Mr. Pink: 'Why can't we pick our own color?'
Joe: 'I tried that once, it don't work. You get four guys fighting over who's gonna be Mr. Black.' Quentin Tarantino, Reservoir Dogs.
Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1996. First paperback edition, 2nd printing. 15,5 x 23 cm. 280 pages, illustrated throughout with b/w photographs of works by Caravaggio, Anthony Van Dyck, Titian, Gerard ter Borch, Rubens, Rembrandt, Delacroix, Ingres, Hogarth, Manet, Cézanne, Renoir, Tod Browning, David Hockney, Francis Bacon. A fascinating cultural history of the color black in menswear.
Black may be a shadow fallen on the feminine part of man. Color dies in menswear in the 19th century, leaving color and brightness to women. 'If there's a dominant meaning in the widespread use of black, that meaning is associated at once with intensity and effacement: with importance and with the putting on of impersonality. Alone or in ranks, the man in black is the agent of a serious power; and of power claimed over women and the feminine.'
- Clothes, Colour and Meaning
- Whose Funeral?
- Black in History
- From Black in Spain to Black in Shakespeare
- From Black in Art to Dickens' Black
- England's Dark House
- Men in Black with Women in White
- Black in our Time
- References
- Index