The new black

by Susan Anderson
Tuesday, December 4, 2007 2:13 PM MST

Crowded over the shrimp bowl with me at a wedding reception, a business owner, who also happens to be a young father, told me that, “Men are the new women.”

He was thinking of the day when he was standing in front of all of his employees, addressing them, when he noticed a smear of baby cereal on his shirt sleeve.

This is a story I have heard in variations from lots of mothers who have discovered a telltale bit of mess left behind by a child on their professional clothes.

My own experience of this includes the time I was conducting a live television interview with an elected official and I reached into the pocket of my silk blazer for a pen. I pulled out an infant’s pacifier. This was on camera, of course.

I don’t know how this is working for men, but I’m guessing that any woman who spies baby saliva on a coworker will feel sympathy. And I’m also guessing that most men wouldn’t notice an unexplained substance on the shirt.

If they did, they would just assume that the man’s pit bull slimed him right before work.

Pink, black and blue

The idea of something (a man) being the “new” something else (a woman) began 45 years ago when fashion editor Diana Vreeland announced that “Pink is the navy blue of India.”

Since black was then and usually is the basic thing that goes with everything and is just right for all events, people are constantly deciding that another color is the chosen one. For a while, it was brown that was the new black.

Eventually, the Wall Street Journal declared in the 1980s that “White is the new black.”

And now the “X is the new Y” concept has gone nuts.

In the movie “Josie and the Pussycats,” we were told that “pink is the new red,” “orange is the new pink” and “Health Ledger is the new Matt Damon.”

To localize the idea, in Casper we could have said about real estate in 1985 that “east is the new west.” Or how about “12th is the new Second Street.” I don’t much care for the true statement, “Ghosts are the new Rockies.”

About the Casper climate you could say, “10 is the new minus 15” about what we now think is cold weather, or “December is the new November” if you’re trying to characterize when the snow really begins. And on these cold nights, it’s true that flannel is the new satin.

The moms of sixth-grade girls will lament that “11 is the new 14” when they describe their daughters, wishing that they could find a way to turn 11 back into what it was when 14 was 14.

A 2001 episode of “Saturday Night Live” referred to the phrase “small is the new big” as applied to electronics that keep getting better, cheaper and smaller.

Cell phones and digital cameras are good examples. Then the show turned the phrase on its head by insisting that “big is the new small,” because an actor was showing off a ridiculously huge cell phone.

Musicians have latched on to the twists on words. There are albums titled “Awake is the New Sleep” (Australian Ben Lee), “Quiet is the New Loud” (Norwegian duo Kings of Convenience) and “Folk is the New Black” (Janis Ian).

The worst use of the “new black” idea is the fact that American clothes are showing a creeping waistline to match their customers, according to a fashion-aware friend of mine. So the size 12 that you wear today would have been a 14 10 years ago.

In other words, 12 is the new 14, but I’m not planning to dig up any old clothes to confirm that.

And the best use of “X is the new Y” was in a trailer for the 2004 movie “Ocean’s Twelve,” the sequel to “Ocean’s Eleven.”

The line was “Twelve is the new eleven.”

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