THE TUXEDO VS. THE LBD

A blog by Makeitup - The Agency

20. December 2018

New Year’s Eve is coming up and you might already have started planning what to wear. Two classics on an evening like this are the tuxedo and the little black dress. They are both great wardrobe staples to keep year after year and you can easily style them up with fun accessories like a pair of colorful shoes, a sparkling bag or why not a great pair of statement earrings? The possibilities are endless. Which one will you choose?



THE LBD

The little black dress, also called LBD, is typically a simple evening dress that is quite short. It was first seen when American Vogue published a drawing of a LBD from the French designer Coco Chanel on their cover in 1926. They called it “Chanel’s Ford”. It was simple and accessible for all social classes like Ford’s car “Model T”.



Black clothing had previously been worn by widows and servants. Chanel helped disassociating the color black with mourning. She reinvented the idea of black clothing and the LBD became a uniform of all women with taste, associated with elegance and sense of style.



In 1947 the LBD was reinvented yet again and we saw a new version with a full skirt and a cinched waist in Christian Dior’s collection later called “New Look”.

The LBD that Audrey Hepburn is wearing in Breakfast at Tiffany’s is one of the most famous dresses in fashion history, designed by Hubert de Givenchy. A fun fact is that the dress was originally much shorter. The film studio though it showed too much of Audrey’s legs so costumer designer, Edith Head, added fabric and it became the version we see on the screen today. The dress was auctioned out in 2006 for the whipping amount of 467 K British pounds.



THE TUXEDO

The tuxedo was a garment exclusively meant for men until the French designer Yves Saint Laurent introduced the female version in his Spring/Summer Haut Couture Collection in 1966. It was a provocative move at a time when women wearing trousers was seen as inappropriate.



With this androgynous, sensual and elegant piece of clothing Yves Saint Laurent redefined the female silhouette and he thereby changed the way women saw themselves.



The former technical director of the YSL couture house explains that when pinning the sleeves of the tuxedo they never did it according to an arm hanging down, but always according to a bent arm, placed on the hip. Talk about power dressing!



Pierre Bergé, Yves Saint Laurent’s business partner and lover once stated:



“Chanel gave women freedom, but Yves Saint Laurent gave them power”.

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