The little black dress is a short, simple black dress that goes from office to evening with a change of shoes and earrings. Before the 1920s, plain black worn in public suggested a servant or a period of mourning rather than the height of fashion.
That changed in October 1926, when American Vogue illustrated a long-sleeved black dress by Coco Chanel, belted at a low waist and worn with pearls and a cloche hat, and nicknamed it the Ford, after the Model T: one smart design for everybody, in the colour Henry Ford was said to prefer. Chanel’s house actually showed several versions, something no car factory would have tolerated. Thirty-five years later Hubert de Givenchy gave the idea its most famous film role, dressing Audrey Hepburn’s Holly Golightly in black for Breakfast at Tiffany’s, complete with pearls, long gloves and a chignon. Since then the dress has been reinvented by almost every designer, without ever needing a new name.