I wore black for a month straight
What you learn when you go Dark Mode
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Towards the end of last year I (Erin) started feeling alienated from clothes. I felt little pleasure getting dressed, and had no desire to shop. At first, I figured this was an occupational hazard — Jonah and I look at clothes a lot, reconnoitering both for ourselves and Spy Nation. But after checking in with some stylish women in my orbit, among them editors and designers, I discovered I wasn’t alone in my sartorial doldrums.
Several told me they felt fatigued by the question of what to wear, whereas they used to feel excited by it. We agreed that the firehose of fashion imagery we face daily — runway pics, targeted ads, GRWMs and affiliate-linked lists of the “15 best ____ to wear now” — is clearly a large part of the problem. I felt like I needed to lock myself in a metaphorical Faraday cage and hit reset.
I thought back to what it was like when I first got into clothes, as a fashion-obsessed teen. A theme quickly emerged: constraints. For one thing, back then, there was no impulse-copping on your phone at all hours. There was no e-comm at all. For another, I grew up without much dough, meaning my desire for cool clothes profoundly outstripped my ability to acquire them. This was a gift in disguise: I delighted in thrift shop finds, in exploring my taste and honing my sense of style rummaging through secondhand racks without the influence of trend- and numbers-driven merchandisers.
At the same time, I curated a fantasy closet of sorts, taping magazine tears into spiral notebooks. I maintained these proto-Pinterest “fashion journals” for ~a decade. A couple such pages are below, including baby Gisele in an ad for Stella McCartney’s first Chloé collection in 1998. I never expected to own any of the things in these magazines. The pleasure was in the wanting, and in cribbing styling principles that helped steer my thrifting. Long before “dupe” culture, I got good at ferreting out runway doppelgangers in the aisles of Salvation Army.
Leafing through those decades-old journals last December, I realized that, to rebuild my appetite for getting dressed again, it might help to develop some productive constraints. I wanted to turn down the noise and limit my inputs, to go back to something I’ve done since I was a little kid: lock myself in my room and play around with my clothes.
I committed to a sartorial version of dry January in which I’d avoid all color. For the first 31 days of 2026, I would only wear black. I envisioned this as a sort of fast, a slapper purification ritual. I’d keep a journal of the month, cataloging what I wore and what I felt as the experiment proceeded.
With access only to a limited section of my closet, what clothes would I miss? And what would I learn about what I actually wanted to wear?
The ground rules…
I wear black often, but rarely do I wear it top to bottom. I prefer to break it up — say, black jeans with a red short sleeve sweatshirt from the ‘50s, a white belt, and the new ugly shoe in brown.
Up top, I decided that zinging any colorful accents off my monastic palette was off-limits. The only accessories I permitted myself were a black waxed canvas tote (from this great L.A. store) and silver or gold jewelry. When it rained, I’d grab a black umbrella.
To respect the walls of my Faraday cage, I would buy absolutely no new clothing for those 31 days. Everything had to be A. black and B. already in my closet (and, in a couple clutch cases, Jonah’s).
Observing an all-black diet was an idea I’d had kicking around for a bit. Back in August I wrote about the allure of going Monochrome Mode, i.e. wearing one color head-to-toe, and how it can help “clarify the way we think about getting dressed.”
Also, I’d always been intrigued by the Rei Kawakubos of the world, who wear nothing but black 24/7/365. What did they know that I didn’t?
The month begins…
January 1: The first thing I do is photograph all the black clothes and shoes I own, so I’ll know which pieces are in play, and so I can think about how they might play off each other.
Friends, Lesson No. 1 hits me right then and there: