Safety Yellow by Zachary Pace

1.

During the decade prior to the spring of 2020, I wore only black clothes.

Whenever someone remarked on this habit, I’d retort that I started wearing all black in 2010—after being unexpectedly fired from my first full-time job—because I was in mourning for my safety.

Now, I think: I will not need them in my new life—the last line of an old favorite poem by Louise Glück titled “Here Are My Black Clothes.” 

The speaker of the poem and I have stowed our black clothes in the closet like mementos of lost love—the speaker tells a lost lover: You liked me well enough in black—and in my new life, I love another color.

2.

For the first three months of the COVID-19 pandemic, I worked at a makeshift desk—less than six feet from my bed—for my job of two years.

Rushing to resume some semblance of ordinariness (and because the work is easier to do at the desk where it was intended to be done), as soon as New York City entered Phase 2 of the state’s post-lockdown reopening (which allowed employees to repopulate offices at reduced capacity), I volunteered to ride a newly acquired used bicycle from my apartment in Brooklyn to my workplace in Manhattan—eight miles both ways, from Flatbush: up the hill in Prospect Park, down the slope of Park Slope, across Carroll Gardens, over the Manhattan Bridge into Chinatown, through the East Village to Gramercy.

For this endeavor, I purchased ten T-shirts (one for each day of two workweeks) at five dollars apiece—via mail delivery, since Phase 1 didn’t allow in-store retail—from Dave’s New York, a workwear outfitter in Chelsea.

Manufactured by Gildan, these short-sleeve crewneck cotton shirts are all the same color: Safety Yellow.

3.

Safety Yellow—Pantone number 13-0630 TN—is one of twenty-three Nylon Brights: a set of neon hues specifically conceived for activewear, outerwear, and safety apparel: Pantone licenses the exact spectral data and dye formulations to clothing manufacturers for accurate reproduction of each (Shocking Orange: another Nylon Bright often seen in proximity to Safety Yellow).

Safety Yellow is greenish, garish, biohazardous. Wearing it—with surgical-blue non-surgical face mask—I traverse the city in shock, a protagonist in a disaster movie. 

Among those I’ve noticed also wearing it: truck drivers, sanitation teams, fire departments, delivery people, crossing guards, construction crews—all workers of high-impact jobs. It’s the yellow of the yellow vests that are the gilets jaunes of the working-class protest movement for economic security in France—vests that French law requires motorists to keep in their vehicles in the event of emergency.

Pantone 13-0630 TN adheres to the US Department of Labor’s Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) color codes—standard number 1910.144(a)(3): “Yellow shall be the basic color for designating caution and for marking physical hazards such as: Striking against, stumbling, falling, tripping, and ‘caught in between.’”

A friend of mine said this will be the color of the fall of 2020; they wore a fluorescent yellow long-sleeve crewneck cotton T-shirt emblazoned with the logo of the French design collective Vetements, and I wore a hooded sweatshirt jacket by Carhartt in the same shade.

Aside from this, I haven’t perceived any special camaraderie among New Yorkers also sporting Safety Yellow.

(I do not dress in ostentatious Safety Yellow when attending Black Lives Matter demonstrations; I dress in a black T-shirt emblazoned with handwritten text by the artist James Concannon: changing times changing minds.)

4.

The first morning I wore all black, I had been fired from that first job and needed to collect my belongings from the office. I intended to make a statement of my grief in black shirt, black jeans, black boots.

With a meager severance, no savings, insurmountable credit card debt, and month-to-month rent, my loss of income indeed depleted my already tenuous sense of safety. Up to that point, I’d survived on student loans and part-time work from paycheck to paycheck. Suddenly I possessed a declining balance.

Then, my abrupt unemployment coincided with a relapse of obsessive-compulsive disorder: Diagnosed at age ten, I’d perform strict, intricate rituals, dictated by magical thinking, to prevent my mother (who has worn all black all my life) from dying in a car accident. After a few years of remission, the behavior resurfaced—and the separation anxiety redirected at other loved ones.

So the ritual of donning this uniform became a form of reassurance—restoring a modicum of continuity—as my proclivity for the peculiar luster of black fabric also became a survival tactic: As a self-conscious queer person, traumatized by homophobia and haunted by body dysmorphia, I grew accustomed to growing less visible in public.

Of course, reduced visibility isn’t without its vulnerabilities. On the subway at rush hour, for instance: There, my black clothes rendered my body practically imperceptible to peripheral vision, and I frequently found myself stepped upon, shoved aside, backed into.

I learned to ride a bicycle only ten years ago. Lately, riding sixteen miles a day, I’m no longer comfortable in all black. 

5.

The color of my Carhartt jacket is technically Brite Lime: yellower than lime green—glow-in-the-dark, highlighter-like, algal—alien green. Wearing it, I’m alien to myself, who wore only black clothes for a decade.

The jacket’s lined with black thermal polyester—the black so lustrous, it mitigates my reluctance to embrace Brite Lime. I put on the Brite Lime over my Safety Yellow T-shirt and the variation in spectral data strikes me as subtle but noticeable as two differently faded shades of black.

I put on my Bontrager helmet, which matches my T-shirt and jacket—my vestments, my armor—I’m protected by variations on Pantone 13-0630 TN. In my new life, I go out wearing Safety Yellow and Brite Lime in order to save my life.

I purchased the jacket at Dave’s New York during the reopening’s Phase 2—which allowed in-store retail—when heavier motor-vehicle traffic heightened the always hostile conditions for bicycles.

According to Carhartt’s website, the jacket adheres to the American National Standard Institute (ANSI) and International Safety Equipment Association’s (ISEA) criteria for High Visibility Safety Apparel and Headwear Devices—standard number ANSI/ISEA 107-2010—which specifies, in addition to color codes that align with those of OSHA, requirements for placement of retroreflective material.

The jacket is accented over the shoulders with vertical stripes—and around the chest and sleeves with horizontal stripes—which are composed of thinner diagonal strips of 3M Scotchlite Reflective Material: designed for maximum retroreflection, which “occurs when a surface returns a large portion of directed light beam back to its source,” according to 3M’s website. The materials “appear brightest to observers nearest the light source (such as a motorist),” flashing the flare of headlights back at a vehicle. Retroflection creates greater visibility from greater distance, permitting the motorist more time to react to the presence of the body inside the garment.

Scotchlite Reflective Material, when inactivated, projects a slightly glittery periwinkle silver—and when illuminated, flickers orangey yellow and blinding white. Gazing at it (hanging on the closet door, radiant in streetlight from the window nearby), I’m overcome by a screen memory: Disney’s Cinderella’s gown, near midnight in the palace courtyard after the ball. I would wear a gown made of only Scotchlite Reflective Material—perhaps Zac Posen could tailor this gown—perhaps with a pair of French-heeled shoes and elbow-length gloves, a headband and face mask, all fashioned from Scotchlite Reflective Material.

I make you a gift of these objects (Glück, “Here Are My Black Clothes”).

6.

For now, I’ve opted to put myself in danger daily—biking to work—since working from home estranged me from the objects of my labor to an extent that felt unhealthy. And since I’m lucky to say that I feel valued—not exploited—by my employer (as a copy editor and proofreader, I’m gifted healthier, more productive opportunities for sublimating my OCD), I’m no longer mourning my safety but accepting precarity as a mode of subsistence.

On rainy days, I’m attired in a fluorescent yellow polyurethane poncho with retroreflective stripes by Galeton. I’ve acquired a waterproof Brite Lime Carhartt coat—accented with 3M Scotchlite Reflective Material—lined in black quilting, for the imminent winter.

If Safety Yellow becomes the unofficial color of the fall of 2020, it’s because pedestrians need what workers of high-impact jobs have needed all along: protective gear—while the streets swarm with bodies aboard various vehicles—everyone making a living.

7.

As long as we’re forced to subsist under capitalism—making a living to stay alive—we’ll never not be estranged from the objects of our labor, which range from tangible (Safety Yellow T-shirts) to intangible (dreams of workplace drama). Here, I’m attempting to diminish the alienation from mine—though the means of production remain increasingly obscure.

For instance, who planted, who farmed, who harvested the cotton that, by processes further obscured to me, manifested these fabrics—who dyed, who cut, who sewed these garments—for my safety? Who put their bodies in danger to do this labor?

8.

“That’s how you stay alive,” a stranger in all black recently told me, pointing at the Brite Lime jacket, as I bicycled by.

That’s how much we must love to live: We risk death for it.
—November 2020

Zachary Pace is a writer and editor in New York City whose work has appeared in BOMB, Bookforum, Boston Review, The Fanzine, Frieze magazine, the L Magazine, Literary Hub, the Los Angeles Review of Books, the PEN Poetry Series, and elsewhere.