The little black dress is having another great big moment, on both the runway and the red carpet

It's hard to believe that this time a year ago, pink was fashion’s favorite color. It was widely available in a robust spectrum, from the dusty rose of millennial pink to the saturated fuchsia of Valentino’s Pink PP. Barbiecore was going strong; with the film starring Margot Robbie as the beloved fashion doll with a signature hot-pink hue expected to be a blockbuster the following summer, trend forecasters at the Pantone Color Institute anointed a bright pinkishpurple called Viva Magenta the 2023 Color of the Year. Fast-forward to the Barbie world premiere in July, when Robbie posed for pictures on a pink carpet, in front of a pink Corvette convertible, but wearing a black custom Schiaparelli Haute Couture bustier dress that was fully embroidered with sequins and finished with layers of tulle. The only nod to pink in Robbie’s look was the mousseline scarf she carried in her right hand. This Barbie wears black. And she’s not alone. 

The little black dress, or LBD, that most iconic of styles, popularised nearly a century ago by Gabrielle “Coco” Chanel, has returned in a big way. The LBD Chanel introduced in 1926 was a simple, sporty black dress made of lightweight crepe de chine, with long sleeves and a hemline that hit just below the knee. Devoid of embroidery and embellishment—Chanel wore hers with multiple strands of pearls—it borrowed from the codes of menswear. 

The original LBD also became a blank slate for reinvention that evolved to accommodate the fashionable silhouettes of every decade, from Cristóbal Balenciaga’s abstract sculptural volumes and Christian Dior’s cinched waists and full A-line skirts to Rei Kawakubo’s body-engulfing Comme des Garçons designs and Vivienne Westwood’s draped corset dresses. 

This past May at the Cannes Film Festival, Kirsten Dunst wore a black tiered chiffon dress from Chanel’s Resort 1995 collection, while Lily-Rose Depp sported three different black Chanel minidresses on the Croisette in the span of two days, including a strapless LBD from the Fall 1994 collection and others made from iridescent tweed and allover sequins. Elle Fanning and Kylie Jenner wore the exact same Grace Kelly–esque black Bottega Veneta tea-length dress in Cannes and Paris, respectively, while Dakota Johnson swanned around Milan in a sculptural black Versace sheath that was as formfitting as Princess Diana’s famous revenge dress.

This recent U-turn from pink makes sense when you consider the way we consume celebrity photos on social media, suggests Kate Young, a stylist who works with Johnson, Michelle Williams, Scarlett Johansson, Julianne Moore, and Selena Gomez. “A lot of the clothes that have been the most successful on Instagram and TikTok are, like, really wacky,” Young says. “After looking at such crazy prints and so much color and logos for years, a black dress in your feed now feels soothing.”

Valerie Steele, director and chief curator of the Museum at the Fashion Institute of Technology and author of The Black Dress, agrees: “After being deluged by color, people are rediscovering the appeal of black.” In fact, Steele observes, there’s a parallel between the moment of peak color saturation when the little black dress first came into being and our own. “Chanel described feeling nauseated by the brilliant colors in Poiret’s fashion, which were these electric blues and tangerine oranges and cherry reds,” Steele says, referring to the early-20th-century couturier Paul Poiret, who was known for neoclassical silhouettes in an acidic color palette.

“A little black dress is the most useful. It adapts to any occasion,” says Vivienne Westwood creative director Andreas Kronthaler. That transitional quality is thanks to black’s multivalent connotations, explains Steele. “The color black is the most complicated and multifaceted color for fashion,” she says. “And as a result, it can mean more different things all at the same time than any other color. I think this is crucial to the continued popularity of the little black dress and the way that it continues to morph into different styles.”

Perhaps the most famous pop-culture example of the LBD is the oft-imitated black satin Givenchy sheath that Audrey Hepburn wore with black opera gloves sunglasses, and a tiara as Holly Golightly in the opening scene of the 1961 film Breakfast at Tiffany’s. At a blowout party to celebrate the reopening of Tiffany & Co.’s Fifth Avenue flagship in New York this past spring, guests channeled different facets of Golightly’s signature outfit, with Hailey Bieber arriving in a black bodycon look by Versace and Gal Gadot dressed in black pannier-hipped Loewe. 

“The little black dress is just the be-all and end-all of chic,” reflects Givenchy’s current creative director, Matthew M. Williams, who created his own homage to Hepburn’s Breakfast at Tiffany’s dress in his Fall 2023 collection with a one-shouldered draped maxi that reads as very evening but is actually cut from a lightweight nylon-taffeta outerwear fabric that gives it a certain practicality. “It would be impossible to improve on the look Hubert de Givenchy designed for that film,” Williams acknowledges. “That scene will always be iconic, but, needless to say, times have changed drastically in the past 60-odd years, and I wanted to take that spirit and reinterpret it using today’s vocabulary.”

For Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny actor Shaunette Renée Wilson’s Cannes debut, stylist Solange Franklin dressed her in a black patent-leather Marc Jacobs sheath with white opera gloves and towering platforms. “Audrey Hepburn would not necessarily have had it in her closet, but I think she would wear it,” says Franklin, who has worked with Zazie Beetz, Serena Williams, and Tracee Ellis Ross. “Maybe not the shoes, but definitely the dress.”

“The fun thing about a black dress is that you can make it super subversive,” says Young, who points to Marc Jacobs’s brilliant Fall 2023 collection of tiny little black dresses with exposed bra cups and micro bubble hems. “They were all way too short and schoolgirlish, but if you just change the proportion ever so slightly, then those are very classic cocktail dresses.” (Many came with matching bloomers, which is similar to a styling trick at A. Potts, where LBDs were shown over pants.)

Black certainly has a way of making everything feel fresh and modern. See the very of-the-moment black lace at 
Dior, chiffon at Valentino, burnout velvet at Puppets and Puppets, and illusion tulle naked dresses at Nensi Dojaka this fall, which are reminiscent of certain Y2K styles but cover just enough to make them feel like things actual adults might actually want to wear. Tory Burch offered an object lesson in deconstruction this season by cutting an LBD from a sheer power mesh traditionally used for corsets. She draped the fabric around the body in a single layer, left the edges raw, and added soft padding at the hips to emphasise the waist. “The little black dress is the ultimate canvas for experimentation,” Burch says. “It can be minimal or romantic, relaxed or sharply sophisticated, and it never looks overdone.” 

“I loved the idea of challenging everything we’ve come to expect from a little black dress,” says LaQuan Smith, another fan of short hemlines, who bricolaged elements like tuxedo-jacket lapels with a cutout LBD and a Mandarin collar with a one-shouldered dress for his opulent Fall 2023 show at the Rainbow Room in New York. In a nod to nostalgia and glamorous sex appeal, the designer says he was inspired by Dynasty, Bond girls, and ’80s club fashion. 

There are no rules anymore for what a LBD should look like—it can be super simple and long or fluffy and sparkly and short—or who can wear one. “A little black dress for me is the piece that you wear with everything,” says Harris Reed, who opened his Fall 2023 debut as Nina Ricci creative director with a high-camp version of the LBD: a black polka-dot minidress with an enormous back bow that was worn over a black glitter polka-dot tulle catsuit. “A little black dress is really a piece of style DNA that every woman, man, and nonbinary individual should have in their wardrobe.”

This piece originally appeared in the September 2023 print edition of Harper's Bazaar USA