“Gowanus Black” is the new black!
Brooklyn’s Nautical Purgatory is officially trending among fashionistas, with iconic New York City-based brand Calvin Klein hawking jackets in a hue called Gowanus Black.
The toxic Gowanus Canal is notoriously filled with noxious sludge often referred to as “black mayonnaise,” and some Gowanusaurs speculated that the gross stuff lurking at the bottom of the fetid waterway served as the inspiration for the jackets’ color — which to the naked eye looks no different than any other shade of black.
“So ‘Gowanus Black’ is a color? As in mayonnaise?” tweeted locals Jamie Courville and Chris Reynolds, who together are working on a documentary about the long-time industrial neighborhood that the city wants to upzone to make way for more residential buildings.
One of the Calvin Klein garments cut in Gowanus Black cloth, the so-called men’s Foundation Trucker Jacket, was nearly sold out by press time, with just one of the cotton-denim-and-polyester coats emblazoned with a black-and-white flag on the back available for $76.
But a second Graphic Denim Trucker jacket for women, featuring a “modern graphic logo” in red stitching on the front, is still available in spades in Gowanus Black, according to Calvin Klein’s website, which shows the piece stocked in sizes from extra small to extra large for $69.99.
The women’s jacket also comes in a color inexplicably named “Gowanus White” — which this newspaper speculates is a reference to the recent announcement that part of the filthy canal is the cleanest it has been in more than a century, thanks to a recently completed dredging-and-capping program the Feds conducted in the Fourth Street Turning Basin as part of the Superfund site’s cleanup.
Calvin Klein reps did not immediately respond to questions about the origins of the Gowanus black and white colors, when the jackets first hit shelves, and whether they are sold exclusively online or in stores.
