ARCHIVE: Little Black Dress
“The little black dress is not a style per se, but it’s a conceptual fashion that’s entirely versatile. There are many ways to design it.”
– Valerie Steele
The Little Black Dress is potentially one of the most crucial staples in any woman’s closet. It is a garment that is both timeless and yet constantly reinvented. It is an investment. Put it on years later and it feels as if your old self has come back to greet you.
The LBD is the ultimate “chameleon” (as it was articled in Vogue), it is a design which is a juxtaposition in itself – both immutable and transformative. In 1944, the magazine chronicled that “ten out of ten women have one, but ten out of ten want another because the little black dress....is a complete chameleon about moods and times and places”, the iconic silhouette garnering “the longest open season.”
Simultaneously timeless and evolving, the LBD stands as an unmovable pillar in fashion, an alter at which designers lay down their prototypes eager to create the next sell-out silhouette. It is characterised in essence by its mutability, offering itself as a metaphor for the fashion industry for years to come.
Fashion lovers everywhere will understand that the LBD possesses an aura of iconicity – one feels empowered when wearing it. Here are some of my favourite LBD wearers throughout the ages:
Now for a short lesson in fashion history: Coco Chanel (although not the first designer to create a LBD) is still the designer who is most closely associated with the fashion staple. Chanel’s love of black was a reaction against the bright colour palette the fashion industry was seeped in in the early 1900s – the fashion mogul was heard to have said that these colours made her feel literally nauseas, causing her to harness a darker and more muted colour palette in her designs.
Chanel is one of a few designers who can be accredited as popularising the rise of the LBD in fashion – her impeccable vision coupled with her yearning for elegant simplicity is one of the reasons the silhouette is worn so vastly today. In this way, one can view the relationship between Chanel and the LBD as analogous to that of mother and child.
The designers first LBD (‘Chanel’s Ford’), a simple long-sleeved, crêpe de Chine garnered so much attention in the fashion world after it was published in Vogue in 1926 that the magazine declared that Coco Chanel’s LBD was “the frock that all the world will wear.” Her design catalysed a movement – and in that very moment the LBD took its first steps as becoming “a sort of uniform for all women of taste” (Vogue).