LBD Little Black Dress
Exhibition at the Civic, Barnsley
31st March – 20th May, 2011
www.barnsleycivic.co.uk
Walking into this exhibition to the sound of Piaf and a proliferation
of black and white images felt like an invitation to pleasurable
nostalgia. Arranged chronologically, the visitor moves by decades
from the 1920s through into the 1990s and then onwards to a
line-up of little black dresses, the work of 25 different designers,
some known internationally, some local to the area. Yet what
lends this exhibition its coherence is the ubiquity of black, the
sameness of ‘little’, flattering dresses, photographed, displayed
and also there to be witnessed in archival catwalk footage. One
question pervades the exhibition. What is it that makes the LBD
such an enduring prototype for different designers, different
media stars – from Marlene to Jackie Kennedy, from Hepburn to
Diana Princess of Wales, and for ordinary women who embraced
the Dior ‘New Look’ in some form in the 1950s, the 1960s
beatnik turtleneck and slim pants, the mini, 1970s punk, 1980s
power dressing extravagance, 1990s sexiness of underwear as
outwear, black lace and slits to the thigh? Bill Blass, a designer,
said that if you felt you were too big then black made you look
thinner and smaller – and if you thought you were too small,
then black made you look important. His statement suggests
that the LBD might be more about conformity than individuality,
yet the items on display also undermine this view.
Jenny Hockey
Principle Investigator
‘If the Shoe Fits: Footwear,
Identity & Transition’
April 2011
Dept. of Sociological Studies,
The University of Sheffield
www.sheffield.ac.uk/iftheshoefits/
Along with its extreme versatility, as the LBD is continuously
reinvented to reflect changing gender relations, new technologies
and emergent trends in art, it is described as ‘timeless’ in its
appeal, the easy and reliable answer to the ‘what shall I wear
today’ question (Miller). For me, the re-locating of black dresses
from World War One mourning to fashion wear was particularly
interesting – not that mourning dress was in any sense fashion,
or status neutral. When Coco Chanel first conceived of the LBD
in the 1920s, she saw it as a style and colour that she could
reclaim from its clerical and deathly associations. With her
concern to explore the scope of ‘masculine’ tailored simplicity
for enhancing ‘feminine’ chic, she launched the little black ‘Ford’
dress, so called because of its mass appeal, a dress that outsold
Ford cars.
What the exhibition’s curator, Polyanna Clayton-Stamm, has
laid out so accessibly in its panels is the subsequent career
of Chanel’s LBD, its ultra-simple, modernist silhouette. The
contributions of Schiaparelli and surrealism, the varying demands
of Hollywood’s silent movies and the ‘talkies’, and Film Noir of
the 1940s, stand alongside evidence of the capacity of black to
stand for both high end, elite fashion as well as 1960s’ beatnik
anti-fashion and punk’s appropriation of sexual fetishism, black
rubber, plastic, leather, fishnet.
Most of what is on display in this exhibition is fashion to be
looked at, rather than dress to be ‘dwelt in’. Yet the many many
ways in which fabric and tailoring embraced the body – despite
the restriction to a single colour – do invite the embodied viewer
to imaginatively step inside the sinuous drape of black satin, the
clutch of black lace about the waist. And the wearers of these
dresses do talk back about their experiences, to some extent:
Monroe spoke her tight, spaghetti-strap LBD as her ‘lucky
dress’; Hepburn said that the wardrobe Givenchy designed
for her made her feel as though she had been born to wear it.
Rudofsky, in his book The Unfashionable Human Body said that
‘the intoxication of wearing certain articles of clothing can be
as powerful as that introduced by a drug’, though it is not clear
who he was speaking for. His statement echoes the promises
of transformation offered by some sections of the shoe industry,
yet the LBD in some of its manifestations appears to enable
conformity rather than transformation, a reliable vehicle for
participating in shared identities. Perhaps its persistent appeal
lies in the fact that it is sufficiently open in its symbolism and
style to register the innovations and references of vastly different
periods during the last 90 years.
All images courtesy of Barnsley Civic
www.barnsleycivic.co.uk