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Easy rider magazine december 20139/2/2023 ![]() They are attentive to the status quo and those who challenge it. Outside of the blockbuster designer retrospectives, a lot of the more ambitious fashion exhibitions at the moment are about a thing and the subversion of that thing. A section devoted to the technical craft of the black dress, touching on the fiendish difficulty of producing something deliciously simple, feels like more standard territory, the air filled with the diligent sound of snipping.Ī Gareth Pugh dress embellished with black plastic drinking straws (Autumn/Winter 2013). Or Sineád O’Dwyer’s wonderful suspender top and naked dress from her SS23 collection, produced in a sample size 18–22. It’s fun to imagine Chanel being scandalised by some of the more outré designs on display: Gareth Pugh’s glorious drinking straw gown (2015), for example, which manages to be both very gothic and kind of hilarious. Like its fellow non-colour white, black occupies the strange position of being a neutral that is anything but. ![]() Like most colours, black is a mass of contradictions: establishment uniform and countercultural riposte, dowdy or even pious understatement and erotic suggestion. Various subcultures get a look in too, with Zandra Rhodes’s jewelled punk wedding dress being a particular highlight. We get beautiful velvet mourning dresses and AIDS crisis-era Versace, kinky Christopher Kane latex and Catholicism-heavy Simone Rocha. Benett/Dave Benett/Getty ImagesĪll the themes one might expect from an examination of black are present: sex, death, religion. Henri Bergmann wearing Christopher Kane’s ‘Hellbound dress’ (Fall/Winter 2022) at the Fashion Awards 2022 at the Royal Albert Hall in London. Instead, we skip from Yves Saint Laurent’s sultry Le Smoking tux (1979–80) through to the bulbous bulges from Comme des Garçons’s ‘Body Meets Dress, Dress Meets Body collection’ (1997), with pit stops via Virgil Abloh’s ironic knit featuring the white words ‘Little Black Dress’ in quotation marks and an excellent section on Afrofuturist aesthetics overseen by an imposing Maximilian gown. as functional and well-executed as a model T-Ford car). Few of the garments here would fulfil the rest of that famous Vogue assessment of Chanel’s LBD as being a ‘Ford’ dress (i.e. Beginning with Chanel and Dior, it offers a whistle-stop tour of the myriad ways in which the black dress has been approached, embraced, twisted and dispensed with. ‘Beyond the Little Black Dress’ is an exhibition in which most of the garments are black, though not all of them are entirely and several are not dresses at all. Its presence, entirely necessary for the show, sets an interesting tone for an exhibition seeking to reinterpret the unassailable status of the LBD – acknowledging the garment’s stripped-back origins before quickly seeking to move beyond them. On first glance it is surprisingly dowdy, not so much sleek as sack-like. The Chanel LBD is still held up as an icon of design: easy, flattering and flexible, it continues to fulfil US Vogue’s promise of being ‘the frock that all the world will wear’. One of her creations greets viewers near the door: a simple, black silk crepe shift with chevron panels and long sleeves from 1926. The disapproving ghost of Chanel hangs over ‘Beyond the Little Black Dress’ at the National Museum of Scotland in Edinburgh. Illustration of Chanel’s little black dress by Main Rousseau Bocher, published in Vogue (October, 1926) ![]()
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