Little Black Dress

St. James Encyclopedia of Pop Culture by Ross Care

The little black dress, a simple yet timeless fashion innovation first popular in the 1920s, has been called the foundation of any woman's wardrobe, and the one style item that makes every woman both look and feel great. Author Edna O'Brien has called it "both chic and armor," though the black dress was originally considered something of an anti-fashion statement when it first appeared after World War I with its "less is more" concept inspired by the simple lines of the chemise and the functional uniforms of French shopgirls and waitresses.

The little black dress has been promoted by many designers throughout the twentieth century, but most couture authorities credit its origin to famed French designer Gabrielle Bonheur "Coco" Chanel (1883-1971). Chanel opened her first dress shops between 1912 and 1914 in Paris and Deauville, where she was the first to create women's clothing to be worn without corsets, and fashions that emphasized comfort, ease, and practicality, with no loss of elegance. She introduced a number of influential and enduring fashion trends, such as the chemise dress, tweed skirts and sweaters, and feminized male items such as trousers and pea jackets. Chanel was advocating the little black dress as a new uniform for afternoon and evening as early as 1915. As Caroline Rennolds Milbank noted: "Deceptively simple, these dresses were wizardries of cut and proportion. Chanel used traditional elegant material--lace, tulle, embroideries, or soft, weightless silks--in a newly tailored way. The little black dress made women wearing anything else seem overdressed, and during the first years of her career--the war years--overdressing was severely frowned upon." Countless other designers, including Edward Molyneux, Jean Patou, and Balenciaga, carried Chanel's original concept into the future.

Writers on fashion have lauded both the essentiality and the versatility of the little black dress. Originally designed for the afternoon cocktail hour, it was soon lauded for the relaxed mood it first brought to feminine evening wear. Its basic simplicity made it easily accessorized, and it has been called an entire wardrobe in itself when worked with scarves, purses, and real or faux pearls and other jewelry. Smart working women are still advised to keep a small black evening bag at the office for transforming the workaday black dress into instant elegance after hours.

The versatility of the little black dress is key to its popular success. Appropriate for formal and informal wear in both winter or summer, the dress has been praised by fashion writers for the way it focuses on the face, looks great with a tan, can stand out or blend in, and both intrigue and seduce. On a purely functional level, it hides stains, and, best of all, slims the figure--enthusiasts swear it can appear to take off ten pounds. The little black dress really owes a great deal of its durability to its color. Black soon shook its long association with mourning to become the most basic of fashion colors, by turns elegant, classic, sexy, or funky. Impeccable fashion precedents for basic black include Audrey Hepburn in Breakfast at Tiffany's, Anita Ekberg in Fellini's La Dolce Vita, where she wore a clerical variation of the little black sheath dress fashioned after an Italian priest's garb, and also nuns, beatniks, and Morticia Addams.

The durable fashion staple was further, if bizarrely, immortalized in Richard O'Brien's Shock Treatment, a 1981 film sequel to the cult smash, The Rocky Horror Picture Show. In it, Rocky Horror's now married and somewhat taken-for-granted heroine, Janet Majors, performs an aggressive rock number, "Little Black Dress," while in the process of a fashion makeover geared to instantly transforming her into the chic and attention-grabbing woman of the hour, courtesy of a "minimal, criminal, cynical Little Black Dress." Throughout the twentieth century, the little black dress has never gone out of fashion, echoing Coco Chanel's observation that fashion fades, but style remains the same.