Design: The Allure of Darth Vaderism

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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-siècle 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.