People’s love affair with black is as deep-rooted as the colour itself. It consumes us, streamlines us, hides us or highlights us depending on what you expect black to do for you at any given time, says Bandana Tewari

Toni Morrison, a Nobel Prize Laureate in Literature, once said “You think dark is just one colour, but it ain’t. There’re five or six kinds of black. Some silky, some woolly. Some just empty. Some like fingers. And it don’t stay still. It moves and changes from one kind of black to another.” Funny, in fashion parlance, we often read how, ‘Red is the new black’, ‘Butter-cup yellow is the new black’, ‘The derrière is the new black’...every season there is a new black!

People’s love affair with black is as deep-rooted as the colour itself. It consumes us, streamlines us, hides us or highlights us depending on what you expect black to do for you at any given time. But whichever way your mind meets in synergistic thrill with black, a woman in black has been epitomised through the history of fashion as a complete woman. “One must respect black. Nothing prostitutes it. It does not please the eye or awaken another sense. It is the agent of the mind...,” said the French symbolist, Odilon Redon.

It would be fair to say that the heretic past of the ‘black magic woman’ has something to do with the mystical allure that women in black project time and again. Part devil, part saviour, this archetypal woman has existed in our memories, the archaic prototype of the woman that many artists, photographers, designers invoke as their muse, sometimes unknowingly. Infused with primordial creative energies of the Mother Goddess, this woman carries with her the secrets of magic. Clad in black, she is the personification of the subterranean forces that lurk away from light, sometimes revealing disturbing truths. Just as without black, no colour has any depth, the ‘black magic woman’ resorts to the symbolic and literal energies of darkness to search our conscience and delve into the recesses of our minds. This folkloric ‘black magic woman’ was many things – worshipper of the moon, ghosts, fertility deities, conduit to the Underworld.

Photographs courtesy: Helmut Newton WORK, published by Taschen.

For complete story, subscribe to Verve Magazine or buy the Verve issue on stands now!