Addressing the colourful topic of the little black dress

OPINION:Noir style comes in many shapes and sizes, as an exhibition celebrating the staying power of the LBD reveals

GROWING UP, I did not think of black as an alluring colour. When you misbehaved, nuns in black habits, brandishing rulers, bore down on you. When a relative died, my mom wore rustling black rayon. When my Irish great-aunts went to work for rich American families, they wore black maids’ uniforms. Our family dog, Scottie, bit anyone wearing black, even my brothers in their prom tuxedos.

Black was the colour of despair, decadence, death, nightmares and vampire capes. It was the colour, priests warned, that your soul would turn if you sinned. But part of becoming a woman is realising the mythic power of the little black dress. It makes you thinner and more chic, no matter how stunted your fashion sense, and gives you dash.

I first saw it in old movies: Rita Hayworth vamping in strapless black satin in Gilda; Marilyn Monroe sparkling in a barely-there Orry-Kelly beaded dress in Some Like it Hot; Natalie Wood winning Steve McQueen’s heart with a low-cut black dress in Love with the Proper Stranger. And of course, the gorgeous black Givenchy cocktail dress Audrey Hepburn wore munching a pastry in front of Tiffany’s one morning – a look so embedded in the DNA of American culture that Tina Fey feyly evokes it on the cover of the new Entertainment Weekly, complete with upswept hair, long gloves, cigarette holder and cat curled around her neck.

Others consider that image the shimmering height of the LBD, or little black dress. But not André Leon Talley, the imperious impresario of a new exhibition on the colourful subject at his eponymous gallery in the art museum of the Savannah College of Art and Design.

“It’s not the most iconic or important little black dress ever made,” dismissively notes the fashion czar, who himself favours comfortable yurt-like garments and size-15 Uggs. (He owns nine pairs of black and bark Uggs.)

He points in the direction of an LBD he finds far more compelling. I’m startled to see a male mannequin gussied up in a see-through black lace dress worn over spanking white boxers, black socks and shoes that would have dazzled Louis XIV, the Carrie Bradshaw of his day.

“This is what Marc Jacobs wore to the Met Costume Gala, a man-dress from Comme des Garçons,” Talley says. “It was a seminal moment in style for a man to go there, perfectly accessorised with diamante buckled black matte leather court shoes that he designed himself.”

No doubt. Talley, a contributing editor at Vogue and a correspondent for Entertainment Tonight, says he was inspired to mount the show after seeing Anna Wintour in a classic black Chanel dress, now framed in a shadow box on the cherry-red wall. It was Coco Chanel and Vogue, after all, who popularised “the little nothings”, as they were known then, on October 1st, 1926, when the magazine published an illustration of a blouson black crêpe de Chine sheath, predicting that every woman would aspire to have it in her closet, just as every man wanted a Ford Model T in the garage.

“Chanel craved the power and independence of men,” says Gioia Diliberto, who has written a novel and a play about the couturiere and who contributed an essay to the show’s catalogue. “So in her designs, she borrowed the ease, comfort and muted palette of men’s clothes to create a style of pared-down elegance for women that liberated them from furbelows and froufrou confections.”

Talley says he collected a cavalcade of designer dresses from his friends in materials from “neoprene scuba-diving fabric to latex to chicken feathers” (really ostrich feathers).

In the rows of black glamour can be found Whoopi Goldberg’s Chado Ralph Rucci caftan – with a snake necklace strangling the mannequin’s neck; Sarah Jessica Parker’s buttery leather pleated Prabal Gurung; L’Wren Scott’s own design, a sexy wool and lace number that she wore to the Golden Globes with her boyfriend, Mick Jagger; and a Tom Ford Chantilly lace and beaded concoction based on Goya’s portrait of the Duchess of Alba.

“Lady Gaga wore that with blue hair,” Talley confides.

Renee Zellweger contributed a navy ribbon-candy-style dress. “Sometimes you wear midnight blue as black,” Talley opines.

I start to feel paranoid when my friend Talley offers a disquisition on how to identify a “good black” hue versus a “bad black” one, and which blacks don’t match. I’d assumed black was black.

“You don’t want a harsh black or a dead black that looks like an old bunker that’s been oxidised through years of neglect in a barren warehouse,” he says. “A good black is an electrifying black. It should be about dreams of beauty.”

Gazing at my green T-shirt, Talley murmurs scornfully, “sea foam, I suppose”, before turning back to the inanimate but far more enticing mannequins.

“When in doubt, you go to your best little black dress, not to your wimpy, seaweedy, outre-mer sea foam or your wretched yellow lemon drop.”

He sums up the staying power of noir style with a line straight out of film noir: “It’s just something that you know is right, even if it’s wrong.”