fashion history at Central Saint Martins, takes me to the Burgundian court of the 15th century, the age of chivalry, when “black became symbolic of dignity, of piety” (my most renowned virtues). Philip the Good, Duke of Burgundy, set the tone and his descendants Charles I, Philip II and Philip IV followed in solemnity and in fashion as kings of Spain. “It’s the colour that is safe,” says Blackman, “because it’s in the middle, it’s never seemly to be flashy in your dress . . . which travels through to today.”

At the jollier courts of Europe, however, colour dominated until rationalists and republicans gained in confidence in the late 18th century and royals started losing their heads.

“Previously, upper-class men wore colourful clothes, wigs and make-up,” says Andrew Groves, professor of fashion design at the University of Westminster in London. “But a new rational approach to dressing emerged that rejected the royal-court approach to menswear.” Utility and functionality, he says, became more important than flash and flair, appealing to the new business class of the industrial revolution. This shift is known — like the recent story of my dating life — as the Great Male Renunciation.

Dignity, rationality, membership of a chic subculture: none of these strikes a chord with why I’ve taken to black

Since the second world war, black has found itself taken up as a uniform by all sorts of subcultures, says Groves: “the studied and self-referential cool of the beatniks in black berets”, the “crimped hair and layered black outfits” of yearning 1980s goths, Tom of Finland’s “ritualised and regulated approach to power dressing”. It’s the colour of masculinity in crisis too, he says, whether the violence of Patrick Bateman in American Psycho or Reservoir Dogs’ killers, disappearing in their black suits.

Dignity, rationality, membership of a chic subculture: none of these strikes a chord with why I’ve taken to black. There is an aesthetic appeal, of course, as Jonny Downes, co-founder of Mainly Black on Upper Street in Islington (where I bought my Simple Black coat), outlines: “If we concentrate on one colour, then it’s all about the cut, the fabric, the way it hangs, the detail that doesn’t make it look high-street.” By removing distractions, you’re forced to make a finer, more distinctive garment.

I can follow a thread back to Japan, where I lived from 2019 to 2020. Since the early 1980s, designers Yohji Yamamoto and Comme des Garçons’ Rei Kawakubo have made black central to their style, and their influence is still felt on the streets of Tokyo, where I accumulated clothes (of many hues). In a 2000 interview with the New York Times, Yamamoto offered his thoughts: “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!”’

This feels right — my choice is more about renunciation and absence. Even before I left for Tokyo, I did not feel at home in London, ill at ease with its changes and concerns, and returning with expanded horizons in the middle of a pandemic did not alter that. The sense of belonging I had when I grew up here has faded. Black, it seems to me, is a way of expressing that disassociation, of opting out. It’s nothing miserable, though, quite the opposite: it’s a bracing freedom to realise that your future lies open, untied to your past. Black is what’s now, new, next.

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