How did my closet become a black hole? When did I decide to follow the path of Johnny Cash and Morticia of the Addams family? Why am I magnetically drawn to the black one. whatever it is, when shopping? What does this mean? Rebecca O’Dell, design editor of Texas Homes and a fellow member of the black pack, has a theory: “All-black is the clothing equivalent of agoraphobia. It’s safe, it always works, and you get to the point that you have a panic attack if you wear anything else. The last time I wore colors I felt like a clown.”
Rebecca and I aren’t alone in our monochromic mania. The lighthearted Dallas designer David Feld says, “I wear black because it reflects my mood.” Ken Knight, president of Ar-resta Inc., says, “Wearing black is like sartorial shorthand. It says you’re a serious person.” Anne McCready, Dallas bureau chief of W and Women’s Wear Daily, is another fan of fashion noir. “About five years ago I started buying black stuff all the time,” she says. “This was when I lived in New York, where there are lots of men and women who wear black all the time-I think it goes back to the Fifties, when the beatniks wore black. It’s an easy color to look sophisticated in. It’s hard to look it in pink.”
Sophia Dembling, a Dallas-based writer, has kicked the black habit. She remembers: “I went through my all-black phase. It’s really easy, it’s really dramatic, and it’s an instant image. But I got tired of people making ’where’s-the-funeral?’
cracks about it all the time.”
Jeff Weinstein, senior editor of the Village Voice, is a longtime believer in the power of black. He says, “Black is always in fashion. It’s immensely flattering. The only problem is that when you find a whole city with the younger people wearing black all the time, it gets a little depressing, as if the whole world is a funeral. Still, people are so hooked on color- and frequently it’s bad color-in this country that a little black is a comfort to the eye and allows you to see the body.”
Amy Cunningham, a Washington. D.C.-based writer, has a pragmatic reason for wearing black: “I keep thinking 1 should lighten up, so I vow, no more black, but I just find myself drawn to it. To me, it all comes down to the department store test: get two pairs of pants in the same style, one black and one in a color. Try on the black pair and notice how slim you look. Try on the other pair and you look like you’ve gained fifteen pounds. It’s miraculous.”
There’s nothing pragmatic about fashion historian Anne Hollander’s philosophical explanation of the allure of black: “Black is everything and nothing. . . .Elegant black can suddenly make color look foolish. . . . In a frivolous and colorful world, black is serious. Indeed, in certain perverse, extreme circumstances, it is far more than that-it is sinister.”
And that, I suppose, is why black holds such appeal for me. It is a paradox: safe and dangerous at the same time. It is correct for all occasions-work, little or big evenings out. funerals, wild-ness of all kinds. Having made the decision to wear black, you are free to concentrate on the line and texture in clothing.
Local members of the black pack favor a wide range of stores for their purchases. Saodade is filled with wondrous inky things, including the work of Todd Oldham, Dallas’s past master of black. The merchandise at Arresta, Avant, Cavaletto, Emeralds to Coconuts, and Sandra Garratt Design also exhibits a strong philosophical commitment to black as a way of life.
Whatever the source of a black wardrobe, it allows focus not so much on any particular ensemble as on the face and body. In that respect, black is boldly self-centered. It says, look at me, not the colors I have on. This is what Tolstoy was getting at in his description of the black dress Anna Karenina is wearing at the ball where Vron-sky falls in love with her: “The black velvet served only as a frame. . . .It was Anna alone, simple, natural, elegant. . .
whom one saw.”
