“Many of the bar owners were looking for this model look. “I think there was this environment where there was a lot of vanity involved,” posits Cooper.
Black was slimming black was sexy black was what the bartenders in the hot clubs in New York, Los Angeles and Miami were wearing. Others conjecture that the style was rooted in more superficial concerns. In fact, their personality is often what brings people to the bar.” “You blend into the background at a dark bar,” says Brown. He suggested another, less kind reason that employers put their bartenders in black: anonymity. Plus, if you’re a decent bartender, you should be able to stay stain-free through a shift. To Derek Brown, this attitude never made sense, as aprons perform the same practical duty. “I think the premise behind it was, if you got dirty behind the bar, it would hide the dirt,” says Cooper. The most common is based on the same line of thinking that prevents most people from buying white carpeting. So why were all the nation’s young bartenders once draped in the color of night? Theories vary. “I know at one time I preferred the Kenneth Cole shirts and had about four in rotation.” The only places where he saw a different uniform were traditional joints-bars where the old-fashioned, white-jacket-and-bow-tie uniform was still in effect. “I used to hit up Ross for their selection of black shirts,” remembers Venegas. At Stars in San Francisco, in 1999, Venegas wore black from head to toe. Sometimes the noir look went beyond the shirt. “I still have had a few that called for it since then,” he says. He estimates it’s somewhere around 70 percent of his bar jobs, from the time he began bartending in the late 1990s to until about 2006.
Hardwick can’t count the number of bars he worked at where he was required to don black shirts. “A black T-shirt or a black button-down.” “I felt every bar job I had, or every bar I ever went to, it was just a variation of a black shirt,” recalls Cooper. What is Tom Cruise wearing? Yeah, that’s right. Think of the poster for the 1988 film Cocktail. Turns out, bartending in a black T-shirt was a thing in the United States once upon a time, informed by a 1990s bar and club world that valued slimming and dirt-hiding apparel over bartending skills.
By November, there were more than 70 posts. Within hours, many other longtime bartenders were posting pictures of themselves bartending in black T-shirts, along with the hashtag, including bar-world luminaries like Simon Ford, Dominic Venegas, Jeffrey Morgenthaler, Charles Hardwick, Philip Duff, Jim Meehan, Derek Brown and Toby Maloney.
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