It starts with a little black dress
Fashion maven Jane L. Rosen explores the impact an item of clothing can have on the lives of women
What’s in a little black dress? When is it more than a paltry thing upon a hanger? Jane L. Rosen prefaces her whirlwind tour through our material world with the wisdom of French designer Yves Saint Laurent: “What is important in a dress is the woman who is wearing it.”
True enough, but the right dress sure can help. In a series of sketches starring the most coveted dress of the New York season, Rosen explores the impact of a hit LBD (“little black dress”) on the lives of nine very different women, from the ingénue model who first wears it, to the wicked Hollywood star who refuses to return it, to a shocked Muslim girl in Paris who receives it by mistake.
The LBD first achieved iconic status back in the 1920s, when French designer Coco Chanel, blessed by the editors at Vogue, achieved lasting fame as the force behind a dress that transformed black from the colour of mourning to the colour of evening — with more than a dash of Jazz Age sexiness thrown in.
Since then, it’s never really gone out of style, as fashion maven Rosen well knows.
Perhaps the elegant Audrey Hepburn wore it most memorably, playing quirky Holly Golightly in 1961’s “Breakfast at Tiffany’s.”
It’s no mistake that both Audrey and Coco are given walk-on roles in Rosen’s rollicking fable about dresses and women.
One apparently mismatched couple — unaware that they’re falling in love — eat popcorn together while watching “Sabrina,” the movie classic starring Hepburn as a chauffeur’s daughter who captures the heart of a wealthy businessman.
(It’s their story, they just don’t know it.)
In another sly homage, the mere act of trying on a Chanel suit (“ivory wool, and the skirt fell just above her knee … it was stunning. She was stunning”) grants every wish of an unhappy girl longing to taste the romance and glamour denied her by fate.
Rosen’s engaging style — chick lit with an edge — revels in a world both romantic and caustic, as if Jane Austen had been teleported from an English drawing room to the change rooms in Bloomingdale’s.
After the dress, a “Max Hammer” label, splashes onto the cover of Women’s Wear Daily it soars into high demand, becoming such a rarity that two Bloomingdale’s salespeople often wield power over who deserves to wear the last size small in the city.
Natalie, a salesgirl from Queens, smarting after her status-conscious boyfriend dumps her to marry a “fancy lawyer, “cheerfully dons the dress to play “beard” (fake girlfriend) on a date to a movie premiere with a Hollywood star whose lying ex has outed him in the tabloids.
(Natalie hopes for revenge, Page Six style.)
Then there’s Felicia, the lovelorn executive assistant of middle years: wearing the dress, she snags her adored boss’s attention. (Happiness ensues.)
Private detective Andie tries it on, hoping to entice a client’s cheating husband; instead, she falls in love.
Each tale has charm, invention, flashes of magic.
The action mostly centres on the wonderland that is “Bloomies” dress department, where wise Ruthie and Tomas, her faithful junior, hold sway.
In Tomas’ words, “We’re your fairy godmothers!”
When good-hearted Ruthie bestows the little black number on an unemployed Brown graduate — for one night only — a girl who’s faked her success on social media turns honest and, more importantly, employable. This Cinderella doesn’t need a prince — she needs a career.
Curiously, the dress-as-object seems hardly to exist, apart from meagre descriptors such as “simple” and “quiet.” Its creator, Morris Siegel, a near-nonagenarian whose fluky escape from 1930s Poland with his friend and rescuer, the original Max Hammer, has achieved both love and success in America.
At his retirement party, Morris nails the essence of the perfect dress, as one that gives its wearer exactly what she requires. “It wasn’t those ill-fitting glass slippers that gave Cinderella the confidence to crash the ball — it was the dress. … A beautiful dress holds a little bit of magic in it.”
Magic, agrees Morris’s doctor grandson, having found love in his ER department via a strange and hilarious episode featuring a girl, the dress, formaldehyde — and a corpse.
As in all fables, attempts to hijack this bit of perfection by vile or selfish creatures end badly; happy endings, like the dress, being strictly reserved for those who earn them.