ABSTRACT
The quality wore silks and velvets, which declared, from side to side of the continent, that they were the quality. The colours are a metaphor for team competition, because red and green and blue and yellow all have equal value, and any of them could be exchanged for any other. Himmler meant the black uniform to awaken fear in every heart. Camouflage clothes loom large in our culture, as real uniforms, and frock coats, used once to do. The Vestal Virgins in Rome wore white, as did priests and priestesses through the ancient world. At the end of Thomas Pynchon's novel Gravity's Rainbow, this searches white and black to the darker depths. Darwin argues in his under-read second classic The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex that the superb glossy black of panthers and blackbirds had intensified from the primal brown through the competitive drama of sexual display.
