All Dressed Up
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.
“Your dresses should be tight enough to show you’re a woman, and loose enough to show you’re a lady,” was the motto of the legendary costumer Edith Head, who knew a thing or two about dresses: She designed the gowns worn by Grace Kelly in “To Catch a Thief,” Audrey Hepburn in “Roman Holiday” and “Sabrina,” and Elizabeth Taylor in “A Place in the Sun,” and in the process, created a new definition for glamour.
These dresses and hundreds of others are the subject of a new book, “The Evening Dress,” by Alexandra Black (Rizzoli, 336 pages, $60). Ms. Black presents dresses from every era, in every length, style, and fabric, but all are united in one aspect: They were intended to be worn in the hours after dark. Evening fashion, she argues, is about frivolity, luxury, and sex appeal, as opposed to the practical attire of daywear. Coco Chanel, she notes, used to say, “Be a caterpillar by day and a butterfly by night. Nothing could be more comfortable than a caterpillar and nothing more made for love than a butterfly.”
In charting the evolution of these “butterfly” dresses, Ms. Black focuses primarily on the 20th century, following the dress from its flapper-chic designs in the 1920s to draped satin gowns in the 1930s to the formal, feminine styles epitomized by Dior’s “New Look” collection of 1947 to loose-fitting kaftans in the 1960s and ’70s to the body-conscious cuts of the 1980s and beyond. Throughout the book, she demonstrates the ways in which these styles have shaped what we see on today’s runways: John Galliano and Karl Lagerfeld have reinterpreted the flapper dress; a 2002 dress by Prada is strikingly similar to one worn by Katherine Hepburn in 1938; Roberto Cavalli borrows Yves Saint Laurent’s 1970s animal prints in his designs; designers from Valentino to Zac Posen continue to reinterpret Dior’s “New Look” dresses.
The book’s 250 illustrations and photographs make it clear why these styles – as well as the fashion icons who popularized them, from Louise Brooks to Grace Kelly to Jacqueline Kennedy – continue to inspire the looks that appear each year on runways, magazine spreads, and red carpets.
