The Big Black Fashion Conspiracy

I've been looking on-line for clothes recently, expecting to have far too many to choose from, but if you eliminate everything black, it's amazing how limited your choices become.  I know black is popular, but it's a difficult colour to wear for most of us who are over 60.  Fashion stores, please take note!

I would like some new trousers, which need to be in a petite size as I am vertically challenged, and I have been looking at other possible purchases.  I don't want any more black trousers, but for some bizarre reason most of the petite trousers are black.  Why?  People barely notice us shorties at the best of times, but if we wear black we will be almost invisible!  Navy would make a nice change, or maybe grey or dark brown.  I quite fancy something more colourful too, which will definitely make me more visible, but where can I find more colourful clothes?

Take Marks and Spencer as an example.  The good news is that I can get M & S clothes delivered here in Spain. The bad news is that most of them are black.  They have eight pairs of petite trousers: one pair is charcoal, another pair is navy (which also come in black), there is a "black mix" pair of jeggings and the remaining five pairs are only available in black.  Three of their seven skirts are black.  Out of eleven coats and jackets, eight are in a particular colour: guess what that colour is?! The little black dress is alive and well at M & S, though five other colours are available: a total of fourteen dresses, six of which are black.  I looked at eleven tops (five of them were black) and finally I found eight jumpers and cardigans, where black shared the lead with blue, both of them having three items.


I decided to start my search at Debenhams.com by including only petite clothing in UK size 12. Result!  I was very excited to see that I had a grand total of 231 items of clothing to select from. However, when I looked at the numbers for each colour, I could see that 87 of those items were in black, 63 were blue (the majority of these were dark blue and navy, which on my screen looked suspiciously like black), 18 were cream, 11 were brown, 10 were ivory and the other colours were in single figures.

Debenhams' petite trousers in black and "looks like black"

At first glance Wallis looked very promising, with twelve colours plus  black, however when I checked each colour individually black was the only shade that had more than one page of items to choose from.  Principles Petite by Ben de Lisi has a choice of seven colours, plus black.  It's a small collection of stylish clothes, most of which (surprise! surprise!) are black (14 items) followed by blue (8), cream (4) and only one or two items are available in the other colours.

John Lewis deliver to Spain, so I checked them out.  I was in shock when I went down the list of colours, as although black was in the lead with 51 items  followed by blue with 47, when I clicked on "multi" I saw the amazing figure of 68.  More than black!  However further investigation revealed that most of the multi-coloured items had some black in them, which in my view made them more black than multi-coloured..

I'm not going to give up though.  The fashion industry may still be trying to persuade us that black is best, but I've just seen Pantone's colour forecast for 2013.  It looks as if Emerald is the colour to go for Spring 2013, with other options being African Violet, Monaco Blue, Nectarine, Poppy Red, Lemon Zest, Tender Shoots, Dusk Blue and Grayed Jade.  Dare I say that these all sound like lovely bright colours? With no mention of black!  I'm hoping that this means that the fashion industry will become a lot more colourful and I can start replacing the black items in my wardrobe - but I'm not holding my breath!

Pantone colours for Spring 2013