The Little Black Dress

"The Little Black Dress"

A staple piece of any closet.

CoCo Chanel in "The Black Dress"

From a corporate job interview with a black suit jacket, pearls, and pumps to a blind date with fashionable jeans,stilettos and silver bangle bracelets, the black dress is truly a must have for any woman's closet.As a classic timeless  staple of the wardrobe, the style of the little black dress should be effortless: a short black dress that is part of a current trend would not make the cut because it would soon appear out of style.

Raquel by Lakedra Reed

 "Rock Me Dress"

In 1926 Gabrielle “Coco” Chanel published a picture of a short, simple black dress in American Vogue.Chanel's dress was designed to be well -suited for every woman. It was calf-length, straight, and decorated only by a few diagonal lines. Vogue called it “Chanel’s Ford.” Like the Model T, the little black dress was simple and accessible for women of all social classes. Vogue also said that the LBD would become “a sort of uniform for all women of taste.”

Kikeara Image Group

Prior to the 1920s, black was often reserved for periods of mourning and considered indecent when worn outside such circumstances.A widow's mourning dress was closely observed at a time when details in fashion conveyed a sophisticated symbolic language. During the Victorian and Edwardian ages, a widow was expected to wear several stages of mourning dress for two years“Deep” or “full” mourning required the woman to wear plain black clothing with absolutely no decoration for the first year and a day of mourning. The second stage lasted nine months and permitted the wearing of black silk. In “ordinary mourning” for three months, the widow could accessorize only with black ribbon, lace, embroidery, or jet jewelry. The final six months of “half-mourning” allowed the bereaved to wear muted or neutral colors: shades and tints of purple were most common. Because of the number of deaths in World War I, plus the many fatalities during the Spanish flu epidemic, it became more common for women to  appear in public wearing black.

                                                                                                         

Hollywood's influence on fashion in North America helped the little black dress's popularity, but for more practical reasons: as Technicolor movies became more common, filmmakers relied on little black dresses because other colors looked distorted on screen and botched the coloring process.The rise of Dior's "New Look" in the post-war era and the sexual conservatism of the 1950s returned the little black dress to its roots as a uniform and a symbol of the dangerous woman. Synthetic fibers made popular in the 1940s and 1950s broadened the availability and affordability of many designs.The generation gap of the 1960s created a dichotomy in the design of the little black dress. The younger "mod" generation preferred, in general, a miniskirt on their versions of the dress .The 1970s did see some little black dresses. Some were lacy and feminine.The popularity of casual fabrics, especially knits, for dress with both sandals and combat boots, though the dress itself remained simple in cut and fabric. Starting in the late 2000s the fashion trends of the 1980s returned to favor. That meant the return of body conscious clothing, muted color schemes, and the reemergence of black. All these things have brought the LBD back, and as now it is popular as ever.So go ahead and cop your black dress that will carry over for decades. 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_black_dress source