The Allure of Darth Vaderism

By KURT ANDERSEN

Get brighter brights, whiter whites, and have a nice day, O.K.? No other people in history have placed a greater premium on sheer, sunny perkiness than mid-20th century Americans. In the objects they buy and make, that post-Puritan inclination has been expressed by splurges of color. From the jazz age onward, pop culture has gone polychrome in a big way: color, brilliant and various, has been almost obligatory in all things, from clothing to kitchen appliances to automobiles to furniture. What was not cotton-candy pink was smile-button yellow; if not sunset orange, then avocado green. Black, however, remained stricken from the palette, used only when demanded by function or material (tires, outdoor grills, cast-iron skillets) and in a few ritual contexts (limousines and hearses, tuxedoes, evening gowns and the costumes of mourners and clerics). When people had a choice of colors, they did not choose black.

In the 1980s, however, black is hip. Not since the glossy lacquer fixtures of art deco and Ford's utilitarian Model T has the color of doom been so specifically fashionable or so ubiquitous. In big cities, there are upscale stores that sell virtually nothing but black hardware and electronics, black furniture, luggage and clothing. One such place in New York City is called Black Market, a punky East Village store just down the block from a still punkier black leather boutique called Fetisch (sic) or Die.

The vogue is not limited to the slavishly chic urban precincts of loft dwellers, San Pellegrino sippers and would-be Rimbauds. Black is now the color of choice for photographic and high-priced electronic equipment of every kind. Sony's new, "ultimate" Trinitron TV, called the XBR, is advertised as a black cube with a nearly black screen sitting on a black pedestal. Miniskirts and sofas in black leather are pandemic. Wristwatches are black, good china is black. Even telephones are once again fashionably black. Sterling cigarettes, a new brand, come in hard black packets.

During the past two years, even Sears has started selling black washers and dryers, and black refrigerators. "The sophisticated black look is a departure Mikasa crystal for Sears," admits Robert Hillman, an industrial engineer with the company. "We had to take the store buyers by the hand around to high-tech stores in Chicago." General Electric is sluicing black into the mainstream too. "We've greatly increased black items in the last year," says Walter Bennett, until recently an appliance marketer for GE. "This year we've made black available down into our very bottom lines."

Just a few years ago, black cars were rare. Today remarkable numbers of cars--expensive cars, serious cars--are black. Nearly one in five new Porsches sold in the U.S. is black, as is one in five GM Corvettes, a 100% increase over the past several years. Less than 7% of the new cars that Chrysler Corp. manufactures are black. All the more remarkable then that it is now the most popular color for the company's high-performance sports cars: among those sold this year, 32% of Laser XEs and Daytona Turbo Zs are black.

In the beginning, there were cameras. For years, professional photographers used all black equipment. Because photography is glamorous, the black gadgetry of the craft came to seem sexy too; amateurs paid premiums for all black cameras. Merchandisers of other products, especially electronics, also began exploiting the new cachet. Richard Sapper, a Milan-based designer, used black early and well (with Marco Zanuso) on a radio (1964) and TV (1969) and then, most influentially, on his lithe, architectonic Tizio lamp (1971). European manufacturers increased exports of high-design matte black merchandise to the U.S.: lighters, clocks and calculators from West Germany's Braun; electric typewriters from Olivetti. Meanwhile, art deco revivalism in the '70s helped re-establish the link between chic and black.

The breakthrough year in popular iconography seems to have been 1977. Who was the compelling star of Star Wars? Darth Vader, powerful and nasty and swaddled in sleek black. Another movie blockbuster that year, Smokey and the Bandit, gave funky, earthbound outlawry a dark and shiny expression too: the Bandit drove a very fast, very black American sports car. "Black really burst into popularity as soon as Burt Reynolds drove that black Trans Am across the screen," says George Moon, the GM executive designer in charge of color.

Market acceptance was not exactly what the symbolists and other show-offy, fin-de-siecle types had in mind a century ago when they flirted with blackness. Some of the color's mass-market cachet today, however, does derive from a kindred perversity, a sort of Lite decadence. In nearly every culture in every age, after all, the associations have been grim: death, penitence, mysteries of the lower depths and the northern wastes, negation. Suburbanites who hanker after an anodized black aluminum clipboard or a GE fridge with a black plastic front are not quite closet nihilists or unwitting satanists. But in an insistently multicolored world, black merchandise is never chosen arbitrarily, and probably not casually: during the early 1920s, when nearly every Ford on the road was black, the color may have meant nothing special, but today black signifies. "It says driving machine, it says high performance, boldness, strictly business," explains Gerry Thorley, Chrysler's designer in charge of color.

Today's stylish meanings are all severe, unsmiling, sexy but mean. Black as a no-nonsense, high-tech wrapper is the predominant mode. Black stereo components, more deadpan than streamlined, make playing records a serious business. Glossy, all black cars look hermetic, the driver encased and invulnerable. Of all cars, they are also the most unforgiving of blemishes and dirt: like health-club body fetishists, the owners of perfectly polished black cars are out to flaunt the hard work their vanity requires. Even U.S. military engineers have indulged in monumental Darth Vader design: the new Pershing II nuclear missile, solidly black but for a few striped highlights, may be the first expressionist weapon.

Black has two other, paradoxical sources of appeal in the current zeitgeist, one a celebration of convention and wealth, the other a manifesto of street-toughness and bohemian penury. In the age of Reagan, la-di-da formality has made big black limousines and black-tie soirees modish once again. Thus for the well-to-do, basic black is a means of ostentatious discretion. On the other hand, the angry black of the new wave--dark glasses, sour black T shirts and scruffy black jeans--is more the anarchist's traditional black. It is neo-beatnik, the color correlate of the adolescent angst satirized by Chekhov. Why do you always wear black? Masha's suitor asks her in the opening scene of The Seagull. "I am in mourning for my life," the girl declares.

Fashion ripples this way and that, of course. The convergence of several black lines does not necessarily add up to a great darkening. Besides, Braun calculators are terrific looking; black dinner jackets are preferable to sky blue dinner jackets; better a posturing young poet, surely, than a buttondown teenage arbitrager in chinos. But why all black and why now? The color is gunpowder and midnight; the message is menace and highly private pleasure. --By Kurt Andersen