This season's must have: Black toilet paper

This season's must have: Black toilet paper

NEW YORK - Last Monday night, both the men's and women's bathrooms at the Double Seven, an ink-and-gold nightclub on West 14th Street in Manhattan, carried new accessories: rolls of black toilet paper, though you could hardly see them through the gloom. (The Double Seven's bathrooms are tiled in black, have black toilets and sinks and are lighted by candles.)

Laurie Black (her real name), a 34-year-old customer relations manager at an information technology consulting firm who was there having a drink with her boss, obligingly tugged out a length of the stuff and squinted. "It certainly doesn't jump out at you," she said finally. "I imagine once you'd pulled it out your train of thought would be interrupted. You'd stop worrying about whether or not you'd paid for your last drink or whether you were going to go home with this guy. You'd think, wow, black toilet paper. Am I really going to use this?"

Good question. If black is the new black, again, should its influence extend to toilet paper? Can toilet paper make it as an object of design, a touchstone of chic? More important, should it?

"The question for us was not why, but why not," said Paulo Miguel Pereira da Silva, the president of a Portuguese paper company called Renova, which has just begun testing its new product, Renova Black, otherwise known as black toilet paper, in this country. DaSilva, who speaks Portuguese and French, communicated with this reporter by e-mail, his answers and my questions translated by an employee.

DaSilva wrote that he had been thinking about the idea of spectacle and how it relates to consumer products while at a trade show in Las Vegas. Black was an intuitive choice for toilet paper, he suggested, because it signals "avant-garde creative work."

"In a design sense," he wrote, black means "irreverence, maybe touching a bit on the core nature of art, which is to break rules and set new ones.

"Culturally, deep down, Renova Black invites people to break down whatever might be limiting as common sense ideas," he wrote.

DaSilva ventured that his new product was "neither solely a product, an object or a communication tool," but some heady combination of all three. He also admitted, more prosaically, that when he stocks his bathroom with Renova Black at parties, guests tend to pinch the rolls.

In any case, hoping to capitalize on the concentration of design folk in town for the International Contemporary Furniture Fair next week, da Silva's company has hired Kelley Blevins, a soft-spoken, Tennessee-born public relations executive at OnTrend International, to find Renova Black just the right context. (He's already placed it in urgent hot spots like the Double Seven, Frederick's Bar & Lounge, Frederick's Restaurant and the basement bar at La Esquina.)

"I wanted as many tastemakers and influencers as possible to have a personal encounter," said Blevins, who, as he said, is the man responsible for making the Chupa Chups lollipop a fashion accessory a few years ago, and so has had some experience in giving a stylish sheen to unlikely items.

Black toilet paper is enjoying its pre-buzz stage, said Blevins, who as of Tuesday had promises from Conran's, Catherine Memmi (a furniture and design store in SoHo featuring much dark wenge wood and white leather), Troy, Vitra and a gaggle of meatpacking district boutiques like Stella McCartney, Carlos Miele, Rubin Chapelle and others that black toilet paper would be a staple at their furniture fair parties.

"Basically, everyone with a bathroom said yes," Blevins said.

A few weeks ago, when Andre Balazs threw a party for his girlfriend, Uma Thurman, at Frederick's Bar & Lounge on West 58th Street, the buzz was so soft no one heard it. Reached in London last week, Balazs, after a muffled conversation with the birthday girl, said the toilet paper was "there, and, uh, it was very black."

"OK," he admitted, "nobody noticed."

Balazs was more voluble, however, when asked if, as a hotelier, he had ever given a toilet paper brief to anyone on his design team. "I certainly did," he said. "We worked on a special sticker for the toilet paper at the Standard Downtown," he added, referring to one of his Los Angeles hotels.

"The concept was that the whole place was part of a mythical evil conglomerate from the 1970s, something that John DeLorean might have run, and so the artist Ryan McGinness, who is fascinated by corporate logos, designed a language based on the human pictograms you see in airports."

McGinness, Balazs said, designed a toilet paper pictogram of a man in the middle of doing that for which toilet paper is made.

He did not.

"He did, too," Balazs said. "Go and look. There is really no end to the amount of attention that one should lavish on the bathroom."

Not even the versatile Philippe Starck, who has designed everything from a toilet cleaning brush to an earwax scooper, has ventured so far as toilet paper, however. Though in 1960, the fashion designer Pierre Cardin, in a licensing frenzy, did put his initials on the stuff, said Marian McEvoy, a contributing editor at Domino. "Which is kind of funny, having the letters PC on toilet paper," she said. "I'm just wondering why someone hasn't done black before, though I could see it, too, in an electric, on-fire blue, or maybe stripes."

Black toilet paper is an obvious fit for the dream-world of club and hotel bathrooms, but a weirder fit at home, unless you happen to have one of those stainless steel toilets that were all the rage a few years ago.

David Mandl, an architect, has a guest bathroom in his Manhattan apartment that's all steel and slate, and features the brushed stainless lavatory manufactured by a company called Neo-Metro. "I wanted to give the bathroom an edge," he said the other day. "With black toilet paper, I think it would look awesome."

(You can't buy Renova Black in stores here yet - remember, this is its pre-buzz period. But you can buy it online from the company, at renovaonline.net, for about 2 euros, or about $2.50. There is a horrifying deep red version on the site too, but it's only for sale to Europeans.)

Donald Albrecht, the curator of the Dorothy Draper show at the Museum of the City of New York, said he thought Draper would have taken to the concept with gusto. "We've got a recording of an Edward Murrow interview where he asks her what she'd most like to design, and she says, 'A butcher shop, which would be all white except for the noses of the pigs, which would be bright pink.' If anybody could be serious about color and toilet paper, it would have been her."

Or Halston, who was Miles Redd's first response to the notion of black toilet paper as a decorative gesture. Redd is an interior designer in the Dorothy Draper mode, whose own bathroom is a mirrored, 1930s original he found in Chicago and fit to his house here in NoHo; it's big enough and glittery enough to throw a dinner party in (which Redd has indeed done).

Black toilet paper, he said, "sounds so Halston, so balls of cocaine."

"My theory is that most everything can be chic at some point or for some period of time," he said. (Redd has never "done" toilet paper, though he has gone so far as to choose toothpaste for a client because the packaging appealed.) "I can see it in a powder room," he continued, "because that's a place where you can have whimsy or shock value, and you don't get tired of it because you're only there for a short amount of time."

Henry Petroski, a design theorist and professor of engineering at Duke University, worried that "shock" and "bathroom" are an unhappy couple, at least when combined outside a nightclub setting. "In the end, I expect that many people who use the toilet do not want to be shocked," said Petroski, whose book "Success Through Failure: The Paradox of Design" was published this year by Princeton University Press. "They want to go to the bathroom in calm and solitude, without the intrusion of objects that distract them from the business at hand."

But Miguel Calvo, who is one curator for the Mobile Living Experiment, a design showcase dedicated to the props of nomadic living filling 18,000 square feet at the Skylight Studios in SoHo during the furniture fair next week, said he liked the "wow factor" of the black toilet paper, and was happily laying in a stock of it for his event. "All global nomads need toilet paper," he said. "Is this fabulous or banal? Who knows?"

His co-curator, David Shearer, said, "Maybe what's important is not the product but a sense of process: you've changed the color of something very ordinary, and so people are going to interact with it in a very different way."

Or perhaps, as David Rockwell, veteran of so-called entertainment architecture, said: "We've reached the logical end for thinking about that product. Black doesn't say anything to me about the particular use of the product. It's not really form following function; it's counterintuitive, so that's sort of interesting."

Rockwell, whose design credits include W Hotels and Nobu, said he was not tempted by toilet paper. What he would really like to try his hand at is Band-Aids.