The evolution of the little black dress

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In Alex Katz’s 1960 painting ‘The Black Dress’, a woman at a party wears red lipstick and a black dress in six different poses. She appears glazed and listless, and it’s not clear if the dress suits her or bores her.

A certain chic ambivalence has long been the USP of the LBD, a compromise waiting at the back of the wardrobe that promises to allow its wearer to slip into any event, fashion incognito.

But as a new exhibition at National Museum of Scotland, Beyond the Little Black Dress, proves persuasively, the idea of the LBD as simply a sartorial standby hardly does its influence or creativity justice.

Black cloth, the show’s principal curator Georgina Ripley points out, is changeable in meaning: angry, regal, melancholy, erotic, mournful, depending on where you stand culturally. “We’re deconstructing the concept of the LBD as a wardrobe classic to show that it evolved into other things over the course of the last century.”

Ripley traces black’s popularity from mourning kings and queens in the early courts of Europe, into practical Protestant dress and then the industrial 19th century, when it became the colour of the professional classes’ backlash against ostentation. As hemlines lifted and petticoats were ditched in the gradual social emancipation of women in the early 20th century, synthetic dye was also easier to make, further democratising black fabrics’ social reaches. By the time Chanel’s simple knee-length take graced American Vogue in 1926, it was the workwear-inflected touches in the design that made it radical, as much as its dark colour. The magazine dubbed it “The Chanel ‘Ford’ — the frock that all the world will wear”.

Ahead of the exhibition’s opening, I visit the National Museum of Scotland archive with Ripley and textile conservator Miriam McLeod. Among mannequins, tissue paper and drawers crammed with conservation materials is the oldest garment in the show: a “robe de style” from Jeanne Lanvin’s autumn/winter 1926 collection. A dropped-waist, silk Art Deco design hand-sewn with glass beads imitating seed pearls, it is demure but daring. “People often say ‘Black is back’, but it really never goes away,” Ripley says as she watches McLeod stitch minuscule repairs to the Lanvin dress with a fine surgical needle. The difference, she adds, is that “dress codes for different times of day just aren’t the same”.

Social and sexual revolutions filtered into the looks that shifted fashion forward. “This exhibition is not just going to be dresses,” Ripley says. “We’ve juxtaposed ’50s silhouettes with more contemporary pieces, so that people can consider how cyclical fashion is, but also how the LBD gets updated.”

To this point, one of the show’s first displays is an Yves Saint Laurent Le Smoking dinner suit from the Rive Gauche line. The 1979-80 design, in wool gabardine with silk velvet brocade trim, speaks to a very modern-seeming solution to evening dressing, one that borrows from menswear. “There is this underlying sexiness to black,” Ripley says. It’s juxtaposed in the show with a Charles Jeffrey menswear outfit which does the reverse of Le Smoking by “feminising the traits of the suit” with a slashed petticoat.

The National Museum of Scotland collection has a surprisingly vast textile archive to prove black’s versatility, stretching back to the 14th century in liturgical gear and into the 20th century via an extensive Jean Muir collection from the 1960s. The most modern pieces pulled or loaned for Beyond the Little Black Dress are technical showstoppers as much as they are markers of changing tastes. In the “Harriet” dress from Molly Goddard’s AW18 collection, the heavy weight of a large nylon tulle skirt is carried magically by a fine mesh top.

Gareth Pugh, meanwhile, takes a witty approach to fabric by using both black plastic bin bags (AW13) and black plastic drinking straws (AW15/16) in two dresses that emphasise the labour of sustainability. “Pugh said he would never remake them, because they were so difficult,” Ripley says. To build the drinking straw dress, hundreds of tubes were hand-sewn on to create a structured black thatch that rustles and moves with the body. “When it’s on the figure, you realise it’s hugely structured and actually gives you a feeling of dressiness,” McLeod adds. Like its sibling piece with individually knotted refuse bag scraps, which from a distance look like matte silk puffs, it has an off-kilter humour to it.

So where does the LBD sit in fashion today? With dress codes relaxing, chances to wear an LBD for many of us might be dwindling, for fear of looking too dressed up, or even staid. But on the red carpet, at least, celebrities are still mixing it up. Witness Florence Pugh at last year’s Venice Film Festival’s Don’t Worry Darling premiere in a black Valentino dress with sparkly spots and a sheer skirt, or Alexa Chung in Nensi Dojaka’s sequin bodysuit for the reopening of the National Portrait Gallery last month. Dojaka’s cutaway lingerie-inspired bodycon dresses are reinvigorating the genre. Just call it the very little black dress.

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