• by Barry Lank , November 3, 2008

Why is black always cool?

No matter what year it is, no matter what part of the country you live in, no matter what kind of people you hang around with, you'll always fit in wearing black. It's not just that black is classic - that it's the color of tuxedos, limousines, business suits, grand pianos and go-anywhere dresses. It's also the color of beatniks, biker gangs, punk rockers and Goths. It's the uniform of "The Man," and the T-shirt of the rebel. More paradoxically still, this has held true for several generations of rebellion.

"Where would we be without bands like Black Sabbath or Black Flag?" asks Gavin Baddeley, an ordained Reverend in the Church of Satan and the author of Goth Chic: A Connoisseur's Guide To Dark Culture. "No one garment unifies the diverse countercultures of the modern underground like the black leather jacket, the uniform for romantic delinquents worldwide."

So how can black be everything to everyone - especially while, technically, being nothing at all?

To begin with, black has a lot going for it purely from a practical standpoint, color expert Kate Smith points out. "You don't see dirt. It's very slimming, especially all-black. You can wear it with so much; you can easily accessorize. You can put different colors on with it. It's almost like you don't notice it," Smith says.

But there's a reason you don't notice it. As every junior-high student knows, black isn't a color so much as an absence of it. When you wear, say, black and yellow, you're basically just wearing yellow. (Also, you will look like a bee.)

Black is the color of not choosing a color.

"All colors have strong associative connections to them," says Leslie Harrington, executive director of the Color Association of the United States, which has been issuing color forecasts since 1915. "When you commit to a color, it's saying to people around you who you are," she says. "Black is the color of choice when you don't want people to know too much. It's like standing at the mike and not saying anything."

This could be why black is appropriate for the establishment as well as the counterculture. In both cases, it can act as a kind of armor. It doesn't necessarily express authority so much as it does mystery - the proper color of authority being dark blue, Harrington points out. Police officers out on the street wear blue. Secret Service agents skulking in the shadows wear black.

Or just think of the stereotypical New Yorker, walking around in black, giving nothing away through either clothing or attitude, keeping her private self private.

"But go into Victoria's Secret, and it's an explosion of color," Harrington says. "Someone is wearing all this lingerie. My theory is it's the people all in black. The lady in the black dress is wearing the red bustier."

On the rebel side, it doesn't necessarily express perversity as much as secrecy - or just a stimulating sense of the unknown.
"Terms like 'underground' and 'subculture' are suggestive of something sheltered from the sunlight," Baddeley says. "Black is the color of night, of danger, hence ultimately death - but also of mystery and promise."

Of course, black has also picked up certain cultural connotations over the years. In the past half-century, it has become associated with wealth, Harrington says, as in the American Express Black Card. The rich of earlier times often favored light colors, as if to prove how little they had to worry about getting dirty.

On the flip side, it's also the costume of villainy, which may be why some people in the counterculture embrace it: "Ultimately, not to celebrate cruelty and suffering, so much as to remind the world that conventional heroes are frequently far more reprehensible figures than the more complex figures they oppose," Baddeley says - for instance, Batman, the Dark Knight.

But enabling these connotations is this: Black is the only color that isn't a color. It's the fashion statement that refuses to speak. It's the cloak of invisibility. It is protection. No clothing is more mysterious than black - and mystery is always in fashion.
"Things are called 'the new black,'" Smith says. "But there's never a new black."