Always A Little Black Dress
By Greg Ward | October 20, 2023
It’s your junior year in college. You just met your new neighbors down the street and they invite you to a bar near campus. You shuffle through your clothes trying to find the right outfit. You need to spice it up a bit, while not creating too much trouble. You flip past jeans, skirts, and blouses and finally land on something. It needs a little dusting off, but you take it off the rack. It’s the greatest fail-safe to ever exist—the little black dress—for all people in the world in desperate need of an easy, sexy, affordable, and classic outfit.
From Audrey Hepburn to Billy Porter, the little black dress (LBD) has become a staple in fashion history. Its cocktail style has captured the essence of many and has become a character of its own. Captured in these photos, Hollis Brown pays homage to all the little black dresses that have come before her. At the start of her twenties, she is feeling confident in herself. With the help of the LBD and a little red lipstick, her boldness is as striking as the NYC skyscrapers behind her. She can be whoever she wants in the little black dress. At one point Hollis is “Miss. Don’t-talk-to-me,” and the next she’s “Miss. Silly-goofy-cute.” Is it the dress, or is it the model? That’s the question that the LBD has made society ponder for many years.
The LBD will never go out of style. It has become a part of our identity. Just like our skin, it helps us reach bodily autonomy. It wraps us up at our worst and best moments. Even though personally I have never worn the LBD, (I should really try it though, my legs would look amazing) the little black dress has been a staple of my own personal upbringing. Yet, my first exposure to the black dress was a little different than most.
Growing up I was first exposed to the LBD at funerals. The LBD was a dress women kept in the back of their closet and hoped to only bring out every ten years. I watched as women batted their eyes with tissues that hid in their little black purses that matched their little black dresses. The LBD was an image of sorrow, or as I like to call it, sexy-suffering. The dress came back into my life during seventh grade. I was invited to many, many bars and bat mitzvahs. Girls in my seventh-grade classes would put on their LBD every Saturday night, kick off their shoes, and dance at Sheraton Hotels. Their moms would almost hurl when they saw the hemline getting shorter and shorter. And now, the LBD has crossed binaries. My friends wear it to bars and get free drinks from men who work in finance. They wake up, still wearing the LBD the next morning, and walk back to their own apartment.
The little black dress is not just a staple of fashion, but a staple of American culture. Hollis and I came up with a list of songs that add to the feeling of putting on the little black dress. From Sara Bareilles to Harry Styles to Taylor Swift. It’s a playlist to listen to whether you are wearing an LBD or if you want to feel like you are wearing an LBD. Maybe we all would feel a little more confident pretending to be in an LBD state of mind, all the time.
Graphic by Hollis Brown
LBD Photographs by Ingrid Doubleday