Men in Black.

Richard Martin

The eponyms of Scott Spencer's 1995 novel Men in Black are intergalactic disinformation specialists who pay ominous unannounced visits to those who have spotted extraterrestrials. Spencer's sinister figures have antecedents, if not dressed in black then wearing a colorless variant of it, in Sloan Wilson's popular 1955 book The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit, the despised villains of which are the then-new advertising executives so gladly and vapidly donning corporate uniform. If the dress code that Wilson annotated has lasted nearly 30 years, perhaps we will still be reading about MIB through 2025.

Straw men are fun for solipsisms and sartorial men are fun in fiction. John Harvey, in his own Men in Black, takes an even more somber look inside men's murky wardrobes: though there are a few dandies in this literary and cultural study, there are no rogues. Writing on Charles Dickens and subsequent instances of dark-toned English Victoriana, already so often associated with the funereal and the melancholy, Harvey ignores any possible vitality in black. He does give text and context to the sooty London of Dickens' black-clothed old men, and to the Baudelairean receding flaneur and advancing dandy, but the problem of course is that a reliance on the text in lieu of the textile inevitably produces results less nuanced, less real, than the apparel itself.

For example, in 1855 a journalist for the Paris newspaper Figaro wrote that there was no immediately apparent difference between the black suit of M. Rothschild and that of his lowly clerk, but that for the discerning, "There is all the difference. M. Rotschild's [sic] suit will stay black, and his clerk's will turn blue and then a dirty gray. M. Rotschild is also a little freer in his movements."

Though Harvey cites popular culture, he slights it. Where Fred Miller Robinson in The Man in the Bowler Hat (1993), a more successful exercise in cultural criticism, extends his inclusiveness to Charlie Chaplin, Rene Magritte, and Elie Nadelman, Harvey prefers literary models and their gravity ("Hamlet's black") of impression. Whereas Robinson wanted us to believe that the bowler shared in the modern lightness of being, Harvey is lugubrious in intent, and therefore in conclusion. He insists on a dark power as the cause and iconography of men in black: "Alone or in ranks, the man in black is the agent of a serious power; and of a power claimed over women and the feminine." Accordingly, he deduces gravely, "We live now in the aftertow of the black wave's latest rise and breaking.... Black may be a shadow fallen on the feminine part of man."

Odd, then, that Harvey himself ignores women in black, whether wearing Worth, Chanel, or Jil Sander. True, he has defined his topic so as to put women outside his purview, but had he fully seen the little black dress of Chanel, artful both in its simplicity and in the cultural radicalism of making such an astringently chic garment from the humble jersey of a maid's uniform, he might have dealt differently with the black clothes of men. Instead, he conjures an Edvard Munch spectacle in the psyche. Seeing black, Harvey seldom sees beyond the overall color of the frock coat or suit to what may be combined with it: red (the Napoleonic military scarlet of Gericault's hero-worship and Stendahl's metaphor), or floral tapestry (the waistcoats of the 18th century), or even the color accents and idiosyncratic details of modern menswear. Has he reckoned with the soigne men-in-black of John Singer Sargent? He sees hollow men in his literary texts, but does he know the men-in-black not of disinformation but of decision, even if that decision is made by Donna Karan or Issey Miyake or Rei Kawakubo?

There are more absorbing questions than the ones Harvey asks. What of the mainstream men who studiously avoid black, preferring the classic dress-for-success navy blue and charcoal? Why does Ralph Lauren in his menswear abjure black and maintain, even in banker's stripes, conventional blue and gray as black's surrogates? It is said that the Duke of Windsor favored formal wear of midnight blue, partly to match his blue eyes, but also because he had seen that black appears turbid in black and white photographs, while blue seems crisp.

Finally, if we are addressing black and dressing black, you can talk about Hamlet and Baudelaire but you had better not forget Batman, Gomez Adams, and every guy who has ever sat for Timothy Greenfield-Sanders.