Colors talk. And black, writes Cambridge academic John Harvey in his new history of sartorial darkness, says, "Don't see me, and see me." What else? "I am death and freedom beyond man and woman. I am what is not. I am no self and sheer self. I am undivided power." I am hip, Harvey might have added, but that may be covered by the previous statements.

Prior to the 19th century, men dressed in a splendid array of colors. Even a poor man could afford a brown or green outfit topped with a red or blue hat. But in the 1820s everyone began going black. First the dress coat, then the trousers, the cravat and finally the waistcoat. Black as Newcastle coal. Baudelaire, Dickens, and Balzac all wondered why the men of their prosperous age chose to appear around town in mourning clothes.

It was no coincidence that black became the vogue at the height of the Industrial Revolution. Prosperous industrialists from northern England were some of the first men seen about London in dark duds. These thrifty, sober men got rich, moved to town, and brought their severely Calvinist taste in clothes with them.

What the 19th century Scrooges didn't count on was black's beauty and sexual attractiveness. Black hints at death, darkness, danger, the unknown, the nocturnal world. It brings together three volatile gods: Eros, Thanatos, and Kratos (sex, death, and power). You don't have to be Robert Mapplethorpe to recognize the attraction of black leather

Harvey is terrific on the history of black garments, quoting sources from Castiglione to Courbet. (My favorite tidbit: 12th-century Cistercian monks wore white, Benedictines black, and each ridiculed the other.) But Harvey's take on the contemporary meanings of black is disappointingly slim. If black shirts were used by fascists in the 1930s to connote deadly power, one suspects they have an entirely different meaning today, something having more to do with the rejection of mainstream consumerist society -- a defiance available for $16.99 at your local Gap.

--Bruce Barcott