Famous Little Black Dresses
Audrey Hepburn as Holly Golightly in Breakfast at Tiffany’s dress designed by Hubert de Givenchy epitomized the standard for wearing little black dresses, accessorized with pearls, as was frequently seen throughout the early 1960s. The dress set a record in 2006 when it was auctioned for £410,000 - six times its original estimate. Betty Boop, a cartoon character based in part on the 1920s' "It Girl" Clara Bow, was drawn wearing a little black dress in her early films, though with Technicolor, Betty's dress became red.
Wallis Simpson, Duchess of Windsor, was known to own several little black dresses and said much in praise of the garments. One quote of the Duchess: "When a little black dress is right, there is nothing else to wear in its place." Edith Piaf, the French folk icon, performed in a black sheath dress throughout her career: for this habit she was nicknamed “little black sparrow." It was thought that the dress helped audiences focus more on Piaf's singing and less on her appearance.
In the notorious "Covent Garden incident", a director at London's Covent Garden theatre fired the then-obese soprano Deborah Voigt from an opera because she could not fit into a "little black cocktail dress", replacing her with the slimmer Anne Schwanewilms.
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Famous quotes containing the words famous, black and/or dresses:
“Madame Sosostris, famous clairvoyante,
Had a bad cold, nevertheless
Is known to be the wisest woman in Europe....”
—T.S. (Thomas Stearns)
“The history of progress is written in the blood of men and women who have dared to espouse an unpopular cause, as, for instance, the black man’s right to his body, or woman’s right to her soul.”
—Emma Goldman (1869–1940)
“For every nineteenth-century middle-class family that protected its wife and child within the family circle, there was an Irish or a German girl scrubbing floors in that home, a Welsh boy mining coal to keep the home-baked goodies warm, a black girl doing the family laundry, a black mother and child picking cotton to be made into clothes for the family, and a Jewish or an Italian daughter in a sweatshop making “ladies” dresses or artificial flowers for the family to purchase.”
—Stephanie Coontz (20th century)