MUSINGS ON THE LITTLE BLACK DRESS

“One is never under dressed or over dressed with a little black dress.”

Karl Lagerfeld

Hello my friend!

The Little Black Dress! LBD! I can’t think of any other garment that has its own acronym in the Oxford Dictionary of English. So, it must be pretty special!

I think I mentioned my love of vintage clothing in the March newsletter. Much of my late teens/early twenties was spent rummaging in Portobello market where I picked up Victorian camisoles, nightdresses and petticoats for a few pounds. So, I wore a great deal of white then. One day though, Susan, who worked in my parent’s bookshop, brought in a turn of the century dress that she wanted to sell as she could no longer squeeze into it. It was long and wasp-waisted … with embroidered sleeves (sigh!) … and cut on the bias with the greatest expertise (sigh!)… and it was black … AND it was love at first sight. Unfortunately, Susan wasn’t selling it for a song and my student grant wouldn’t stretch that far but my father took pity on me and bought it and … it still hangs in my wardrobe! (No, it doesn’t fit any more!)

That was my first black dress and though I’m often to be found in that colour (or non-colour) these days, it’s only now when I’ve designed my first charcoal dresses, including the Applepicker’s dress, that I’ve been contemplating black and the LBD in more depth.

My first little black dress design… the Applepicker’s Dress

Thoughts on Wearing Black

“You can wear black at any time. You can wear black at any age. You may wear it on almost any occasion. A little black frock is essential to a woman’s wardrobe.”

Christian Dior

From a practical viewpoint, black gives you plenty of bang for your buck. It’s versatile so one garment can suit many different occasions, it can be partnered with almost every other colour and it complements every skin tone (but if you feel it’s a little harsh for you, why not soften it with a scarf?).

Aesthetically, there’s no doubting that black can look the nec plus ultra of elegance. Coco Chanel – about whom much more below – said that black and white have an “absolute beauty … dress women in white or black at a ball: they are the only ones you see.” Personally, I think black looks best worn with jewellery, especially statement, a la Maya Angelou. Think too of, say, Coco Chanel’s and Audrey Hepburn’s strings of pearls. And while gems most definitely uplift the whole look, other accessories such as bags and shoes can have a similar effect and, in turn, that black dress will make those accessories pop. (So, the money you save through the longevity and practicality of your LBDs can be spent on all those things instead. Ha ha!)

Yet, if an LBD is a wardrobe staple today, it wasn’t always so ….

Applepickers - back TM HIGH RES edited.jpg

Details…

A Little Background

1926 was the year that the Little Black Dress was put firmly on the map and it was Coco Chanel’s Little Black Dress that did it. In October that year, Vogue US featured a drawing of a crêpe de chine waistless sheath that she’d designed. The adjective ‘little’ referred not to its size but to its discreet simplicity. In the editorial, the magazine described it as “Chanel’s Ford” in reference to the mass-produced car and “the frock that all the world will wear.” Chanel (who wore black as a child in her orphanage) reputedly claimed, in her turn, that “Thanks to me they [the non-wealthy] can walk around like millionaires” (hmmm…).

In fact, Chanel wasn’t the first to design an LBD. Henry James mentioned a “little black frock” in “Wings of a Dove” in 1902. Chanel herself had worn black before and had created long black evening dresses by 1917 and other couturiers were already designing black dresses. Indeed, Vogue had written earlier in 1926 that “the “little black dress” has re-entered smart circles”. (“Re-entered”, not “entered” interestingly.) Yet it was Chanel’s fame and reputation for ground-breaking, fashion-forward styles that revolutionized the garment’s image and rocketed it into fashion consciousness.

To appreciate just how revolutionary the new fashionableness of black and Chanel’s collection were in the early 20th century, let’s take a glimpse back at the history of the colour in previous centuries. Rich in symbolic meanings, it was associated with darkness, death, mourning, mystery, piety, scholarship, power, wealth and more. The dyes were expensive and difficult to stabilise and black was a sign of wealth and status for centuries. It was favoured, for example, by Italian merchants in the 14th century (excluded from wearing the coloured cloths of the nobility) and by the court in 16th century Spain who dressed exclusively in black as an indication of the country’s great fortune.

Black was the colour of mourning in Europe from the time of ancient Rome when the elite wore toga pulla (dark toga – not necessarily true black) for funerals up until the 19th century and beyond (though white was associated with mourning for a time in Medieval Europe). In Victorian England, mourning attire was codified with widows expected to don black for at least two years after their husband’s death. Queen Victoria famously remained in black for 40 years from Prince Albert’s decease in 1861 until her own in 1901.

There’s an intriguing work by John Singer Sargent, “Portrait of Madame X” in New York’s Metropolitan Museum that tells us a lot about the time. In the 1880s when it was painted, black was still the colour of mourning and the public greeted the portrait with disgust because “Madame X”, Virginie Gautreau, adulterous wife of the French banker Pierre Gautreau, is wearing a black gown – but not, shockingly, as mourning attire! Instead her gown, with its low décolletage and diamond-studded straps suggests none of the chastity of the grief-stricken but rather the looser morality of the seductress long before Lauren Bacall captivated Humphrey Bogart in a long black peek-a-boo dress in 1944 in “To Have and Have Not.” Originally Sargent even went so far as to depict one of the straps as slipping from the sitter’s shoulder but reactions to the vilified painting led him to later repaint this suggestion of undress.

Since Chanel’s famous garment of 1926, black dresses have been worn consistently by style icons. Audrey Hepburn’s black sheath dress in “Breakfast at Tiffany’s” designed by Hubert de Givenchy is probably the most famous. Yet other memorable examples abound including Catherine Deneuve’s schoolgirl style dress by Yves Saint Laurent in “Belle de Jour” (1967), Julie Christie’s scooped-back sequinned gown by John Bates in “Shampoo” (1975), Demi Moore’s cut-out robe by Thierry Mugler in “Indecent Proposal” (1993), Elizabeth Hurley’s safety pin dress (aka THAT dress) by Versace, Princess Diana’s “revenge” dress by Christina Stambolian (both 1994), Michelle Obama’s fabulous frock by Azzedine Alaia (2009), etcetera … the list goes on.