LBD vs Let's Be Different

I have a confession to make.

Not only do I regularly go panty-less, I don't like little black dresses.

Let me tell you the story of me and the Little Black Dress. I bought my first LBD the week before my twenty first birthday. It is the archetypal little black cocktail dress - sleeveless, with wide set shoulder straps, a ‘v’ neckline, shaped waist and tulip skirt that finished just above the knee. Silk, no embellishments, on sale, perfect fit. I thought I'd found the fashion pot of (black) gold at the end of the rainbow. I anticipated that I would wear it constantly.

A funny thing happened, though, when I put it on before going out for dinner on my birthday. Rather than feel elegant, timeless and sophisticated - what I'd hoped to feel on my 21st - I felt flat. Uninspired. Boring. I tried in vain to jolly myself into the party mood, but couldn't. I simply didn't feel like me. Or, rather, I felt like me, but on mute.

I had a hunch this might have something to do with the dress. Everything else about the evening was perfect. In the interests of being a benevolent wardrobe dictator, however, I decided to give the dress a couple more chances to prove itself. Both times it failed miserably - again, I had that curious mute feeling I'd had at my birthday. Something was definitely amiss with that LBD. Months of puzzling over the problem of the LBD later, I came up with the reason why I never felt quite as fabulous as I normally do when wearing that LBD. Finally, it dawned on me and all the pieces fell into place.

As I said in my first post, writers write, sculptors sculpt, but as fashionistas, we wear our art. Being the ultimate fashion cliché, my LBD was blocking my ability to express myself clearly. Try and imagine how Iain McEwan would have felt if he ended 'Atonement' with something as trite as 'better to have loved and lost than to never have loved at all'. Or Donna Tart's 'The Secret History' finished with the words 'boys will be boys'. I admit to taking some liberties here, but I can't imagine that Iain and Donna would feel particularly great about those words on the last page of their novels. In fact, I think they'd feel like they'd copped out - that they'd resorted to a cliché when they could have expected something more original, more creative, more fabulous, of themselves. That's exactly how I felt about the LBD - that I'd failed to express myself completely because I threw in the creative towel and resorted to the hackneyed and the cliché.

Like all great clichés, the LBD was initially a stroke of creative genius. When the LBD-bomb was first dropped by Coco Chanel in the 1920s, it was nothing short of a revolution. It 'freed' women from having to worry so much what to wear to the numerous social occasions a gal-about-town would be - and still is - expected to go to. An LBD, back when it was a fresh new concept, would have said a lot about the wearer; about how modern, how carefree, how liberated and devil-may-care she was.

The trouble with the LBD now, though, is that it's become a fallback position women adopt when they don't feel confident enough in their creativity, in their own look, to wear something truly fantastic and truly expressive of themselves. It's fashion's missionary. And because it's been so heavily promoted, and reincarnated in every decade since the 1920s, there are just so darn many of them around that to wear an LBD actually makes you pretty much a part of the fashion wallpaper. Dull, dreary, black wallpaper, that is.

This isn't to malign the black dress in general - indeed, I have a couple of other black dresses, both jersey, one clingy and the other floaty, which I love. In both cases, though, the black dresses I love have something a bit different going on - one of them is a print, the other has a daring and unique v-back construction. Both of them have something that sets them apart from the pack. My critique of the LBD is restricted to the heavily promoted 'classic' version - see the description of mine above, or the Portmans window next time you're in a shopping mall. It's the cliché of the black cocktail length dress in a plain fabric with minimal detailing that my vitriol is reserved for.

For me, the fatal flaw of the LBD concept, aside from being overused to the point of cliché, is the idea that a single dress can reflect how you feel at a cocktail party with your girlfriends, on a romantic date, at a work dinner or at a family wedding. All of those events, for me, have a different emotional tone – joy, excitement, loyalty and dread respectively. For all its supposed universality, the LBD doesn't resonate with all of these tones. Before defenders of the LBD will bring out the accessory defense - you can change the tone of the outfit with accessorisation - this in and of itself reflects a sad truth about the LBD: at its very best it's merely a blank canvas for fabulous accessories. Think about the LBD Audrey Hepburn wore in ‘Breakfast at Tiffany's’. Now take away the necklace and the cigarette holder. What have you got left? Not a whole lot of fabulous, that's for sure.

My clothes ought - no, need - to be more than blank canvases, just as a writer needs his or her words to be more than just text on a page. Whilst it's necessary to have some pieces in your wardrobe that whisper rather than shout ‘fabulous’ from the rooftops, I feel that the LBD doesn’t even belong in the category of whisperers. Every piece in your wardrobe - even if it's a workhorse item like jeans or a black vee neck - must be more than just a blank canvas, and must have something to say. Most of us don't have the money, or hanging space, for clothes that don't say anything at all, and can ill afford to surrender our individuality to clichés in an increasingly homogenized world.

Throwing down a gauntlet, I challenge you, dear reader, to abandon the LBD. Instead, Let's Be Different. To wrangle some ee cummings here, I'd rather learn from one bird how to sing than teach ten thousand stars how not to dance.

So Let's Be Different.