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A little black dress (LBD) is a black evening or cocktail dress, cut simply and often quite short. Fashion historians ascribe the origins of the little black dress to the.
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Subscribe Top Menu Current Issue. The vast majority of books on clothing are concerned with fashion, and thereby with the fashion industry. So the history of fashion is often collapsed into the history of the industry itself. The model underlying such works is made clear in the general argument of Fine and Leopold , Each major commodity such as food or clothing exists within a vertical system by which to understand consumption we must also understand production. In the clothing system, fashion is the primary link between them, both driving demand and driving supply.

Books certainly exist on the industry itself as a commercial form e. White and Griffiths , Rath , but by far the largest group of writings is based on the history of the fashion designer as an influence again on both production and consumption. Arnold The problem with this argument is how to establish its credibility other than as simplistic conclusion based upon deju vu?

That is to say, having seen that the world has gone black, we simply locate particular designers who promoted this trend and assume they are responsible for it. The problem being that this does not allow for the possibility that this trend developed despite rather than because of design. A more credible way of examining this question is to acknowledge that we are indeed looking at a huge business, a major element of modern capitalism, and that to make the case a convincing one we have to find some logic that links the interests of this industry with black as a result or effect of this trend.

This is precisely where the argument starts to look much less plausible. Indeed the evidence against it can be seen on every high street. But irrespective of whether this quote is apocryphal for Henry Ford, it simply doesn't reflect the fashion industry today. So far from being monopolistic, this is one of the most diversified industries of the modern world, and it is relatively easy for small outfits with limited capital to start up either as producers or retailers.

The main chains and designers may dominate, but there are quite a few of them, and they exist in a state of clear competition one with another. In such a distributed and competitive market the struggle for each is to find some niche, some element, that will give them a particular character.

Black Velvet Short Sleeve Bardot Bodycon Dress

It is fine for one or two firms such as Armani to establish themselves with a certain ideal of the classical that is indeed largely grey to black, but precisely because companies such as Armani occupy this niche, it is necessary for others to find alternatives. In short, the fashion industry has to be based on difference rather than homogeneity. So the primary evidence for this industry not being the culprit here is simply a comparison between what is on sale and what is being worn. I have not met anyone as yet who would disagree with the general qualitative assessment that the styles and colours being worn as one goes to work each day, or looks around the street, or even goes out in the evening are far more homogenised that what is available in the shops.

The shops have become more homogenised over the years, as in the retailscape at Selfridges mentioned above. But this seems to follow rather than force the trends in what people wear. It is simply that attempts to create distinction in colour and printing do not sell sufficiently over the long term.

I just can't see any commercial logic in the clothing business as a whole which makes black the way to profit - the industry needs a diversity of niches to exploit, not just homogeneity. If anything the entire population going into black is more likely to put business finances into the red! Sure, they can probably cope with it, Armani does pretty well out of grey, but if this is some kind of business plot, its not an obvious one. The problem in decoding clothing is that it is simply too easy to argue that what people wear must follow from what commerce supplies. We have to be dragged into the opposite corner of seeing what is supplied as a surrender to what people are prepared to wear, but the logic of modern women's clothing with respect to its ever increasing homogenisation represented in the decline of colour and printing certainly seems to imply that the driving force has been the customer not the couturier.

So it looks like the simplest and most deterministic theory, that a shift in consumption merely reflects a shift in production will not do. We need to find some other candidates in the literature. Is there perhaps some historical precedent, some other period in which clothing leached out colour and print? Fortunately there has recently been published a volume which seems as though it could be a clear precedent for our current situation. The book is called Men in Black and was published by John Harvey in Firstly this is useful because it discusses some other theoretical accounts.

Flugel it seems had already argued that the move to black was a kind of egalitarian, democratic response rejection of the ancien regime by the bourgeois of the period. This sounds credible, but unlikely to work for the contemporary case. In general we have seen a return to a political conservatism since then and more recently a return to greater inequalities in countries such as the UK and US.

There is a more subtle version of this argument, in which we can see men through the 18 th and 19 th century giving up the overt display of wealth and power and adopting the measured and perhaps more menacing uniform of a generic power that does not need to be specified. Once again, however, there is little reason to see the little black dress and subsequent general adoption of black by women as related in any way to this. These are not, in any case, the theories that Harvey uses for the period of his concern. His book is devoted to the rise of black amongst men in Victorian Britain.

Just as we might finger key designers today as having a certain influence, the dandies of that time seem to have adopted a certain ascetic and minimalist appearance which made black fashionable, the elaborations being in style rather than colour. But Harvey also rejects the idea that the mass adoption of black by the middle class was particularly influenced by the stylistic antics of the elites. He sees a greater legacy in the centuries of adoption by the church of an association between black and sobriety and seriousness, that gave black a certain gravitas, which is reflected in Shakespearean characters such as Hamlet and Othello and evident in the sobriety of the male figure in Dutch art.

In effect there is a kind of Durkheimian movement whereby the social norms of the middle class take on in a secular version the values of the church Harvey But the catalyst that really crystallised the association with black was, according to Harvey, the bridge between the secular and the religious that emerged in the Victorian cult of the funerary.

Thanks to many television reconstructions of novels written during this period we have become increasingly familiar with scenes from this time composed of men in black dancing with women in white who appear, in general, rather cold embodiments of a certain wifely virtue. What this book demonstrates is that there are clear precedents for the phenomenon this paper is concerned to explain. There are indeed other periods in which clothing leached and bleached. What does not follow, however, is the conclusion that these precedents give us the key to explaining the current example of these shifts in acceptable sartorial codes.

To take the specific instance of Harvey's book, this obsessive funerary concern is an unlikely candidate for the little black dress today. I doubt that the women I meet at parties are trying to dress as though for a funeral - some of the parties I go to are bad, but not usually that bad!

Rather what we have to learn from these works is that there are likely to be some quite specific factors at play in any particular instance of this phenomenon and that we should not assume that there is anything in common between any two such instances as separated by time and space. One legacy of the extensive writings that once dominated the anthropology of clothing based on semiotic theory e.

It is perhaps more sensible to recognise that black is a colour that is going to have many diverse connotations and periods of ascendancy. There is not necessarily going to be a strong link between the sartorial habits of Dickens and of the modern teenage Goth, even if both do favour black. For my third candidate I want to turn to the wonderful title of what unfortunately turns out to be a slightly disappointing book Chromophobia by David Batchelor The great thing about the title is it makes a direct case for a recent decline in colour, a leaching out of colour from the world that can apply to the rise of both white and black, and also that it points the finger at one clear culprit, which is the rise of modernism and modernist minimalism.

It provides a number of instances both in literature and art which seems to suggest this pervasive fear and dislike of colour and its increasing condemnation as vulgarity. The book also does a usefully job of noting that there exists opposing tendencies, a Chromophilia, that can be found for example in a certain film tradition stretching from the Wizard of Oz to the recent Pleasantville. Beyond this, however, the volume lacks the convincing scholarship that can be used to explain the phenomenon.