A Navy Blue State
of Mind:
Thom Browne SS21

That year the prefect of St. Adalbert's issued a new set of uniform regulations. The girls' skirts, formerly plaid, were now to be navy blue, to match the boys' jackets and ties. On the first day of school, Muffie and Maisie were sent home for wearing denim. Maisie, who picked out her own clothes, was denied television for a week by her parents. Muffie's mother, who sewed all her children's outfits herself, marched into the prefect's office, Muffie in tow, to argue the charge. She brought with her a color chart issued by a thread manufacturer. She held a patch marked "Navy Blue" against Muffie's skirt.

"It's the darkest blue denim available, and as you can see, it matches perfectly."

"I'm sorry, madam, but we cannot have our charges looking like field hands."

Bad luck had visited the Turnipfield Marauders for years before the general manager decided to change their color scheme to mustard and khaki. But the GM's decision to pin the blame on their navy blue uniforms was less based in science or superstition than in the blandishments of Bella, the decorator he had been seeing. She was betting heavily on a return to the earth tones favored in the 70s, and was making up apartments for ambitious young people that looked like some yurt in Taos where Euel Gibbons and Dennis Hopper once ate fricasseed acorns. For Bella, navy blue was the dark side, the regimental nemesis of her ecological grooviness. She murmured in the GM's ear until her preference became law.

At Maury's, the bar across the street, every victory had been soaked in pink champagne—which stood out well against the navy blue. Marauders fans dyed their hair to match the winning hue, and you could spot the team’s supporters on the highway by the color of their cars. On opening day the stands were awash in navy blue. People held up large blue cards, which clashed subtly because they all had different commercial sources. Lusty booing erupted when the team entered the field, looking like so many fried cheese balls. Still, the team stood smiling, unbowed by the jeers. Then, as one, they began unbuttoning, very slowly at first, and suddenly threw open their arms to reveal the navy blue underneath.

Edna and Alice had wandered through the park after dinner and were lying side by side on a grassy mound, looking up, trying to remember constellations.

"There's Orion!"

"That one I think is Cassiopeia."

"And over there is the big fish."

"There's no big fish. There's a big dog and a big bear."

"It's clearly a fish. Look at its tail."

"Where exactly are you looking?"

"Over there, that patch that looks sort of purple, over the pine tree."

"That's not purple. It's an optical illusion."

"I know. The sky is blue. But bits of it look purple at night."

"It's still blue. Midnight blue."

"Midnight blue? There's no such thing."

"Look it up."
"I think it's navy blue. It's the exact color of my peacoat."

"What Color Are the Blues?" is the song Dooley Wilson plays in that famous scene cut from Casablanca, present whereabouts unknown. In point of fact, the song itself has disappeared. It was maybe written by Fats Waller in 1932, and maybe lost by his music publisher, or maybe it originated in New Orleans two decades earlier—some say it was written by Buddy Bolden himself. In any event it was never published, for reasons that remain obscure, and although it just missed being recorded a couple of times—the title appears on lead sheets for both Duke Ellington's band and Lionel Hampton's—no actual recording has ever surfaced. All we have is a fragment of lyric in one of Babs Gonzalez's memoirs, and another in a 1936 column in the Chicago Defender, and they do not appear to come from the same song. Now and then some aged jazz player sings a bar or two in a TV documentary. In one account it is the plaint of a jilted suitor staring out at the sea, in another a young woman debates what shade to wear to her ex-fiancé's wedding, in yet a third it is a pioneering anthem of Black liberation. What everybody remembers is the night at Minton's in 1946 when someone in the crowd shouted the title at Dizzy Gillespie. "Navy blue," he snapped, before blasting into "Salt Peanuts."

Nel blu' dipinto di blu.’ That's what the work order said for the dining room. Blue painted blue. The customer, a larkish sort, had emailed his specifications from the other side of the globe. He had bought the house online, had hired workers and set them to their tasks via DMs. His furniture and kitchenware was due to arrive in a week via shipping container, and would be uncrated and positioned by yet another gang of laborers directed remotely. Gianni, originally from Positano, recognized the line from "Volare" and translated it for his colleagues on the paint crew. But what did it mean? The study was to be the color of a manila envelope, the kitchen that of a baby eggplant, the principal bedroom the shade of Elizabeth Taylor's eyes. All that was clear enough. But blue painted blue? Which blue? Indigo, Cerulean, Periwinkle, Delft? The painters debated among themselves until they realized they soon wouldn't have time to complete the job. Finally, Anand took action. He chose a can at random and painted a patch of wall. The pigment being quick-drying latex, he then opened another can and painted over the patch. The result: navy blue. The customer never said a word.

Abigail and Istvan spent a great deal of their time at the shopping mall. They would browse every outlet, not neglecting the scented-candle shop or the place that sold pleather jackets with speakers, so that knuckleheads could blast their music wherever they set foot. They would slowly amble from one outlet to another, drifting through the aisles, pausing only for occasional sustenance at the food court and the very occasional nap in the loo. They never seemed to have any money, but somehow they were able to keep acquiring stuff. They both affected a mode involving a lot of staggered multicolored layers and many flimsy scarves tied and flung and draped around their necks. This both allowed them to strut like rock stars and blurred the border between their clothes and any other clothes they happened to brush by.

One Wednesday night in March they found, in an alcove between an eyeglass boutique and a wall, an entire consignment of garments destined for the most fashion-forward franchise in the mall, sent from its head office in Talinn. They somehow—no one knows how—got the pallet out of the mall, down to Abigail's mother's house, and up to Abigail's bedroom.

Inside they found an array of t-shirts, slacks, and slip-on sneakers, all rigorously plain and all in navy blue. This represented "The New Essentials" and "The Monochrome Set," according to the accompanying promotional literature, which featured a black-and-white photograph of Yves Klein leaping into the void. (A sentence in agate type disavowed any connection or similarity to International Klein Blue©.) Abigail and Istvan were even more ashen than usual as they stared aghast at the spread of avant-garde workers' leisurewear. "This is what you wear in detox!" Istvan finally screamed.

A young man with a bright future—or so they said—had been living in his car, waiting for a callback from any one of the hundreds of job applications he had submitted. His shirt and tie were on a hanger in the back; his one suit, a conservative dark gray, lay neatly folded under a mat in the trunk. His father, a traveling salesman, had taught him the trick of pressing a suit by laying it out between the mattress and box spring of a hotel bed. He didn't have a hotel bed, but reasoned that the mat, under a couple of boxes of books, would do the job just as well.

One day his phone finally rang. To his delight it was a consulting firm on the cutting edge of the lighting-fixture industry, a place that had historically served as a springboard for many bright young persons of his sort, who now dominated the profession. He extracted the suit and picked off numerous imaginary bits of dust, removed his oxfords from their chamois sack, re-tied his necktie several times to get the lengths just right, and presented himself at the reception desk.

His interview, however, was frosty. He was bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, knew all the right answers, displayed modest wit, but nevertheless the partner seemed distinctly unimpressed. Deflated, he sloped out of the office. The receptionist, seeing his distress, held out a bowl of seasonal candy corn with a comforting smile. "I can't figure out where I went wrong," he confided. "Oh, hon," she replied. "They're all wearing navy blue this year."

In those days your mother would dress you up in a navy blue blazer—there was no other kind of blazer—with brass buttons and a fictitious crest on the pocket, with gray serge trousers that itched ferociously, a white shirt and a mass-market rep tie in shades of asphalt and cement. Only then were you considered proper to mingle with nice people. You would burrow into the farthest corner of the most distant couch, armed with a supply of juice drink and windmill cookies, and think dark thoughts about everyone in the room. You would snicker as you saw the adults begin to bob and weave after their third Dubonnet, wonder whether or not the clock on the mantle was actually stopped, wonder what would be playing if anyone cared enough to turn on the television, pretend to fall asleep whenever a grownup seemed about to approach you with something to say.

But mostly the nice people left you alone, and that was a good thing, because despite the painstaking part in your hair, you were not a nice kid. You would have snarled if anyone attempted to talk down to you, and fallen asleep for real if anyone tried to talk sports. You weren't often tested this way, though, because mostly people would just take one look at your blazer and decide you were nice. You began to think it would be a good outfit for robbing banks.