No colors anymore . . .

What does practically every rock 'n roll performer; whiny, little emo-brat; anime otaku; younger comedian; self-declared "sexy" woman; "dangerous" (again, a self-declared state) cowboy; neo-Nazi; acutely sensitive poet; "serious" writer, businessperson, baby-sitter, etc, etc have in common?

They all think wearing black makes a statement other than, "I'm boring."


I'm not talking about those people who occasionally wear a black shirt or pair of pants along with other colors. I'm talking about those people whose entire wardrobe consists of nothing but varying values of black, with an occasional white shirt to accentuate the blackness of everything else and perhaps a dark maroon piece for festive occasions.

For years I have tried to figure out what the allure of the all black wardrobe could be. What, exactly, do people think it says about them, and why would you want to say that? Here's what I've managed to come up with:

• I'm dangerous. Everybody from the Nazi SS to wanna-be ninjas* have used black to instill fear in others. We equate darkness, black, with death and danger. I'm no psychologist, but my guess would be it is because night time was for many eons a dangerous time for us humans. Our eyes don't see that well in the dark, and you never knew when a lion or panther would suddenly be jumping out of it.
• I'm serious. I don't have time, or energy (or the imagination) to play. This is a serious world with serious problems, and doing something like wearing bright, non-depressing colors would just get in the way of all the serious things I have to do.
• I'm sensitive. As far back as you want to go there have been hyper-sensitive, totally self-absorbed, overly dramatic little twits who could only show how hyper-sensitive, totally self-absorbed, and overly dramatic they were by dressing all in black to show how sad the world really was and how sensitive to it they were.
• I'm mysterious. Oooo, I'm the man/woman in black. You don't know me. You can't figure me out. I'm a complete mystery because I always wear black. Ooooo! (And other ghostlike sounds.)
• I'm classic. I am the time honored sexy woman in the little black dress/handsome man in the Italian black suit. Or it could be they just don't have the imagination, or the nerve, to do something other than what some lazy, hack writer in a fashion magazine stole from an article written forty years ago that had been stolen from an another article written forty years before that and so on, and so on.

What, in my opinion, really happens is that the person, regardless of the reason, disappears and loses, or attempts to lose, their identity as an individual. They become part of an amorphous, faceless group of things in black. They have lost their uniqueness. Their personality. And like all monochromatic states, are, in the end, simply boring.