“One is never overdressed or underdressed in a little black dress,” the designer Karl Lagerfeld once said.
Now an exhibition at the National Museum of Scotland, in Edinburgh, sets out to explore just how the LBD has been immortalised across film and television, appearing as a perennial on the catwalk and being hailed by many women as a “wardrobe hero”.
Beyond the Little Black Dress, which opens on Saturday, brings together more than 60 looks from collectors and designers around the world to chart its evolution.
Georgina Ripley, the principal curator, says the dress can be used to view more than 100 years of social change. Ripley was unable to trace who first coined the widely used moniker LBD. She also plays with the “L”, juxtaposing little and long hemlines.
“We didn’t want to show just literal little black dresses,” Ripley says. “From the very beginning, lots of them crossed boundaries, such as masculinity and femininity. Others walk a fine line between respect and rebellion. We wanted to challenge the viewer.”
A long-sleeved silk crepe day dress is one of the main exhibits. Designed by Coco Chanel in 1926, it was described by Vogue at the time as “the frock that all the world will wear”. If it looks to modern eyes like the height of minimalism, there were different associations at the time. Ripley chose it as she wanted to begin the exhibition with the idea of “the birth of the LBD”.
Before 1926, black dresses did exist but they were mostly worn by domestic servants as a way of distinguishing “the help” from the “mistress” of the house.
By borrowing ideas from both the working classes and menswear, with a more androgynous silhouette and shorter hemline, Chanel reflected the wider modernisation of womenswear that was happening in the 1920s.
While Vogue compared the dress to Henry Ford’s Model T car, linking it to the idea of the egalitarianism of fashion, the reality was very different.
Calling it la pauvreté de luxe – “luxurious poverty” – Chanel used expensive silk fabrics to turn what was once a simple and affordable piece of working-class clothing into an aspirational symbol of haute couture.
Ripley and her team have also delved into the idea of black itself. A buttoned-down Christian Dior dress commissioned by Wallis Simpson in 1949, and a fit and flare evening dress designed by Norman Hartnell for Princess Margaret in the 1950s, play into the idea of “rebel royals”, with black having traditionally been reserved for mourning.
During the 1980s a new wave of Japanese designers including Issey Miyake and Yohji Yamamoto arrived in Paris, using black to play with the idea of light and darkness through radical pleating, fraying and creasing. This look continues to be adopted as a uniform by creatives ranging from fashion editors to art curators.
In 1988, Yamamoto shifted things when he declared “red is black”. Ripley has sourced a striking crimson dress from his 1991 collection to “really wake everyone up and break down how people think about colour”.
The exhibition also highlights the erotic and provocative association of black. A bondage-inspired dress from Gianni Versace’s 1992 Miss S&M collection, created at the height of the Aids epidemic, is placed alongside Christopher Kane’s Hellbound latex dress to provoke a discussion around sexual empowerment.
Ripley says she wanted to introduce visitors to dresses they would be unfamiliar with. So rather than the “revenge” dress worn by Diana in 1994, there is a sheer McQueen dress worn by Jodie Comer’s character Villanelle in Killing Eve and a billowing Christian Siriano dress worn by the Queer Eye star Jonathan Van Ness.
“It shows that the LBD is a piece of clothing that can be used as a blank canvas to project identity,” Ripley says.
Five memorable black dresses
Audrey Hepburn, 1961
Audrey Hepburn wears three LBDs from Givenchy in Breakfast at Tiffany’s but it’s the one the audience first sees as she emerges from a yellow cab with a coffee and croissant in one hand that has gone down in cinematic history.
Tina Turner, 1987
For more than five decades, Tina Turner dominated the stage in micro-minis, which fans referred to as “the Tina dress”.
Her divorce from Ike Turner was the catalyst to a sexier approach to dressing, with a leather black dress becoming a regular.
She said: “I wanted to move, so my skirts got shorter and less constricting because freedom was important to me, on stage and in life.”
Princess Diana, 1994
Described as the “revenge dress”, Diana wore this LBD to a dinner at the Serpentine Gallery on the same night that Prince Charles admitted to his affair with Camilla Parker Bowles on national television.
Elizabeth Hurley, 1994
The original “viral” dress. When a then relatively unknown Elizabeth Hurley appeared alongside her boyfriend, Hugh Grant, at the premiere of Four Weddings and Funeral in a body-clinging black dress by Versace held together with gold safety pins, she caused a media frenzy.
Victoria Beckham, 1997
During her days as Posh Spice, when she was Victoria Adams, an LBD became her uniform. Featuring a super-short hemline and spaghetti straps, Adams added to the 90s mood with strappy high heels and lashings of fake tan.
• Beyond the Little Black Dress is at the National Museum of Scotland from 1 July – 29 October 2023
