The big story of the Little Black Dress

The iconic Little Black Dress, made famous by Coco Chanel in the 1920s and a constant in fashion ever since, is celebrated in the new summer exhibition at the National Museum of Scotland. As the show’s curator Georgina Ripley reveals, there is power, beauty, rebellion and sex appeal sewn in to its history

The exhibition runs until the end of October

In 1926, American Vogue hailed a simple, short black dress by Coco Chanel as ‘the frock that all the world will wear’. Borrowing its functionality and comfort from menswear, and its durability from the uniforms of the working classes, it combined couture details with modest origins.

Ostensibly, Chanel’s dress was the armour for a modern woman aiming to liberate herself from patriarchal control. Yet the androgynous design still conformed to prevailing beauty standards based on a youthful, slender figure, and was affordable only for the wealthy. Nevertheless, it embodied the post-war modernising spirit of the 1920s and secured Chanel’s mythic reputation as the inventor of the fashionable ‘LBD’.

It felt appropriate to select a 1926 silk crêpe day dress by Chanel to open Beyond the Little Black Dress, the National Museum of Scotland’s major summer exhibition. Bringing together more than 60 looks from collections and designers around the world, the exhibition deconstructs the iconic garment, examining the radical power of the colour black in fashion.

It explores how the complexities of the colour have made the LBD simultaneously expressive of piety and perversion, respect and rebellion; from the well-mannered cocktail attire of the early 20th century to the leather and latex worn by members of punk and fetish subcultures.

In the century since Chanel’s famous creation, the LBD has been imitated and reinvented, and its image has reverberated throughout popular culture, tracing the shifting social tides of the 20th and 21st centuries. The colour black is open to myriad interpretations and can be influenced by factors such as cultural background, faith, gender, political affiliation, or economic situation. As such, the LBD is a blank canvas on which to project identity and cultural meaning.

Of course, it has also long been a shorthand for good taste. In 1954, Christian Dior’s The Little Dictionary of Fashion declared it appropriate to wear black at any time, any age and for almost any occasion. At once the cloak of mourning and the uniform of the chic socialite, it is also a symbol of sexual sophistication. It treads a delicate line between respectability and rebelliousness.

While the Chanel dress is loose, comfortable, and unadorned, by 1947, Christian Dior’s ‘New Look’ revived a voluptuous femininity in women’s dress that straddled the demure and the erotic, based on tight corsetry, voluminous petticoats and pointed brassieres. Governed by strict codes of etiquette, Dior’s mid-century LBD became synonymous with the ritual of the cocktail hour.

There’s an important clue to the boundary-pushing content of this exhibition in its title. We wanted to take our visitors on a journey ‘beyond’ the expectations and established understandings of this most iconic of garments. Not everything on display is ‘little’, black or even a dress.

The counterculture and social revolution of the 1960s changed the shape of eveningwear once again. This was epitomised by Yves Saint Laurent’s Le Smoking tuxedo for women, an example of which is on display alongside another look which challenges outmoded and gendered notions of propriety; a suit jacket and trousers by Scottish designer Charles Jeffrey LOVERBOY’s Spring/Summer 2022 collection, subversively styled with a slashed tulle skirt.

Elsewhere in the exhibition, designers experiment with materials to striking effect. There are two looks by Gareth Pugh on display; one fashioned from bin bags, the other from plastic drinking straws. The latter offers both a tongue-in-cheek comment on the outdated notion of the cocktail dress in the 21st century and a prescient statement on society’s excessive use of single-use plastic.

Fashion is one of the most energy-consuming, polluting, and wasteful of modern industries, exacerbated by cycles of endless consumption. In response, contemporary designers are seeking more sustainable solutions; from cutting-edge technologies to nature-led approaches. In the midst of this change, the LBD - a garment which has stood the test of time - remains a powerful source of sustainability.

Smart technologies such as digital mapping, 3D printing, and bioengineering are poised to have a profound impact on the future of fashion, pioneering new materials and techniques of production. They can also be harnessed to customise garments to suit size, taste, and personality. Black appears in this lexicon as a reassuring base on which to experiment – be it via a robotic dress by Ying Gao or a dress by CuteCircuit made from their interactive ‘Magic Fabric’ which is embedded with micro-LEDs.

Other designers are championing circularity, either through regenerative agriculture or by recycling waste products. We’ve commissioned a piece especially for the exhibition by eco-designers and climate activists VIN + OMI which incorporates nettles and horsehair sourced from Highgrove, the private residence of The King and Queen. The dress was developed through sketches instead of using fabric toiles or samples, ensuring that the making process did not extract anything more from the planet.

Created for their autumn/winter 2020 collection, its materials and construction set a gold standard for sustainable production and are the very antithesis of ‘fast fashion’, an issue explored elsewhere in the exhibition in a reflective 2020 film by Osman Yousefzada.

In Her Dreams Are Bigger, Yousefzada meets garment workers in Bangladesh and shows them a suitcase of discarded clothing carrying the label ‘Made in Bangladesh’, which had been bought from charity shops in England. The women try on various pieces as they’re asked to imagine the people who wear the clothes they make. The film shifts the focus onto the makers and underscores the humanity at the heart of fast fashion.

Western interpretations of black are underscored by the early Christian Church which equated black with sin. Historically associated with demonic cults and witchcraft, black as the personification of the dark unknown has morphed into a trope of evil. Yet in ancient Egypt, as in other parts of Africa and Asia, black had both positive and negative associations. Simultaneously symbolic of life and death, it was linked to the fertile aspect of the earth, the passage to the afterlife, and the promise of rebirth.

The extreme duality inherent in black is most evident in a spiritual context. Christianity links black to hell, grief, and mourning, yet it is also worn among religious orders to demonstrate humility and asceticism. Across cultural traditions of veiling and modest dress in Islam and Judaism, black traditionally communicated piety, symbolising the mystical goal of renouncing the self to reunite with the divine. In Buddhism, black signifies the primordial darkness.

Black’s inherent monastic virtue, evident in the Catholic priest’s cassock and in the nun’s habit, has held a particular allure for designers. An ensemble from Cimone’s Autumn/Winter 2017 collection references the severity of the Benedictine nun’s habit, but the styling suggests a playful, even sacrilegious subversion of Catholic iconography.

The formidable former editor of Vogue, Diana Vreeland, once said that black is the hardest colour in the world to get right. Its starkness focuses the eye on the core elements of design – texture, tone, and silhouette. By turns opaque or transparent, matte or shiny, the play of light across the surface of the textile can reveal or conceal design details, while the absence of colour accentuates the architecture of the garment. With nowhere to hide, the designer’s technical skill is paramount.

We’ve examined this idea in a section of the exhibition called Designing in Black, which explores the integrity of black to the fundamental elements of design, and features works by designers historically renowned for their mastery of the LBD.

Designers like Yves Saint Laurent, and Jean Muir are united in their reverence for the craft of dressmaking. Their innate understanding of the properties of specific fabrics allows them to eliminate superfluous lining and underpinnings, constructing garments so sophisticated that they have transcended fashion’s changing trends.

For designers such as these, the secret to the most successful LBDs is a fiendishly complicated simplicity. We’ve selected a deceptively simple 1950 piece by Cristóbal Balenciaga for display. His steadfast signature colour was an intense black, which lent precision to his imaginative silhouettes – minimal for day, voluminous for night. His use of black was informed by his fascination with traditional Spanish dress, from the costumes of flamenco dancers and toreadors to black lace mantillas and mourning veils. Unusually, he even created his toiles in black cotton fabrics.

Black has long held symbolic associations with rebellion and transgressive behaviours. The colour of nihilism, revolution, and solidarity, it has been adopted by various 20th century subcultural movements, from punk and goth to streetwear.

DJ and musician Jonny Slut combined black leather and rubber with feathered accessories, fishnets and heavy kohl make-up. His look exemplified the post-punk, goth image of legendary London club night ‘Batcave’ and the ambisexual aesthetic of electroclash club ‘Nag Nag Nag’. Scottish designer Theresa Coburn created a leather top and kilt for him, incorporating references to fetishwear already familiar from punk and pop culture.

Displayed alongside that look is a dress from Olivier Theyskens spring/summer 2019 collection, referencing the high romance of Victorian corsetry and trailing skirts and the erotic suggestion of tight lacing come undone.

Black has always been imbued with a seductive power, by virtue of its cultural association with a particular kind of subversive sexuality. Fashion, which often exhibits elements of fantasy, has long been fascinated by sexual subcultures, and the erotic thrill of the socially ‘taboo’.

In the wake of the #MeToo movement, Scottish designer Christopher Kane has been fearless in confronting society’s troubled relationship with sex through his collections. Stepping into the void left by designers like Azzedine Alaïa and Thierry Mugler, Kane’s sensual, playfully fetishistic garments, like the ‘Hellbound’ dress from his Autumn/Winter 2022 collection boldly explore female sexual empowerment in the sex-centric zeitgeist.

Contemporary debates around sex-positive clothing are about not only subversive design, but also disrupting society’s restrictive beauty ideals. Designers such as Christian Siriano and Sinead O’Dwyer are re-interpreting the LBD in their provocative designs for bodies historically excluded from the fashion canon.

Jonathan Van Ness – celebrity hairstylist and star of the Netflix show Queer Eye – has enjoyed many a red-carpet moment in a show-stopping LBD. Van Ness identifies as non-binary and confronts stereotypes of gender and sexuality with their fluid style. They have also powerfully subverted the notion of the LBD as an understated garment. On display in Beyond the Little Black Dress is a dramatic off-the-shoulder gown by Christian Siriano, worn by Van Ness for a feature in the September 2019 issue of Gay Times magazine.

Elsewhere, the exhibition explores Blackness both in terms of identity and the use of the colour among Black British fashion designers whose works speak to an Afrofuturistic lens in a section guest-curated by Sequoia Barnes.

Afrofuturism can be characterised as the creative use of technology and tropes of science-fiction to explore Black diasporic cultures, experiences, and concerns. Combined with symbols from the Black diaspora, the works created decolonise time and imagine liberatory futures.

Aesthetically, Afrofuturism is known for its clashing of colours and textures to visualize the juxtapositions that exist between past and future, fantasy and reality. The fashion industry has explored Afrofuturism on numerous occasions, but here we explore the rare use of the colour black in Afrofuturistic fashion. Where designers have used black, they have highlighted the shape and construction of garments, reflecting the idea of Afrofuturism as a creator of imagined worlds.

British designer Maximilian Davis was born into a close-knit Trinidadian-Jamaican family in Manchester. His Spring 2021 debut collection represented his ambition to produce elegant and modern 19th-century inspired tailoring, while simultaneously uplifting the history of Trinidadian Carnival that is intrinsic to his identity. An occasion which once enlisted enslaved people to perform for their enslavers, after emancipation carnival was reclaimed as a space to express Black identity.

The stark yet soft, angular draping of the Maximilian dress on display embodies an ethereal ‘regalness’ that allows for fantastical ideas of world-building. In the exhibition, this dress represents the matriarchal figure of the Afrofuturistic mothership – as the pinnacle of this section, she is surrounded by her ‘family’ of otherworldly figures.

Fashion became démodé even before the Covid-19 Pandemic shuttered factories and cancelled fashion shows in 2020. The modern industry stands accused of cultural appropriation, sizeism and racism, wasteful business models and reckless consumption, as it struggles to keep up with a relentless fashion schedule and constant consumer demand for newness. Yet throughout almost a century of change, the LBD survives - its continued existence a radical form of resistance.

Just as the fashionable black dress became a practical and versatile option for women during the Second World War, doubling up as mourning wear and a formal afternoon dress, today the LBD is still considered an essential component of the capsule wardrobe and a keystone of slow fashion. In all its derivations it has absorbed countless trends from across the fashion spectrum, capturing and revealing changing definitions of gender, sexuality, ethnicity, status, and class. Perhaps, as with Chanel’s simple black dress of 1926, the future of the LBD will lie in its capacity to bring us back to the meaningful essence of fashion.

Beyond the Little Black Dress is at the National Museum of Scotland from 1 July – 1 October. It is sponsored by Baillie Gifford Investment Managers. Visit www.nms.ac.uk/BeyondLBD for more details and to book tickets.