The image is among the more indelible from film wunderkind Quentin Tarantino: an imposing row of guys, bedecked in black suits and shades, methodically marching toward the camera — a menacing gaggle of human crows.
Later, we discover that the hoods in the 1992 movie “Reservoir Dogs” have been given anonymous names based on colors. Mr. Pink asks Joe, the man in charge, “Why can’t we pick out our own color?”
Joe replies: “I tried that once, it don’t work. You get four guys fighting over who’s gonna be Mr. Black.”
In the new movie “Men in Black,” the title characters are part of a clandestine police force, equipped with precious knowledge of alien life covertly roaming the planet. They boast futuristic weapons — a flashlight, for instance, that renders anyone who stares at it an amnesiac — and they wield the power that comes with forbidden, top-secret knowledge.
And they wear, like avenging uniforms from hell, black suits.
Movie directors weren’t the first to find poetry in ebony fashion; neither were ’80s punks, ’70s Blues Brothers, ’60s mods or ’50s motorcycle hoods. There’s a long, intense, maybe profound cultural history of men in black, dating all the way back through the past millenium.
It started, if not with Adam, with his medieval descendents, a male predilection that is not just about fashion but about a deeply rooted social message symbolizing power and, in some subversive versions, those who seek to supplant it.
At least that’s the persuasive theory of author John Harvey, a lecturer at Cambridge University whose own scholarly treatise on the topic, “Men in Black,” precedes Barry Sonnenfeld’s spiffy new movie by three years. (Sonnenfeld’s actual inspiration is a comic book of the same title by Lowell Cunningham that debuted in 1989.) But professor Harvey says he gave a lecture under the title as far back as 1981, when the topic first piqued his interest.
“At first I was a little miffed they were using my title,” he says. “But then I decided it was flattering. I haven’t actually seen the movie yet, but from what I hear, it just goes to prove my thesis.”
In our history, he says, men wearing undyed gray clothing or bright colors abandoned them in favor of black in a slow but steady progression. Consider the Black Friars, for instance, a Dominican order founded in 1215 and known, for a time, as the Catholic Church’s “watchdogs.” In Chaucer’s time, few people other than churchmen wore black. But by the 15th Century, black was emerging as an important social costume for males, especially in such important commercial centers as Venice.
In 1498, a Milan citizen visiting Venice observed, “Nobody stirs abroad in any other costumes. It is a style certainly very suited to grave persons. They all look like Doctors of Laws.”
Grave or no, the fashion took hold, with a vengeance. By the 19th Century, serious men in society wore very little else, as Harvey demonstrates with countless quotes from fashion commentary, lithographs and paintings from the period and even illustrations from the novels of Charles Dickens.
What is our long fascination with this fashion?
Intimidation, for one. Harvey writes that black’s “most widespread and fundamental value lies in its association with darkness and night, and with the ancient natural imagery that connects night with death.
“As a pigment smeared on skin, in primitive societies in several continents, it is associated with evil, death, disase; with witchcraft and misfortune. Warriors going to war make themselves black, both to look bigger and to frighten their enemies with the sight of death. Black may, for the same societies, have positive values also, and be associated with black rain-clouds — urgently yearned for — and with black alluvial mud, promising new germination.”
And, of course, as any ’80s new wave disco dweller could have told you, black means sex, “not only a matter of the natural attractiveness of a lustrous glossy blackness, but, in the modern West, a sense of danger, making black exciting, daring.”
No women allowed
But what about women in black? Harvey provocatively argues that men in Western society maintained a proprietary hold over the color, at least in terms of mainstream fashion, as part of the tradition of sexism and female oppression. Women weren’t in power, and therefore they wore something else, usually white.
“The empowerment of black has occurred primarily in men’s dress . . . while women have tended, almost until the present century, to be left with the grieving and penitential use of black,” he writes. “Even when brilliant, rich, powerful women have worn magnificent black in the past, they have usually needed the pretext of mourning to do so.
“Through time, the use of this color — the color that is without color, without light, the color of grief, of loss, of humility, of guilt, of shame — has been adopted in its use by men not as the color of what they lack or have lost, but precisely as the signature of what they have: of standing, goods, mastery.” By our century, as women gained the vote and other rights, the taboo gradually melted and black became fashionable for women, too.
But earlier, Harvey’s examples of powerful men using black to communicate their power are legion: Philip II of Spain almost exclusively wore black in the later years of his 16th Century reign, introducing an almost universal adherence to the fashion in his country. Martin Luther wore black, which became the dominant color of Protestantism, and so does Hamlet, at first for mourning, but also, as Harvey’s careful study of Shakespeare’s color imagery points up, as an overriding “inky cloak.”
Harvey sees Hamlet as a true prince of darkness, whose procrastination and meddlesome poking about either directly or indirectly wipes out all of Ophelia’s family and much of his own.
While most of us think of a dandy as a colorful chap, he began in all-black attire. The first dandy, Beau Brummel, raised eyebrows with his obsession with black fashion in the 1810s. And if Europe was gaga for black in the later 1800s, America was even more passionately so: When Dickens showed up daring to sport colorful clothing, the Yankees complained:
“He wore . . . a satin vest with very gay and variegated colors. . . . His whole appearance is foppish, especially as most gentlemen in the room were dressed chiefly in black.”
The 20th Century saw the rise of Fascist police forces, garbed in black in Italy and Nazi Germany. In the entertainment world, the enveloping black cape of Count Dracula became familiar on movie screens.
Rebellious youth
Black can serve as a great symbol for the out-of-power, too. In our time, it has been adopted as clothing for the rebel and his or her “I’m taking over” message. Black is useful because it’s bad, a threatening garb for the nose-pierced, tangerine-haired punk and an invitation to danger among the S&M crowd.
“I have no idea whether real gangsters wear black or not,” Harvey says of “Reservoir Dogs.” “But Tarantino and other film directors clearly understand that black clothes are frightening, though frightening in a very special way. You can wear them and be stylish, sexy and a little startling, too.”
Today he finds black in something of a retreat, especially in male fashion. “Women are dressing in black much more, as they’ve achieved more of a position in the business world. Men seem to have retreated at the same time to more charcoal gray.
“But don’t count men in black out. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve seen the headline, `Black is back.’ “
Personally, he tends to avoid the color. “I’m wary of wearing black,” Harvey says. “It seems too easy a way to say you’re important and call attention to yourself. And it moves very quickly from a fashion to a uniform. We’ve seen that time and again in history.
“Someone wears it to be individual and conspicuous, and very soon others latch on and wear it as a uniform of power. If you don’t have a huge amount of character, you can wear black and appear to be interesting when, in truth, you don’t have very much to say. You can hide behind it.”
