My mom has this joke about me and black blouses, that I own them the way other people own tote bags, no memory of acquiring any of them, definite memory of acquiring all of them. She’s not wrong. I counted last week while doing laundry and it was seven, which is one more than I remembered and one less than the number I was quietly dreading.
Here’s the thing nobody says out loud about black. It’s not the safe choice, it’s the choice you make when you don’t want to make a choice, which is different, and I think we all know it’s different, we just don’t want to sit with that at eight in the morning.
I bought the current one for nineteen dollars at the place on the corner I’ve adopted as mine, the one where the Tuesday guy restocks like he’s personally trying to ruin my budget.
Cost per wear right now sits around eighty cents, which I recalculated twice because the first number felt too good to be true and it mostly was, I’d forgotten I paid for hemming.
Tucked in, it’s a completely different piece of clothing. Tucked in it looks like I have a plan for the day. Left out, over jeans, untucked and slightly crumpled from being balled up in my bag during a meeting that ran long, it looks like I gave up sometime around Wednesday, which, fair.
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That’s the actual test for this category, not how it photographs on day one. It’s how it photographs on day eleven, worn four times, washed twice, one of those washes done in a hurry with the wrong setting because I was running late. Mine survived that. A cheaper one I bought two years ago did not, it pilled under the arms by week three and I retired it to “house blouse,” which is where bad buys go to die slowly instead of quickly.
The gamble here, and I’ll say it plainly, is the silky one. The slippery kind that looks incredible on the right person doing the right amount of nothing all day, and looks like a costume malfunction on someone who’s carrying a laptop bag and running for a bus. I own one. I love it. I have also flashed a coworker my bra strap through it in bad lighting, so, gamble.
Black doesn’t get boring, I’ve decided, it gets under-thought. You buy it because it’s easy and then you don’t actually look at it again until it’s thin at the elbows and you’re wondering why it stopped working. Mine’s still in the good column, buy number two this month, and if you’d seen buy number one, a stiff, cheap thing that creased just from me looking at it wrong, you’d get why I’m relieved.
