Essay — Volume vii, no. 03
The discipline of black, and what we lose when we colour it in.
Twenty years after I first cut a sleeve too long on purpose, I am still arguing — quietly, mostly with myself — that restraint is a louder thing than ornament.
I spent the better part of last December in a borrowed studio in Aoyama, re-cutting a wool coat that had refused to behave for eleven years. The coat is not mine — it belonged to a friend of a friend, a tall woman who had stopped wearing it because, she said, it had become "a kind of architecture I no longer lived inside." That phrase stayed with me. We talk about clothes as expression, as identity, as costume; we almost never talk about them as rooms we walk around in.
i.On the colour that is not a colour
Black, properly observed, is never one tone. In a single drape of heavy wool you can count six shades before the light gives up: ash at the shoulder, slate where the fabric folds, a near-bituminous shadow under the arm. To call it black is shorthand for a conversation you have not yet had with the cloth. The grisaille tradition understood this: paint in greys, and the eye will hallucinate the rest.