The Style Files: An Ode to the LBD (Little Black Dress)

The little black dress is as most women know, perhaps more than any other piece of clothing, the essential one that will take you from work to cocktails or anywhere else. Coco Chanel more than any other designer can be credited with making it ubiquitous. In the book Coco Chanel: The Legend and the Life (by Justine Picardine) it states that “the little black dress was not formally identified as the shape of the future until 1926, when American Vogue published a drawing of a Chanel design.… It was an apparently simple yet elegant sheath, in black crêpe de Chine, with long, narrow sleeves, worn with a string of white pearls; and Vogue proved to be correct in the prediction that it would become a uniform for all women of taste.”

The American Vogue illustration aligned Chanel’s creation with the any-color-as-long-as-it-is-black model-T Ford car.  Vogue called this dress "Chanel's Ford," because like the Model T, it was accessible to women of all social classes.

Worn by Edith Piaf as she sang about love and loss and emblematic of Gallic chic the dress made it across the ocean to America and into the mass fashion consciousness, perhaps most notably as Audrey Hepburn’s costume in the 1961 movie “Breakfast at Tiffany’s.” Although that dress was made by the Paris couturier Hubert de Givenchy it was a defining moment in the history of the little black dress and it’s power and thrall. It was the dress that immortalized the woman who belonged to no one.

The epitome of elegance in any woman's wardrobe is the little black dress. It has power and suggests chic and refinement. A metaphor for cosmopolitan glamour, the little black dress allows for individual choices and interpretation. So is the little black dress the last haven for a conventional dresser, or an opportunity to add a jolt of imagination to a classic?

The answer is both. For the femme fatale black is the perfect colour and imagination in fabric, cut, accessories and the way the dress is worn add that extra jolt. For the minimalist who prefers a pared down aesthetic a little black dress paired with black accessories will always be chic.
Miuccia Prada best expresses the reality of timeless yet contemporary fashion, when she says  “To me, designing a little black dress is trying to express in a simple, banal object, a great complexity about women, aesthetics, and current times.”