A Definitive List Of Perfect LBDs To Wear When This Is All Over

In the decades since, the cliche of the LBD’s ‘timelessness’ has perennially overshadowed its political timeliness. The same month (December 1961) that Breakfast at Tiffany’s was released and the world witnessed Audrey Hepburn playing an escort in an LBD (long black dress in this case) by Hubert de Givenchy, the contraceptive pill also made its UK debut (caveat: for married women only).

Audrey Hepburn in a dress designed by Hubert de Givenchy, 1961.

Hulton Archive

By the early ’80s, when the cabbage-soup diet was pinging between fax machines and a new global aerobics obsession (Jane Fonda’s Workout) blew up out of Beverly Hills, the LBD had gone from being a silver bullet for protracted wardrobe decisions to the ‘post-diet dress’. Rather than the marker of liberty Chanel had endorsed, this one article of clothing was all-too-often becoming a societal scale against which women’s bodies and morals were graded.

When Princess Diana stepped out to attend a dinner at the Serpentine Gallery in June 1994 on the same evening that the TV interview in which Prince Charles admitted his extramarital affair was broadcast, her Christina Stambolian look was branded the “revenge dress”. It wasn’t the “independence dress” or the “freedom dress”, it was the revenge dress? Come on.