Who's The Boss? Who Has More Power? Ofcourse, The Woman Dressed in Black
My recent
visit to a gala fashion event left me puzzled to see a sea of people dressed
head to toe in black. I paused for a while and asked myself: “what is
this..some social cult or something?”
During
the event my thoughts raced towards fashionistas devotion to the colour black.
It was almost equivalent to the sea of orange coloured robes I saw people
wearing at OSHO’s International Meditation Resort in Pune or White robes
adorned by the nuns of my Lucknow School. Though in the following years wardrobes of the stylits have brightened up a
bit, but although trends such as colour blocking or floral prints may float by
on the surface wave, underneath there is a deeper, darker tide that pulls us
back towards black. Repeated try by the fashion industry on colour codes now
and then may highlight that red or pink or blue is the new black, the old black
is still very much with us.
Well
known online fashion Stores confirm that “black”
items sales are twice as many as “blue”, and five or six times as many as
“brown” or “grey”. This ratio remains more or less the same in winter and
summer. Any online upmarket fashion retailer will vouch that they have more
blacks in their wares than any other colour at any time of the year.
I have often asked this question to myself that what is in black
which has a high infatuation value than any of the more dreamy colours our
world is made up of. As a black admirer myself, I wear colours sometimes,
particularly in summer, but black is what I feel most comfortable in. Even
while on a shopping spree I might try to lure myself in buying more colourful
and floral outfits but the fact remains that black naturally attracts me like a
moth to fire.
So for all those others who are asked why they wear so much black,
here I am trying to answer that question.
The
Psychology of Black
The
colour Black sure has some history to it.
Black is
a distinctive feature of religious garments (nuns, priests, Hassidic Jews). It
remained a part of army uniform of many old civilizations and also various
cults and societies.
In the
modern day world it can be clearly seen as a part of distinguished uniform in
the hotel industry, in corporate who are fietishly attracted to it and and many
other business who have made black as their official colour. Black finds itself
as uniquely versatile and flexible in the arena of clothing be them smart,
casual, uniform, anit-uniform et el.
Black is defined as the
very darkest colour. Scientifically black absorbs all the visible frequencies
of light, just as white reflects them all. Adding black to a colour changes its
tone, not its hue. You will not find black in a painter’s pallete , water colourists
opine that black is cheating and that it gives an impressions of all colours
which we want to perceive. Black is an absence, not a presence. That what I
think has made black so versatile and this colour can have so many wildly
different meanings projected on to it.
This absence-not-presence is surely why black is universally
believed to be flattering, and why anyone who has ever fretted about their
figure regards black as a true friend. Architects while defining spaces with
colours say that if you paint a very small room black it can seem bigger.
In the words of late Liz Tilberis, ex-editor of British Vogue, “Black
gives you an outline, a silhouette”. Colour and pattern, on the other hand,
give you a surface-broken up, textured, contoured, that runs around the body
and creates a visual sense of dimension. Black doesn’t actually have magical
powers, though—if the outline is bulgy, in theory black will emphasise that,
whereas colour and pattern detract from it. It should therefore follow that
slim people look better in black than chubby ones, but that is a subjective
matter.
Also there
are a lot of practical reasons for choosing black. When I ask people why they prefer
black over other colours, their natural first response is that “it’s easy to handle
black”, which means it does not reflect the
dirt (an important aspect in all uniforms),
it does not date, it matches with almost all other colours, and most
important it makes you stand out from the crowd. Black may look smart even if it’s
cheap, and hence economically becomes a better choice, in short it’s the ruler
of all other colours... Black is no doubt the king of colours.
For
designers too black is an Angel. Doing colour can be time-consuming and complex—there
are too many variables and it very tough to strike a right colour combination
which people will like instantly. Some say black is boring and makes all
wearers look alike. However, in the eyes of
Marie-Christine Brunin, who brought Zara’s shops to Britain, black makes
clothing recede and isolates the face, so emphasising our individuality.
Wow!! now that’s some reason to go BLACK...
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