Let’s be frivolous and oblivious today and talk about fashion. Except…..wouldn’t you know it, even a little black dress hides larger issues of politics.

“The fashion industry sometimes celebrates the little black dress as an equal-opportunity fashion—versatile, classic, and chic. But this neutral garment was never ideologically neutral—nor was it the democratic creation of a visionary designer. The little black dress marked and mediated social boundaries, a collaboration between cutting-edge technology and age-old class politics.”

As I learned here, the LBD is a blue collar costume that successfully crossed over. Black uniforms were introduced in England in the 1860s, to distinguished the help, now officially called “domestics,” from the ladies of the house. The trend towards these uniforms was soon extended to shop girls, telephone operators and the rest of the labor force. Anything to keep up class distinctions and make them visible!

Eventually, there was a reversal when private sowing machines and mass produced sowing patterns on paper allowed the “plebeians” to look as beautifully varied (after work) as their upper-class sisters:

“Coco Chanel didn’t invent the little black dress, she was astute enough to pick up on the underlying trend that made it popular—la pauvreté de luxe, she called it, or “luxurious poverty.” It was a look reserved exclusively for those who could “afford” to look poor by pretending that they simply couldn’t be bothered with fashion. But while a rich woman might now better blend into the crowd, on closer inspection, there would be some small detail in her seemingly anonymous garment—a certain cut or fabric or label—that acted as a secret handshake for those in the know.”

Next time you swoon over that luxe velvety thing or wonder how you lived for 67 years without a little black dress think about the implications.

All this came up, of course, because I chanced into a fun exhibition of little black dresses, with little of the politics explained. Just an opportunity to photograph some nifty outfits staged by their respective decades and sink into a fantasy land as long as the visit at the Washington State History Museum lasted…….

Here is an amusing clip with NYT fashion on the street photographer Cunningham talking about finding all the women in LBDs.(the photo is from the exhibit.)

Fashion, the armor to survive daily life? No, fashion is capitalism’s favorite child (I wish I had invented that phrase, but it was coined by Werner Sombart, derived from Karl Marx’ Capital where he writes about ‘The murderous, meaningless caprices of fashion’ – except they are not meaningless. They fill the need of capitalism for perpetual innovation, variation, and suspension.)

And here is some of the music heard in the ultimate LBD movie Breakfast at Tiffany’s with Audrey Hepburn.

Your’s truly standing in the dress up corner of the exhibition. Costumes and hats provided, my turtleneck an pants coincidentally black….