Grief is universal. The way we dress to signal it is not. In parts of West Africa, white is the traditional colour of mourning. In China and several other East Asian cultures, white has long held the same function. In Brazil and parts of South America, purple. The Western convention — that black is the colour of death and the proper dress for those who grieve — is specific to a particular cultural tradition and has a traceable, if not entirely tidy, history.
Black dye is difficult to produce well. True, deep, stable black requires layering multiple dyes — typically first mordanting the cloth with iron-based compounds, then overdyeing with plant-based dyes such as weld or woad. Before synthetic chemistry arrived in the 19th century, achieving a rich, durable black was expensive and technically demanding. That cost made black fabric a status symbol in much of medieval Europe, even before its association with mourning was fully established.
Medieval Roots
The connection between black and death in Western Europe has roots in both classical antiquity and early Christian tradition. Roman magistrates wore dark togas at funerals; early Christian communities, drawing on a symbolic vocabulary in which darkness represented spiritual absence, extended the association. But formal mourning dress — as a codified system with rules about who wore what, for how long, and in what degree of darkness — really solidified in the late medieval and early modern periods.
By the 16th century, European courts had developed elaborate mourning protocols. The English court under the Tudors expected nobles to wear black for defined periods following a royal death, with the depth of the mourning and the quality of the black fabric signalling proximity to the deceased. These codes were not just about grief; they were about the public performance of loyalty, hierarchy, and social order. A duke who turned up to court in insufficient black after a royal death was making a political statement, whether he meant to or not.
The Victorian Apotheosis
The practice reached its most elaborate expression in Victorian Britain, where mourning dress became a detailed, commercially sustained ritual system. Following a death in the family, women were expected to progress through stages of mourning — full mourning, half-mourning, ordinary mourning — each with its prescribed fabrics, trimmings, and durations. Full mourning required dull black fabrics (shiny finishes were considered insufficiently subdued); bombazine, a dull-finished blend of silk and wool, was the approved material. Jet, the black gemstone, was the only acceptable jewellery.
Queen Victoria’s forty years of mourning dress following Prince Albert’s death in 1861 made this system culturally dominant in a way it had never quite been before. It also made it commercially enormous: London firms such as Jay’s of Regent Street operated exclusively as mourning warehouses, and the textile industry developed specialised mourning fabrics in anticipation of demand. Death, which had always had an economic dimension, had now generated a dedicated retail sector.
After the Great War
The First World War killed so many so quickly that the mourning system simply could not hold. With whole communities bereaved simultaneously and fabric subject to wartime rationing, the elaborate Victorian protocols became impossible to maintain. By the 1920s, formal mourning dress had largely collapsed as a social requirement outside the immediate funeral service itself. Black survived as the conventional colour for funerals, but the month-by-month gradations disappeared within a generation.
What remained — and what persists today — is a much simpler convention: black at funerals, and black when you want to signal solemnity or absence. It is a shadow of the old system, stripped of its procedural complexity, retaining only its colour. That colour, at least, has proven extraordinarily durable. It crossed the channel, crossed the centuries, and outlasted every empire that formalised it.