Royal protocol asks members of the family to travel with a black outfit packed, in case someone passes while they are away. That is readiness on a magnificent scale. A version of it has now escaped the palace, and plenty of people in their twenties are getting dressed for an ordinary Friday as though a coffin were on the guest list.
The look is easy to spot once it has been pointed out. Black tailoring cut sharp, a shirt buttoned to the throat. A veil clipped to a hat, a comb, or nothing much at all, even seen in the queue for a club. Gloves sometimes. Sunglasses indoors after dark, worn like a will has just been read. Fashion editors have taken to calling it funeral fashion and have found it a patron saint in the wealthy widow, a woman whose grief arrives with excellent tailoring and no visible money worries. She has been aspirational for decades. The novelty is the setting. Nobody has died. The table is booked for eight and there is a cocktail list.
The easy verdict is costume, and some of it deserves that verdict. A £12 veil from a fast fashion site, worn to look mysterious in photographs, is a costume. Halloween has been going on for years. The more interesting question is why she has wandered out of October and into the regular calendar.
Black on the living is hardly new. Rei Kawakubo and Ann Demeulemeester put whole wardrobes into black in the 1980s and were rewarded with the nickname crows. What has changed is the addition of the ritual pieces. Nobody in a black jumper is asking to be mistaken for a mourner. A veil is asking exactly that.
A little history helps here, and the Victorians did not do mourning by halves. When Albert died in 1861, Victoria wore black for forty years, and the country copied her so keenly that suppliers ran short of mourning fabric. A widow moved through stages over two and a half years, from deep mourning, to full, to half. Each with permitted fabrics, shades and rules about where she could go and whom she could see. In full mourning she wore a long black veil whenever she left the house. The whole system was compulsory, heavily gendered, and a rather expensive way of proving respectability. Women carried most of it. Nobody sane would wish it back.
Inside all that rigidness, the veil did something clever. It lets a grieving woman stand in public without being available to the public. She could be looked at but not read. Her face stayed her own. The rule said she must hide, and the hiding turned out to be a mercy.
That function survived the abolition of the rule. A veil in a bar does the same job under worse lighting. A bar is a place built for being looked at and talked to, and someone in a veil is present and unreachable all at once. That is an attractive position for anybody who has spent the week being available to a phone, a manager and a group chat. Some of the appeal is simply that.
The rules of mourning were dropped generations ago and nothing was put in their place. Compassionate leave runs to a few days. A friendship that ends without anyone dying gets no leave at all. For a stretch of recent years, funerals were capped at a handful of mourners, so a grandparent could go into the ground with ten people watching and a livestream for everyone else. Then there are the losses that never had ceremonies to begin with: the friend who drifted, the plan that quietly shrank, the year that went missing. None of it has a dress code. A Victorian widow at least lived in a culture that admitted she was in a state and dressed it accordingly.
So the black goes on by choice, and the choosing matters. A Victorian widow wore it because she had to. A twenty-three-year-old in a double-breasted black jacket on a Thursday has nobody to satisfy. The outfit becomes a small, stubborn announcement that something has been lost, or that loss exists and is heading for everyone at the table, the birthday girl included. Painters said the same thing once with a skull in the corner of a still life. A jacket is more wearable and considerably better for dancing.
It also works, which is the part usually skipped. A night out dressed for a funeral has to justify the outfit. Being in black with a veil pinned on invites a certain seriousness about the evening; this had better be worth it, these people had better be worth it, this drink had better be a good one. Holding the two facts together, that everyone dies and that a table has been reserved regardless, is close to the whole trick of being alive with any grace.
The flaw is the one every trend has. Once grief becomes a look, it can be bought, and a mood board is not a mourning practice. Photogenic sadness is also the kind that gets attention, while the unphotogenic kind stays offstage. Four days without showering, a dead person's number still in the phone, the awful small administrative business of closing accounts. A veil is a very beautiful way to say nothing about any of that. The trend earns its keep only if the black leaves room for the ugly version too.
Somewhere around the second round, the veil goes up over the brim of the hat so that a drink can get through. Nobody in the bar gives it a second glance. Grief, it turns out, still has to eat.
Written By: Pranamya Shetty
Edited By: Hazel Hunter
