Until the 20th century, producing color fast fabrics was either impossible or expensive. Brightly-colored clothing was difficult to maintain, and if you had a

Until the 20th century, producing color fast fabrics was either impossible or expensive. Brightly-colored clothing was difficult to maintain, and if you had a lot of it, you basically needed to be rich enough to afford a staff to take care of it. As the middle class expanded, people wanted practical dress clothes, and that generally meant black or white for fastness and launderability. Puritans/dissenting protestants played a large role in manufacturing and finance in the US and Britain, and they preferred dark colors to reflect their seriousness and sobriety. As these countries came to dominate world trade, their dress preferences spread. In the 19th century morning coats and frock coats predominated in the middle/upper class. After WWI these came to be despised emblems of the older generation that started the war. The future Edward VIII of the UK, when he was Prince of Wales, popularized men's sporting wear -- his tastes were influential because they represented youth, modernity and vitality in contrast to the pre-WWI generation. He introduced the style of sport coat, tie and collar that still predominate today. His style, plus the darker colors already preferred by professionals, remain more or less the global uniform for men because of the influence of British/American professionals. "Producing fast black in the Middle Ages was a complicated process involving multiple dyeings with woad or indigo followed by mordanting, but at the dawn of Early Modern period, a new and superior method of dyeing black dye reached Europe via Spanish conquests in the New World. The new method used logwood (Haematoxylum campechianum), a dyewood native to Mexico and Central America. Although logwood was poorly received at first, producing a blue inferior to that of woad and indigo, it was discovered to produce a fast black in combination with a ferrous sulfate (copperas) mordant. Despite changing fashions in color, logwood was the most widely used dye by the 19th century, providing the sober blacks of formal and mourning clothes."[0] [0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_dye#The_rise_of_formal_black https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_dye#The_rise_of_formal...