Fragments from a Dark History of Black Fashion (I-IV)

Portrait of a Lady in Black (c.1580)

I.

In much the same way that black absorbs all forms of visible light, thereby collapsing any distinctions of colour, so too does it seem to enchant all sorts of people and wrap them equally in its dark splendour. Paradoxically sexy and subversive at the same time as it is austere and authoritarian, black appeals to priests, puritans and policemen, as well as poets, punks and perverts; aristocrats and anarchists; fascists and fashionistas ...     


II.

By the Christian Middle Ages, black was commonly associated with the three great D-words: death, darkness and the devil. It's a little odd, therefore, that members of the clergy then as now had such a penchant for wearing black. Some argued that it was a sign of humility. But other priests knew that black robes and gowns symbolised their authority, as it did that of magistrates, government officials, and wealthy bankers and merchants. It's almost as if the Church secretly wished to acknowledge that their power too was rooted in the world, in fashion and in evil. 

III.

Eventually, members of the European nobility - such as the stylish Duke of Milan - also began to be seduced by the simple (yet sophisicated) elegance of black. From Italy, the look spread to France, then England, followed by Spain. By the end of the 16th century, black was worn in all the courts of Europe, whatever their religious persuasion. Indeed, even the best-dressed Puritans, for whom dress codes were very important, had a thing for black. It was red - as worn by the Pope and the Whore of Babylon - that they regarded with horror, even though, as a matter of fact, black clothing was very expensive due to the dyes used and a sign not of sober moderation, but privilege and status. For ordinary folk, it would have been socially unacceptable to be seen wearing the latest black fashions, even if they were able to afford them. They were thus obliged to stick with their workaday blues and browns, etc.   

IV.

For a while, during the 18th century, black lost some of its lustre as the fashion colour of choice, as members of the French nobility rediscovered their gaiety. However, 1789 soon put an end to that. As the Jacobins asserted their power, black again became the dominant colour and there was a moral revolt not only against the aristocracy, but against the extravagance of haute couture. Further, with the invention of new, inexpensive dyes and the industrialization of the textile industry, good quality black clothing became widely available for the first time. By the end of the Victorian era, it was the accepted colour of business dress, evening wear, and mourning in Britain, Europe and the United States - as well, ironically, the colour of choice for Romantic poets and anarchists alike.

Note: those interested in reading fragments V-VII of this dark history of black fashion should click here.  

Bad Romance

The Fall of the House of Usher, by Kristyla at deviantart.com

What was it about incest that so obsessively fascinated the Romantics? 

Although only Byron had experience of it as a practice, the theme was imaginatively explored by many other poets, including Wordsworth and Shelley, for whom it seemed to function as a spiritual principle of absolute identification of the self with the non-self or other. 

The tragic psychodrama of Wuthering Heights, is founded upon an incestuous bond formed between Catherine and Heathcliff. For whilst they are not blood-siblings, they are nevertheless brought up as brother and sister within the Earnshaw family home. Thus their mad striving for an impossible union is somehow shocking and toxic; giving off a kind of 'chthonian miasma', as Camille Paglia writes, which infects and corrupts the social world.        

Like Emily Bronte, Edgar Allan Poe is also concerned with love, the limitations of love, and the fatal transgression of those limits. For whilst we might live by love, we die or cause death if we take love too far; be it in either a spiritual or a carnal direction. Thus, whilst it's perfectly legitimate to be interested in the object of one's affection and quite natural to want to know a good deal about the person one is perhaps planning to marry, it's profoundly mistaken to totally identify with another and attempt to suck the life out of that being. Each of us kills the thing we love most when we love with the terrible intimacy of the vampire.

In his brilliant reading of Poe, Lawrence writes:

"When the self is broken, and the mystery of the recognition of otherness fails, then the longing for identification with the beloved becomes a lust. And it is this longing for identification, utter merging, which is at the base of the incest problem."

                                                

- D. H. Lawrence, 'Edgar Allan Poe' (Final Version 1923), Studies in Classic American Literature, (CUP, 2003), p. 75.

Via incest, lovers can achieve sensational gratification with the minimum of resistance. But it gradually leads to madness, breakdown and death - as we see with Heathcliff and Catherine, or Roderick and Madeline in Poe's classic tale, The Fall of the House of Usher. Both Catherine and Madeline die having had the life and the love sucked out of them, whilst still unappeased. And so both return from the dead in order to drag their lovers with them into the grave:

"It is lurid and melodramatic, but it really is a symbolic truth of what happens in the last stages of inordinate love, which can recognise none of the sacred mystery of otherness, but must unite into unspeakable identification ... Brother and sister go down together, made one in the unspeakable mystery of death."

- D. H. Lawrence, 'Edgar Allan Poe' (First Version 1918-19), Studies in Classic American Literature, (CUP, 2003), p. 238. 

Both Poe and Emily Bronte were great writers, doomed to die young. Was it, one might ask, the same thing which ultimately killed them? For both experienced the same heightened consciousness of desire taken to its furthest extreme as they entered what Lawrence describes as the 'horrible underground passages of the human soul', grimly determined as they were to discover all that there is to know about the obscene disease that ruins so many idealists: Love.