Go Away White

This NY Times article really caught my eyes today for obvious reasons :)

A select few memorable phrases from the article:

"We were all young and poor: If your clothes were all black, everything matched and was vaguely elegant (especially if you squinted). Entropy was a thrifty, built-in style; if your tights ripped into cobwebs, that, too, was a look."

"Looking back at my own experience, it seems that black clothes were a response to certain catastrophic influences that came up with terrible regularity. We had all lost, or were in the process of losing, friends to AIDS, addictions and accidents. There were always disappointments in romance, and no surplus of mental health or functional families. Boots, black and leather provided a certain group with a certain emotional exoskeleton, a blustering attempt to express an edgy, careless willingness to hurl ourselves into oblivion. But the writing on the collective black flag, for all our reckless posturing, may have been best articulated as: 'Ow, I’m hypersensitive. Please don’t hurt me again.'"

The last point is definitely interesting, as it argues about the correlation between black clothes and the various devastations that define one's life and the symbolic meaning of black clothes.

Now compare that to these words from Karlo (of Atelier, of course):
"What I do is deeply personal. I am lucky that a lot of people connect with it. I am really attracted to cities. When I think of cities, I see concrete and graphite, gray, black and white. I never picture myself in a bucolic countryside. I am not against these environments, but whenever I picture myself, it's urban - there are certain vibrations, textures and feelings that come with that, and that is expressed through the brands I am attracted to. I do not see myself
particularly as gothic, although there is a lot of black and distressed clothing in the store. I am kind of romantic, but in a sense that things do not always end well, not in a pastoral sense."

It is interesting how Karlo views black clothes not necessarily as a reflection of gothic doom and gloom, but more of a romanticisim and urbanity....

Speaking of the article, I'd be curious to get that Valerie Steele's book "Gothic : Dark Glamour" :D