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For all the guides on how to dress for your complexion, you only have to look at how black has been redeemed in the last ten years to see how color in fashion is often more about social meaning than simple color theory. During the late-aughts, menswear writers confidently declared that nobody should ever wear the color. Black suits are for morticians and the help. Black dress shirts are déclassé. Black trousers go with nothing. Black sport coats look like orphaned suit jackets. And black leathers don’t acquire the patina that makes a pair of well-polished, well-worn brown leather shoes so handsome. In fact, giving up square-toed black shoes in favor of more anatomically correct brown ones became something of a rite of passage for well-dressed men. And in binning those shoes, many have learned to avoid black entirely.
To be sure, some of those rules are sensible. Suits are typically easier to wear in navy or gray, rather than black, and black dress shirts are questionable at best. But as men have become more comfortable with fashion, black has seen a resurgence. It’s a color that connotes mystery, sophistication, power, elegance, and even sex appeal. It’s understated and urbane, dignified and dangerous. And for those reasons, black persists in menswear.
In a New York Times article published earlier this year, Jonathan Wolfe asked Valerie Steele, the director at The Museum at the FIT and author of The Black Dress, why New York City’s unofficial uniform is about wearing black from head to toe. “It’s only some New Yorkers who wear black, but it’s the kind of people popularly identified with this city – fashion people, artists, and hipsters,” Steele answered. “New Yorkers start to become associated with wearing black in the late 1970s and early ’80s. That’s when you get a sort of perfect storm of different style tribes wearing the color.”
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