Fade to colour

I'm big on the black. I mean, I wear black exclusively: all black, all the time. Black 501s, black T shirts, black suits and black shirts, and if I ever wore ties they'd be black. Easy to match, easy to get dressed, and it makes my dry cleaner very happy.

The trouble is, I've grown to realise that all-black loses the power of black. Black only retains its blackness if it's set against something that isn't black. (To quote Holly from 'Red Dwarf' when asked why she hadn't noticed a black hole: 'The thing about black holes is, they're black. And the thing about space - the colour of space - yer basic space colour - is... it's black.') So I bit the bullet at the weekend and bought a selection of strongly coloured shirts. Dark green, blue, wine-red, there's even an orange and a purple one in there. My wardrobe now resembles a paint shop.

There's worse. My fave shirts are Ralph Lauren's 'custom fit' - they taper in at the waist, which helps when you've got fairly broad shoulders and a fairly narrow waist - and Ralph helpfully makes them in about 20 colours; like any obsessive male I now want the full set, and not just the casual Oxfords; I'm seriously thinking about the dress shirts at £175 each. I'm in the grip of clever retailing, and my credit card is really going to suffer.

So... my days of being all black are over. But I can take some comfort from the way the coloured shirts are accentuating the black suits, giving it context and meaning. Black is still king. I'll just keep telling myself that. :-)