The Little Black Dress: An Embodiment of Femininity

Image credit: SH Skyline at Night, by Ryan Ouyang

Ishita Jaiswal

Read the Faculty Introduction.

In the early hours of the morning, a cab enters a completely empty New York City street and stops in front of a grayish-brown building containing a Tiffany’s store. From the cab descends a beautiful woman. She pays the driver, and stands facing a Tiffany’s window, eating what looks like a bagel and drinking coffee in a to-go cup. She looks melancholic, or perhaps the forlorn background music of Henri Mancini’s “Moon River” on a harmonica makes her appear that way. She stands there for a few minutes, but as the sun rises further, she walks away, towards her home.

This is the opening scene from the 1961 film Breakfast at Tiffany’s, one of the most iconic romantic comedies of Hollywood. The woman in the scene, played by Audrey Hepburn, is Holly Golightly, a regular patron of fashionable cafes, or “café-society girl,” of New York (Merriam-Webster). While the scene itself is enrapturing with its landscape and music, what stands out is Holly’s attire. More specifically, her dress. Holly wears a floor-length, all-black dress with a side-slit and fashionable neckline. This dress, made by Hubert De Givenchy, a French couturier, falls in a category of dresses with a name that resonates with women across the globe even today: the “Little Black Dress,” or in short, the LBD. This seemingly regular piece of clothing has been written about extensively, portrayed numerous times in films and television, and redesigned repeatedly by couturiers around the world. But what is it about this article of clothing that makes it worthy of such attention?

While the Little Black Dress may be simple in appearance, its depiction of empowered femininity, freedom, and liberation inspires profound discussions about embracing traditionally defined ideas and cultural definitions of womanhood. This stereotypically feminine attire and its history speaks volumes about reclaiming, displaying, and propagating femininity –the set of characteristics that have been biologically, culturally, and historically associated with women– while continuing to liberate and empower the female body. Iconic designers like Coco Chanel have championed the LBD and other similar dresses as perfect instruments to reclaim and proudly display femininity while liberating the female body from the constraints of uncomfortable and impractical clothing.

However, feminist theorists like Simone De Beauvoir have called this same piece of clothing an instrument of “feminine narcissism” (Beauvoir 585). The story of the LBD and the Coco Chanel’s feminist beliefs seem to be in sharp contrast to that of Beauvoir, a contrast which reignites the debate about the nature of femininity and whether or not its existence is a myth. In a pursuit to further explore this debate and its implications regarding fashion and feminism, it is important to explore the history of LBD, investigate its rise to popularity, and analyze Chanel and Beauvoir’s respective views. In doing so, it can be argued that the little black dress, or feminine fashion of all kinds, remains alive despite ideologies like Beauvoir’s becoming extremely widespread because femininity is not a myth, but rather an active and important component of expression and liberation.

To begin, the term “little black dress” did not originate with the Givenchy dress featured in Breakfast at Tiffany’s. American poet and writer, Shelley Puhak, while outlining the origins of the Little Black Dress in an article for The Atlantic, discusses how black dresses had been designed and worn much before the 19th century. Between the 16th and the 18th century, dresses went from being an expensive kind of attire meant for aristocrats to being the uniform of household maids and working-class women (Puhak). The little black dress and its famous legacy have their beginnings in the 1910s, in the atelier of Gabrielle Bonheur “Coco” Chanel (Puhak). To reiterate, Chanel wasn’t the first person to have designed a short black dress, but she was the one responsible for bringing it into the limelight of high fashion and subsequent ubiquitous popularity (“Vogue” 0:30–0:36). In 1912, an actress named Suzanne Orlandi appeared publicly wearing a Chanel-brand LBD, but it wasn’t until 1926 that this simple and elegant women’s dress became an absolute hit (Museum). Vogue America published a picture of this dress that year dubbing it “Chanel’s Model T,” comparing it to Ford’s widely popular automobile Model T (“Vogue” 0:40–1:00). Vogue also called it “the frock that all the world will wear,” and they were right in assigning such a comparison to Chanel’s LBD (“Vogue” 0:40–0:50). Within the following two decades, the little black dress became a global fashion statement worn by celebrities, socialites, and actors wherever dresses were popular and accepted forms of clothing (Goldstone). Before the LBD, black wasn’t the preferred color for most designers. It was associated with mourning and grief before the Victorian era (Puhak). Towards the latter part of the 1800s, it became a colour of the lower class, and black dresses were seen as a “hand me down for the help” or a required uniform for shopgirls (Puhak). As Chanel brought the color black into high fashion, it became synonymous with style and luxury for everyone (Vaughan). Even today, it is often recognized as a quintessential element in women’s wardrobes. In modern times, women like Princess Diana, Victoria Beckham, Kate Middleton, and Beyonce have worn it (Brunker). At the same time, fast fashion companies like Zara, H&M, and Topshop have produced numerous renditions of the LBD for the greater public. Coco Chanel herself said “I imposed black; it’s still going strong today, for black wipes out everything else around” (Picardie). Overall, it is clear that the little black dress’ unique and attractive design made it a top choice for women of all backgrounds.

However, it wasn’t solely the colour or the beauty of the dress that made it a favourite of women around the world. The LBD has a rich history in terms of fashion and society, which is important to explore in order to understand how it enabled women to reclaim and proudly wear their femininity whilst moving ahead with the times. When the little black dress was first designed, the world had just emerged from the first World War, with another brewing in Europe. The Great Depression came down on all social classes, leading to women entering the workforce in the 1930s and the worsening of many people’s economic situations (Rotondi). At that point, the population involved in the economy consisted mostly of men, who were the primary entrepreneurs and the workers. But the burden of the crashing economic reality was too much for them to bear alone. So, women–who, until that time, were largely responsible for household duties–entered the workforce to help revive the economy  (Rotondi). However, as women entered the workforce, they faced plenty of restrictions that prevented them from working efficiently. One of the most significant restrictions was their clothing. Since the medieval era and during the earlier part of the 1900s, women’s clothing had consisted of long gowns and dresses with cinched waists, corsets, boxed silhouettes, layers, and intricate necklines. This kind of attire was impractical for labor, especially in the factories and offices where women had recently started working in the 1930s (Chilton). So, they adapted to the pressing requirement of practical attire by wearing men’s clothes. Trousers and shirts made their way into their wardrobes, and dresses and skirts were ousted (“When Did Women Start Wearing Pants?”). Coco Chanel, however, opposed this adaptation for a small yet profound reason: by discarding their own dresses and adopting more manly clothes, women were inadvertently rejecting their femininity. However, it can be argued that this “rejection of femininity” represented by this fashion adaptation was not simply a result of the need for practicality that came with the changing times. This rejection may have been an implication of a gender ideology championed by Simone De Beauvoir in her magnum opus, The Second Sex, which was published around the same post-war period when traditionally feminine clothing fell in popularity. In The Second Sex, Beauvoir claims that gender, and the characteristics traditionally associated with it, is a “social construct,” which may have greatly influenced women’s fashion choices.

Since The Second Sex deals greatly with critiquing gender and femininity, it is important to contextualize this concept. Put simply, femininity is the set of attributes that shape, define, and describe a woman. Traditionally, femininity has been defined by nurturing traits and sensitivity (Windsor), sensuality and gentleness (Kite), and humility (Vetterling-Braggin). It also includes the desire to appear beautiful, well-kept, and attractive. But, in The Second Sex, Beauvoir termed femininity, or “the eternal feminine,” as an ambiguous and basic notion (289). She called the inherent set of characteristics that defined a woman a “myth,” and seemingly promoted the idea that nothing inherent defined the male or the female gender (Beauvoir 289). According to her, it was society and culture that formed, encouraged, and propagated the attributes associated with masculinity or femininity (Beauvoir 289). For her, these attributes were merely a way for men to deem women different and often inferior to them. She regarded femininity as a vague and baseless concept, likening it to a dress, which she saw as an equally vague and baseless picture of feminine expression. While discussing how women “dress up,” she claims that dressing up in feminine clothes “concretises feminine narcissism” (Beauvoir 585). She goes on to argue that fashion is merely a way to eroticise a woman and denies that it has anything to do with a woman’s desire to express herself (Beauvoir 585). In fact, for Beauvoir, a woman who thinks of her dress as an expression of her identity is someone who “suffers from not doing anything” (585). Such a commentary on dressing up and feminine clothing clearly demonstrates that Beauvoir’s ideology greatly opposed that of Chanel’s. While the latter claimed that traditionally feminine clothing championed the expression and propagation of femininity, the former called the very existence of women’s fashion into question. Furthermore, Beauvoir’s view that everything associated with gender was a myth and social construct gained popularity. With this rise in popularity, the inherent attributes that made women critical to society, from beauty to domesticity, started losing their significance.

However, even as Beauvoir and those who agreed with her championed this move away from an inherent idea of femininity and its expression via dresses, women like Coco Chanel continued to push against it. Chanel’s appreciation for femininity and its relationship to clothing is apparent when she says, “look for the woman in the dress. If there is no woman, there is no dress,” and “dress shabbily and they remember the dress; dress impeccably and they remember the woman” (“A Quote by Coco Chanel”). So, to ensure that women wouldn’t have to choose between practicality and femininity, she designed clothes that weren’t restrictive. Most of her designs did away with cinched waists, corsets, shoulder pads, and other aspects of a dress that would make it uncomfortable for a workplace. The little black dress was no exception; it was one of the first dresses to have a loose form without appearing too masculine and was comfortable and breathable. It did not have the traditional corseted cut and stitch, yet appeared delicate and feminine. Chanel designed the dress to look luxurious and feel effortless. It even drew ire from male journalists for being unlike usual dresses with a specific structure that highlighted the female body (Charles-Roux).

Even today, many adaptations of the little black dress appear feminine and elegant without being restrictive or impractical. Fashion designers have of course made revealing, impractical, and short versions of the LBD, but women can still easily find and wear a simple, decent, Chanel-like version of the LBD to work, without being impractical or distasteful. Chanel’s creation of the little black dress, and many of her other practical yet elegant designs, can be viewed as her opposition to Beauvoir’s claim that “fashion does not serve to fulfill [a woman’s] projects, but on the contrary to thwart them…the least practical dresses…are the most elegant” (586). Thanks to designers like Chanel, feminine expression in the form of clothing doesn’t have to be enslaved by impracticality. Rather, elegant dresses like the Little Black Dress are practical and fulfill a woman’s desire to express herself completely.

Throughout history, humans have found and enjoyed various ways to express themselves, including language (both written and spoken), music, and art. Fashion, too, is a form of art, and the way we dress is a form of language. So, for both men and women, their clothing represents what they want, how they see themselves, and how they wish to be seen (Edwards). Therefore, Beauvoir’s claim that women who think their dresses are a form of expression are narcissists who are not “doing anything” seems inappropriate at best (585). Considering that this claim stems from her rejection of “the eternal feminine,” her idea that femininity is a myth formed and propagated as a social agenda is also questionable. While several biological proofs exist reaffirming the legitimacy of traditionally feminine traits in women, the desire to express one’s gender identity is itself a proof of femininity being inherent to some extent. To say that women prefer dresses just to please the male gaze rather than wearing them because of their own desire is belittling. For women like Coco Chanel, dresses such as the LBD were a way to let women embrace their own ideas of outward femininity, while giving them a choice to communicate their gender identity without making them uncomfortable. Even today, the various manifestations of the LBD, and the countless other practical dresses inspired by it, continue to do the same.

Dressing up in LBDs, or any dress for that matter, is a choice women should feel empowered to make. Contrary to what Beauvoir argues, this choice does not mean a woman “has accepted her vocation as a sex object” (586). In fact, choosing to wear a dress amongst the plethora of modern fashion styles can be considered a form of expression that strengthens and reinforces a woman’s gender identity and her belief in her own inherent feminine traits. A woman preferring an LBD over trousers and a shirt should not be equated to her making herself “a prey to male desires,” but rather her celebrating femininity (Beauvoir 586). Thus, it can be argued that such a woman considers the traits of femininity to be neither rigid nor a “myth” utilized by society to oppress women.  A woman like Audrey Hepburn who wears the elegant and comfortable LBD may not only find it to be an expression of herself, but also a reinforcement of her power and significance. The iconic little black dress illustrates that Beauvoir’s critiques of dresses may make a patronizing statement about women’s fashion choices; instead, expressing femininity through clothes should be considered an active and important component of female empowerment.

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