The colour of night is back in fashion. Girls in black swing sexily, seriously down streets. It is black as itself again, not black as a foil for everything else, but black in its own right. Genevieve, a friend of my son, appeared in my kitchen clad in it from the top of her clever head to the tip of her charming toe. I eye it like a long-lost companion. Like most women of my generation I have had several long, passionate affairs with black. The colour seems loaded with grown-up meaning; articulate yet disciplined, proper and yet exotic. It speaks to some sense of determined purpose. It is dangerous. It is the opposite of dowdy, but also the opposite of showy. It reeks of avant-garde chic. Since I was 18, I have never been without a black polo neck jumper. Men often wear a version of black too—from Brando-esque biker's black leathers to Quentin Tarantino's chaps in black suits who reinvented the office with menace, black defines a racy, risk-taking severity. There is plenty of meaning still attached to black.
Yet some of the resonance of black comes from the meanings that have been stripped away from it. Black used to mean seriousness and professionalism. Until the 19th century, men wore as many—or as few—colours as women, and then they lost them and black became the colour men wore when they went to work or formal dinners. Indeed, despite the modern abandonment of the tie and the outbreak of coloured shirts, men still wear mostly dark; the black dinner jacket, rather surprisingly, has by no means died. I think chaps feel they look handsomer in black. Black used to mean learning and withdrawal from the trivial, as with priests. It has often meant a kind of puritanism, closely related to a minimalist elegance—it is pared down and authoritative. Black puts you at a knowing angle to the world and its doings.
Yet now I rather long for some of the old meaning of black; it would have helped a little in difficult times. It is not that the widows in Sicily are better off—who would want to be cast into black garb forever?—but we have lost something black used to do. Last year my husband died; my children lost a father. We could have lent on black to broadcast what had happened.
Because we no longer have any socially agreed way of exhibiting bereavement, everyone—both the grievers and those who come across them—has to reinvent the first encounter painfully, time after time. The bereaved have to be found out repeatedly, and those they meet have to fall into the pit of making a blunder. When one of the founding intimacies of life is torn away, the people left behind have every social relationship in their world to remake, as well as all the other stuff. It is as if they had been dumped on Mars. All encounters, from the meaningful ones with old friends, to trivial meetings with new acquaintances, to the casual engagement across a committee table, as well as with all the institutions they work in and through, have to be hazardously renegotiated. It is stormy when you are at a low ebb.
Black used to do just a little of the work for all the wretches stumbling about in a strange new world. But we modern explorers have no flags to hang in advance of us announcing what has happened in a language everyone understands—it is privatised.
It is not that we do not have mourning practices; it is that some of them are distinctly odd. A kind of wild, hysterical humour takes over as one slams into the wall of contemporary custom (like a crash you see coming but cannot avoid). Let me explain how the rigid modern convention works. You have a conference, work to sort, a discussion, a routine or a tricky negotiation to launch, a chance encounter at a concert or a movie, or the clash of trolleys in the supermarket, a lesson to go to, a football match to play in—anything at all—with people who don't know you, or who know you but don't know, or who know but for whom there is no prompt. You look (no doubt more battered than usual) like anyone else. But being bereaved is like being the ancient mariner, the ghastly guest at any feast. You leer into the sight of some unsuspecting person with a great albatross around your neck. You try very, very hard not to embarrass people. You would not want to do this to anybody (unlike the mariner who has only himself to blame) but cannot help it; it is after all your condition. There is nothing you can do about it. At some point, a family reference comes up—it always does, in any number of ways—and you, the bereaved, have to explain to the shocked mistake-maker what has happened. Death.
Immediately the poor mortified, wrong-footed, guest or colleague is covered in confusion. You can see the panic in other people's eyes; inadvertently, you have caused them pain. They feel you have made them commit a faux pas, but how could they know, what are the signs? People are often tremendously graceful, and many respond to the moment with warmth and humanity. But it is not cheerful, and it is always in the wrong register. They had only wanted to ask about the next parents' evening, fix an agenda, find out what you have done for maths prep, or have the kind of polite-trivial conversation that keeps life rolling—and here they are, trapped in the meaningful. Oh horror!
The bereaved are inescapably socially dissonant. So the person who has blundered into forests of meaning has to apologise and is upset—and you have to comfort them, restore them, discount it all. And crash, there is another social negotiation in turmoil, rules broken all around. You cannot get on with the work in hand because of a typhoon of unease.
Of course, you could, in a postmodern world of infinite choice, wear black anyway. But it does not reliably carry the meaning it has borne for a thousand years: not loss and death and vulnerability. As no one expects people who are bereaved to wear anything special, no one would recognise what it meant, in this case, to wear black. So it would not do that little bit of work. Indeed, now, to be bereaved and to choose to wear black would land you right back to embarrassing people. It would look as though you were being inordinate in your grief, affectedly hanging on to it, imposing it on people, making a fuss—and, as some wouldn't recognise it, you would still have to explain when they found out. It simply would not help.
Women use clothes to think through. They imagine themselves into new experiences by mulling over what they will wear. They consider the nuances of fashion and of their persona, their bodies, and how they want to be seen in the situation and triangulate them in a complex equation. Women settle on uniforms of course, and just climb into the established gear for the job in hand, but getting the appropriate kit on for the work to be done matters to most women. It is a kind of mad balancing act. One aspect is fashion. This is not the gripping narrative of "ins" and "outs," just an unavoidable command that everyone obeys. The garment must meet whatever is the prevailing fashion somewhere. It is this that makes everyone look so amusing in old photographs. All unknowing, even grandmas are revealed in the grip of styles they took for granted, their skirts and hair as disciplined by convention as any fashion obsessive. So you hope that the choice you make (within the rules of the moment) packages you and your particular failings as helpfully as possible. These gripping problems, as any woman knows, can be complicated and engrossing. It is not an issue of new dresses (though the hunt for the right garment can be a perplexing, pleasurable tussle), but of subtle calculations.
The point is once you've got it right for you, you don't have to bother—it just works. You are communicated by your skirt. Anybody who knows me must be puzzled by this: I don't agonise about what I wear, never buy fashion magazines, don't spend much money or much time in shops, feel neither insecure or secure about it all, let alone look smart, fashionable, or even neat—but it is undoubtedly one of the means by which I think myself through the world.
You don't stop caring because it is more grimly complicated than before. Not least because it turns out you do (well I did), ultimately, dress for your husband. Not that he noticed most of the time—when he did he often enjoyed provoking me about it—but sometimes he was appreciative, and that was the eye that set the standard, that one glowed under. I think my sons do some of this work for me now, and it is possible that it is a kind of comfort to them seeing the mother galleon sallying out looking normal. Nevertheless, now, after, one is terribly keen not to pile up any more disturbances in the flood and eddy of the everyday. But that's the point perhaps, because there are no recognised flags for this moment, the daily uniforms we dive into do nothing helpful, and seem bewilderingly to transmit wrongly, or at least send no message that helps.
Loss, the avid imperialism of grief, the shaky uncertainty of the new world one faces, could do with some socially approved help. Of course, there is no going back: black has scooped up the solemnity it used to have and is using it for different purposes now. What should a widow wear to a party? Well, probably not—as it turns out—black.
