The new black

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This article is about the catch phrase. For the album by Strapping Young Lad, see The New Black.

"_____ is the new black" is a catch phrase used to indicate the sudden popularity or versatility of an idea at the expense of the popularity of a second idea. It is also the origin of a snowclone of the form "X is the new Y".

1 History
2 Contemporary examples
3 References
4 External links

[edit] History

The origin of the phrase goes back to fashion editor Diana Vreeland in 1962 who used the phrase "Pink...(is)...the navy blue of India" meaning that the color pink seemed to be the foundation of the attire there, much like navy blue was the base color of most ensembles in New York City. The phrase is commonly misattributed to Gloria Vanderbilt and a fictional trip to India in the 1960s where she supposedly noted the prevalence of pink in the native garb. In actuality, it was Ms. Vreeland who made the observation when shown a sample of pink fabric from India.^[1]

In the late 1970s, the phrase "X is the new neutral" was widely used (culminating in the humorous observation that "It looks like red is the new neutral"). By the early 1980s this had changed to "X is the new black".^[1] Later in the 1980s, the phrase was reappropriated to indicate that other colors (frequently brown, navy blue or grey) were temporarily displacing black's position in fashion or industrial design as a versatile staple that complemented all other aspects and was generally unobjectionable.

The phrase quickly became lampooned for its simplistic nature; The Wall Street Journal soon declared that "White is the new black". It soon degenerated into a complete cliché and is now used in a great variety of contexts, mostly ironic in nature. Because the phrase is so familiar, it is now sometimes used in absurd contexts as a signifier instead of as a metaphor.

The phrase is often generalised to "X is the new Y", where the standard may be almost anything ("the new rock and roll" is a common variant). This makes it an excellent example of the linguistic phenomenon recently dubbed the snowclone, and is so widespread that the British satirical magazine Private Eye chronicles the over-use of the phrase in its column "Neophiliacs". In 2008, Lake Superior State University included "X is the new Y" on their annual "Banished Words List", stating, "The idea behind such comparisons was originally good, but we've all watched them spiral out of reasonable uses into ludicrous ones and it's now time to banish them from use."^[2]

[edit] Contemporary examples

(2001) The phrasing was used to humorous effect in the movie Josie and the Pussycats, with increasingly referential claims that, "Pink is the new red", "Orange is the new pink" and "Heath Ledger is the new Matt Damon."
(2001) "Big is the new small," referring to the supposed cool factor of a gigantic cell phone, as used in a 2001 episode of Saturday Night Live. It played off the phrase "small is the new big", indicating that small electronics were more expensive and modern than larger electronics, and therefore the smaller your cell phone the better. However, that phrase was cast in opposition to the still-earlier concept that "bigger is better".^[3]
(2001) Norwegian folk-pop duo Kings of Convenience named their debut album Quiet Is the New Loud.
(2003) Carson Kressley from Queer Eye once declared, "Gay is the new black." It is unclear whether he intended to mean that gay fashion was now extremely hip and versatile, or if being gay was trendy (implying the exploitation of gay culture along the same lines as blaxploitation in the 1970s), or both. The phrase has also been used by other authors around the same time as the launch of Kressley's show, and it is unclear who was the originator of the phrase.
(2003) In the musical Wicked, Galinda sings to Elphaba that "black is this year's pink".
(2003) Funeral for a Friend's song "Red is the New Black" from the album Casually Dressed & Deep in Conversation
(2004) The tagline for the 2004 film Ocean's Twelve, the sequel to Ocean's Eleven, was "Twelve is the new eleven."
(2005) "The New Black" is a single from Every Time I Die's third album, Gutter Phenomenon.
(2005) One of the catch phrases for Apple's iPod shuffle is "Random is the new order", which may be a double play on words.
(2005) In The New York Times of May 23, Stuart Eliott stated that "So in a trend-conscious industry, economizing is the new black." The phrase was not used in quotation marks or in an ironic context, and the metaphor is incomprehensible without a familiarity of the history of the phrase. ^[4] Black has a meaning in accounting: "in the black", financially sound.
(2005) Australian musician Ben Lee's album Awake Is the New Sleep.
(2006) A movie review of Brokeback Mountain opined that "Gay cowboys are now the new penguins"^[5] – a double reference to the surprise success of the love story (which supplanted the previous year's dark horse, the documentary March of the Penguins) and to the publicity given to gay penguin couples in zoos, which had recently been in the news.
(2006) Strapping Young Lad's album The New Black.
(2006) Janis Ian's album Folk Is the New Black.
(2006) Chris Stephenson of Microsoft, on the color of the Zune packaging: "Brown is the new black is the new white."
(2007) An episode of The Apprentice 6 was entitled "Pink is the New Black", in reference to the color of men's swimsuits.
(2007) Jonathan Byrd's album This Is the New That.
(2007) The bonus disc of Radiohead's album In Rainbows contains a track called "Down Is the New Up".
(2008) On the Weekend Update portion of Saturday Night Live, Tina Fey (in a monologue about Hillary Clinton) stated that "Bitch is the new black" while Tracy Morgan later retorted on the show that "Bitch maybe the new black, but black is the new president, bitch."