No, it's nothing to do with the recent stylish sci-fi comedy, though John Harvey may well include a still of Will Smith and Tommy Lee Jones in their sharp black suits in his second edition. An English lecturer at Cambridge whose exhaustive research can't quite hide the fact that he's more at home in his own field of the Victorian novel than in the rarefied atmosphere of the semiotics of fashion, Harvey traces the development of black from its original status as the colour of mourning through its adoption by the clergy, the merchant classes and, finally, just about everybody - even women, though his theory doesn't really stretch to include women - as a mode of dress which confers both power and anonymity on the wearer. As an illustrated jaunt through the recent sartorial past, Men in Black is mildly diverting, but Harvey is no Roland Barthes, and the more arguments he trots out, the more one suspects he doth protest too much.
