Professor Andrew Groves, Professor of Fashion Design, featured in an article in the Financial Times about the history and reasons behind wearing black.
Professor Groves said: “Previously, upper-class men wore colourful clothes, wigs and make-up. But a new rational approach to dressing emerged that rejected the royal-court approach to menswear.” Utility and functionality, he said, became more important than flash and flair, appealing to the new business class of the industrial revolution. This shift is known as the Great Male Renunciation.
Since the second world war, black has found itself taken up as a uniform by all sorts of subcultures, said Groves: “The studied and self-referential cool of the beatniks in black berets”, the “crimped hair and layered black outfits” of yearning 1980s goths, Tom of Finland’s “ritualised and regulated approach to power dressing”. It’s the colour of masculinity in crisis too, he said, whether the violence of Patrick Bateman in American Psycho or Reservoir Dogs’ killers, disappearing in their black suits.
Read the full article on the Financial Times website.
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