Why Do Designers Wear Black?

I wake up every morning with the question of what to wear for the day. 

I turn the light on in my closet yet everything remains dark.  80% of my closet is lined with black clothing items. Neutral colors of tans and denims make up 15%. The last 5% includes colorful impulse buys that hang neatly on their untouched hanger and a colorful sock in the back corner that hasn’t seen its matching counterpart in years. 

A sad, colorful sock in the back corner. 

Let’s rewind back to 2011. The highlight of my morning was sorting through an overfilled drawer with the most colorful, most obnoxiously patterned knee-high socks. I didn’t care if they matched. In fact, it was better if they didn’t. Somewhere between then and now those socks were replaced with black ones. 

I didn’t think about that sock much. Not until recently coming across an instagram post by @alokvmenon (Alok Vaid-Menon). It was a book report on “Chromophobia” by David Batchelor. Full transparency, I didn’t read the book, but instead, got hyper-fixated on the title. Chromophobia. A fear of color.  The word played over and over again in my head forcing me to question the role, or lack of role, color played in my personal life despite it playing an important role in my professional life.

Designers’ professional lives can’t escape color. Color studies. Color psychology. Finding colors that feel new. Finding colors that feel known. Adapting when your client has a vendetta against the very exact hex code you used. There’s even whole marketing campaigns and products that revolve around the color of the year. Some markets have even have a monopoly over specific color schemes. Red and yellow? Fast food industry. Red and green? All things Christmas. I mean, try to create a poster with solely red and green and convince me it doesn’t belong smack-dab in the middle of December. 

Color runs through our veins as designers but we don’t wear it on our sleeves. Agencies are known to have a relaxed dress code when clients aren’t around.  However, designers have universally made their uniform black inside and outside of the office. There are memes galore, hundreds of Quora questions and Reddit threads of people asking why designers of all sorts wear one color. Several people have even said to me “I should have known you were a designer based off your outfit.” 

So that brings us to why? Why do designers wear all black? Why don’t we embrace colors like we embrace them in our work? Well, I have a few theories.  (Spoiler alert, there’s no definitive answer.) 

Theory 1: Dress for success.

Classic photographs of famous designers come in one style; a black and white outfit to match a black and white edit. We subconsciously (or knowingly) associate black with success in the industry and imitate it. Steve Jobs? Black turtleneck. Sylvia Harris? Black boat top paired with a  necklace. Vera Wang?  Sleeveless black top and black bottoms tied together with black heels. 

Theory 2: Give me black or give me more sleep.  

Designers don’t sleep at night. Ideas don’t come M-F during business hours.  Ideas

come from seeing an abstracted shadow on the wall at 2am and connecting it with the feeling you had when you realized the lyrics to your favorite song from 5 years ago weren’t what you thought they were. 

Because of those thoughts that happen in the middle of the night, we reach for an outfit that we don’t have to think about when the sun wakes up. Black. It’s a color we are familiar with from all the late nights hoping another car would drive by with their high-beams on to cast more shadows on the walls. You don't have to think about what color pants to wear with a black top. It’s a color that mixes and matches with itself and comes with a higher level of formality tied to it compared to other colors. 

Theory 3: The color for introverts.

Creatives are generally known to be introverted.  If you want to avoid people, or better yet, if you want people to avoid you, wear black. Black lacks indicators of approachability and feelings of friendliness.  When I was going to school, I noticed far less people would sit next to me and strike up a conversation if I was dressed in darkness. The moment I put on a color pulled from the rainbow, I was suddenly put into more social interactions. 

Theory 4: “Ideas should be the color”

Perhaps we analyze color so much that when it comes to what we wear, black is the best choice. The general public doesn’t have strong feelings on black compared to say, a mustard yellow blazer. Blazers are seen as formal, but the color? You bet people are going to have opinions and comments. Black makes a statement without drawing attention to yourself.  It won’t clash with the palette used in your work. It allows the joyous colors from your project to be the focal point and for you to be the professional presenting it.  Adage designer Tosh Hall, explains it as “the reason we wear black is because it’s simple and everything else should be the color – your ideas should be the color.”

Theory 5: There’s no underlying reason at all.

Perhaps it’s just a color people feel most confident in. Or perhaps it’s just a color people unexplainably like more than the other options available.  Ask a person why their favorite color is their favorite color. 9 times out of 10 they’ll say “I don’t know I’ve just always liked that color.”

Or perhaps it’s just my little designer heart overanalyzing a color commonality and trying to give it more context as to why.