Architects have a reputation for wearing black, but we also have a major perception problem to overcome regarding the maintenance of our black clothes and the composition of our wardrobe – one which, in many cases, keeps us from feeling comfortable wearing the black garb that constitutes an essential part of our professional typology.

The problem, as many architects see it, is that sometimes our blacks don’t match and that many among us feel that this presents an unacceptable attire condition. We might think of it as a black-clashing. (This is especially a problem for those architects who go to work early and have to get dressed in the dark or by non-color-corrected incandescent light.)

I posit that the avoidance of non-coordinating blacks stems from a misconception regarding the potential intellectual stimulus in the mixing – a misconception endemic across the profession and in academia. It’s based on a shortsighted and non-rigorous position, essentially flawed in its original assumptions – a clear failure in architectural thinking. To address the perceived problem what is needed is not a new wardrobe, as many might expect, but a more holistic revision of architects’ sartorial thinking from an architectural point-of-view.

To wit: Matching is a false ideal. During the premodern era, matching was much less common. It was not only not expected, but rarely found. Even a cursory inspection of documentation of the clothing from various historic periods will reveal that matching was simply not a concern. In less choice- and marketing-driven eras, the number of items of clothing a person might own was so limited that color was not an issue. Having color in one’s wardrobe at all cost more due to the expense of extracting and creating a variety of colored dyes. Natural fiber colors or simple homemade dyes were the rule.

Closer to our time, just as a Victorian architecture was an eclectic mix of color and texture, so were the clothes of the Victorians. Portraits of the wealthy of the 19th century reveal as riotous a kaleidoscope of colors and patterns as we would associate with the most over-the-top Queen Anne wedding cake house of Cape May. Not being matched was simply a way of exaggerating the impression of wealth: the layering of texture, color, pattern, and textile weight all adding to a rich and decadent encrustation of clothing.

With the rise of a modern aesthetic, new technologies and new possibilities for quality control allowed for more consistency in the color and texture of clothes. Now matching was possible, so it became a style trend – it was modern, at least for a while. On parallel tracks, however, were a rising interest in hygiene, suggesting crisp whites, and an artistic/philosophical interest in essential qualities of material and the ability to experience these qualities more fully from a position of neutrality. We started to see whites, blacks, minimal smocks, untailored drapes, and other experiments in neutral body image. Interest in a typology of clothing was as prevalent as that in typology of building during this transitional era. Magritte didn’t use the bowler in his work to be clever or to make a fashion statement. It was a wardrobe basic – the bowler man was the everyman.



So, now that the flush and exoticism of the modern ascetic aesthetic has worn off, is it still necessary for our blacks to be signs of neutrality or absence? In a time when we can do anything, when modern can mean neo-baroque expressionism as easily as it can mean minimal expression, can our black wardrobes not express our expanded world view?

Even before the end of the 20th Century (over half a decade ago!) we had entered into an era in which there was a growing attention to the potential for finding inspiration in influences from our varied cultures, races, and histories. In the ‘90s it was multiculturalism; in the '00s, it's global culture. Yet, in this age of diversity, architects remain puritanical - anti-diverse - refusing to allow different blacks to sit next to each other and influence each other in an ensemble!

There is great potential in architects' embracing of a rainbow of blacks into daily use. Our personal attire can serve as a narrative of our laundering history, our attention to the process of textile care, and the quality and colorfastness of the original clothing. Sporting a brown-black with a blue-black may not need to be such a horrific prospect.



It seems that we may be able to talk about the opportunities of varied black clothing from a phenomenological standpoint. But some distinctions should be made when we discuss the phenomenology relative to black clothes. Phenomenology has been understood differently by different black-clad philosophers.

For Hegel, phenomenology was an approach to philosophical observation that begins with an exploration of phenomena (what about our black clothes presents itself to us in conscious experience) as a means to finally grasp the absolute, logical, and metaphysical Spirit behind our wardrobes’ blackness. This has been called a "dialectical phenomenology".

For Husserl, phenomenology was an approach to philosophical observation that takes the intuitive experience of phenomena (what presents itself to us in phenomenological reflection as we look in the mirror) as its starting point and tries to extract from it the essential features of experiences and the essence of what we experience. This has been called a "transcendental phenomenology".

For Heidegger, the phenomenological vision of a world of beings must be bypassed toward the apprehension of the to-Be-ness behind all beings. This has been called an "existential phenomenology".

While each can be brought to bear in this discussion, Heidegger’s analysis of the very Be-ness of things may be one of the most useful for architects in considering the implications of the blackness of their clothes and how to transition to a more open and accepting attitude about the potential for diversity within the all-black wardrobe.

The Questions to ask yourself:

1. Basics
So after ruminating on these philosophers’ phenomenological distinctions for a couple of seconds, consider the following – and remember, these are questions to ask yourself as part of your daily dressing routine:

- When does an article of clothing go out of blackness, becoming a non-black color, as opposed to merely changing shades of black?

- Is the black part of the essential nature of the clothing? What are your pants’ properties or relations and how are they related to the pants themselves?

- What features are the essential, as opposed to merely accidental or circumstantial, attributes of a black shirt? Do the things that have happened to the shirt – fading or washing with blue socks – become embedded as parts of its essential nature?

- Does it matter that I wore these black pants earlier this week? (1)


2. Next, consider the influence of decisions we make on the condition of our black attire:

- What do you do, can you do, or might you do to enact changes in the conditions of black articles of clothing?

- Is it about the actions taken while wearing the clothes (crawling on the floor, spilling wine, walking through a carwash) or about the discipline or lack thereof in the care of the clothes – or both.


3. And this gets to the heart of this issue –

- Is your black accidental or intentional?

- Is accidental preferable to intentional? Accidental drift in the shade or texture of your clothing is a more honest record of the life that you have lived in that clothing. But is this what architect’s think about phenomenology for? Isn’t it more likely that we want to control the conditions under which our wardrobe weathers, washes, and wears?

- By extension, if some items of black have changed color because of being washed with red socks, others have changed color because of an intentional bleaching, and yet others have been subjected to staining from when you changed the oil in your Opel GT, should these blacks be worn together? If so, should there be an intentionality about the mixing of the experiences that these clothes have undergone? Can you really seriously ignore these issues if you consider yourself a rigorous architectural designer/thinker?


Strategies (or is it ‘Tactics’, I forget)

Finally, some comments on the appearance that you’re going for, and some further goals you might consider:

To return to the 19th century, it’s helpful to refer to the writings of John Ruskin, who understood something about phenomenological observation even if he didn’t call it by name. We can assume that he would not have understood the compulsion to wear all black clothes. Not only was he of the nineteenth century, he was an art critic – not an architect. Beyond the obvious, however, Ruskin would have understood and appreciated a sartorial application of his observations on distance and detail. (3)

Where Ruskin describes the shadowy profile of a church spire, the increasing distinctions of form that became comprehensible upon approaching the church, and the fine appreciation of the minutest detail rewarding close inspection, we can apply these tests to our wardrobe of black as well. From a block down Prince Street, you’ll cut a striking figure and your blacks will blend, yielding the pure thin profile that you see when you imagine yourself.

As you’re observed moving closer, your audience/observer will begin to recognize the form emerging from the lack of contrast: the messenger bag, the flipped collar, the silk tie, the Prada belt and shoes. Glimpses of sheen will flash out of the flat black field, and the play of light and shadow will begin to describe your figure and your movement.

The key in this discussion is how your audience/observer is rewarded upon close inspection. After the intrigue of the middle distance, is there more to learn? You will want you wardrobe to invite and engage this curiosity. (Won’t you?) This can best be handled via a focused and rigorous design charrette each morning. What are the textures, the lines, and the colors that become visible up close – from within the area you consider your personal space – that intimate proximity experienced during a hug, a handshake, a conversation over coffee, or a subway ride?

Starting from the more basic articles from which you build the foundation of your outfit and working toward accessories/details:

1. Black Jeans:
Starting with an easy one, you know that your jeans are going to fade. It is the essence of denim [derivative of ‘de Nimes’, named for the place where Levi Strauss and his wife summered in Provence] (4) that it fades. Denim must be allowed to engage with this essential characteristic of the material. If you have determined that, in order to protect the purity of their blackness, you must dryclean your jeans, you are denying their very denim-ness, an intellectually suspect position that can lead to sloppy design rationalizations in your architectural work. Worse yet if you allow your cleaner to iron the denim, forcing the textile to take a form for which it was never intended.

Somewhere along the line, unless you’re obsessive-compulsive, you will probably wash your black denim with something of a different color and the exposure of the white binding fibers of the denim to this foreign color will cause an ever-so-slight shift in tint. If this happens repeatedly, the tint will become greater and the overall blackness of the jeans will begin to shift toward less-black. This is a natural and appropriate process, a register of the real life of the denim, just as important as the wearing of the knees, the stretching of the wallet pocket, and the fraying of the top edges of the pockets.

2: Microfiber sweater:
It was probably an expensive sweater, unless you got it from the shelves in the back of Banana Republic. Even if you did, it’s a very nice sweater. So the elbows have begun to show wear? Does that mean its tired and ready for Goodwill? Or does it make it more uniquely yours and more rich with history and the trace of life’s trajectory?

3: Black shirt wine stains:
This is a tough one. I mean, just because we’ve left the early modern hygienic ascetic era behind, it doesn’t mean you want to look unclean, right? But those wine stains are a marking, a trace of where the shirt has been, where you’ve been. So some value judgments must be brought to bear. Is is a cotton shirt, a rayon shirt, or a silk shirt? Think about the value of the shirt and its replaceability and weigh this against thoughts about the source of the stain and whether it’s a marking about which you want people to know. Was it a Merlot from an invitation-only gallery opening of new work by Chuck Close or was it red table wine from a winebox at your Mom’s picnic in Poughkeepsie on the Fourth of July? What do you want to have to tell someone when/if they say, ‘Oh, you’ve got something on you right there.’ (I won’t go into the possibility of lying. That’s a different design/intention discussion altogether. But I won’t rule it out. Especially if it’s a silk shirt.)

4: Black pants/skirt, linen napkins:
You know it’s happened to you. Every mid-price sit-down restaurant that aspires to popularity these days has linen napkins that leave fuzzies on your lap. A purist would simply choose the restaurants that choose manmade fiber napkins, but you might want the trace of a certain 42nd Street Chinese place on your lap for some reason. (I have no idea why, but…)

This is not a permanent marking so really should be thought about as merely a temporal condition of your black pants or skirt. It’s acceptable to flaunt your night out for dinner for a wear or two, but really, after that, you have to admit that the item of clothing is just dirty. Whether before or after drycleaning, those pill-balls need to be carefully removed with a lint roller and the experience held in your memory – no sartorial souvenirs here.

5: Acid-washed, stone-washed, and pre-ripped jackets and pants: You’re kidding, right? (5)

6: Belt:
Does your belt have wear around the size hole adjacent to the one you’re using now – indicating that you’ve had a weight change? That’s part of your recent history!

Some belts these days are made with a leather-appearing face that is merely sewn on. When the belt wears, especially the threads along the edge, you might start to see this face material come loose. This is a trace of use but also a little bit too much of a giveaway that you haven’t been shopping at the most upscale stores. You’ll have to change belts if this happens to you, or just start buying real leather so that your belt can show its wear in a dignified way.

While it’s still true that a brown belt with black shoes is not an acceptable accessorizing strategy, a little variety in the blackness of your belt and shoes is less stigmatizing. It’s not like the shoeshine guy in the subway station is going to polish you’re belt for you, right? So the sheen on the belt may suffer a bit. Or spend your evenings polishing your belt instead of drinking Hefeweizen with your archi-buddies. Your choice.



7: Black messenger bag:
Messenger bags come in a variety of materials and forms. For some architects, this has become one place that they can truly express their individuality. A bright Timbuk2 bag is as likely to look like a flag of some small as-yet-not-covered-by-NPR country as it is to be black. Some will still hew to the standard, though. And for these folks you can go manmade materials or natural.

Manmade: Your nylon Swiss Army bag will stay true black forever, giving your wardrobe a kind of control against which to be able to see the distinctions among the other pieces you’re wearing. (Disclaimer: It’s not unheard of that, thought the black nylon fibers won’t change color, if you take your nylon bag to jobsites, wood splinter and other substances can embed themselves in the loose weave. These are to be taken as trophies and exhibited proudly.)

Natural: The old guard had this down perfectly. You have to admire the architect who has spent most of a career shuttling a Peugeot between work and university, tousled overlong hair sticking up in a show of harried brilliance and drooping shoulder holding a very heavily loaded, beautifully misshapen and roughed-up soft leather shoulder bag. It takes a long time to get a bag to look as distressed as the ones these guys carry, and you can’t fake it. If you’re patient and committed, willing to stick with the same bag for years (and willing to spring for one that will last so long) you, too, can grow old with a visible symbol of your commitment to perfectly aged leather.


Follow a few of these tips – and develop your own through constant observation and experimentation - and you’re ready to meet the world as an architect who fully understands that your wardrobe is an outward sign of your approach to design. While phenomenology is not so much a wardrobe strategy as a lens for perception, cognition, and comprehension of the world around us, if you will pay attention to the essential qualities of the clothes themselves and their relative condition when placed together in an ensemble, your attention will impress those who care enough to look at what you’re wearing, giving them a deeper appreciation for your sensitivity.

And if you approach this effort seriously, treating your time in front of the full-length every morning as a design problem to be solved, you’ll start each day with an awareness of the little differences in color, texture, and form that can enhance your ability to pick the right toilet partitions to complement the ceramic tile in the hospital project on which you’re working.




Notes:

(1) David Byrne famously observed that if you always wear the same clothes, pretty soon people will start to recognize you. But you don’t want them to think you’re some creep-o like Mickey Rourke’s character in 9 ½ Weeks. (2)

(2) You might want to be like Mickey Rourke’s character in 9 ½ Weeks because he sure had some fun, but you don’t want them to think that. You want him/her to find out after the fun with the fruit.

(3) Ruskin, John. The Seven Lamps of Architecture (I think).

(4) Aber, Ita. ‘Bluejean Baby’, New York Times Book Review, 3 September 2006, p6.

(5) How dare you think that falsely aged clothing could be at all an acceptable part of this discussion? Pretending that your clothing has a history of use and activity when, in fact, those adulterations were manufactured before the clothing came into its functional life is deceitful. How could any self-respecting architect imagine that false historical garb would be an option? I’m offended that you even read ‘Acid-washed, stone-washed…’ and continued reading as if I was being serious. Stop now. You don’t deserve my philosphical/architectural wardrobe advice.(6)

(6) Well, okay, at some point in the ‘80s this could have been a supportable position given the environment of ironic (not iron-on) application of flattened and simplified versions of architectural specimens of carefully documented provenance onto generic modern boxes. But only then. Not now.


Next Issue: “Fuzzy Split Ends: Time to Go to the Hairdresser – or to Derrida?”