In praise of Adele and the Long Black Dress

NEW YORK: This weekend, Adele’s Las Vegas residency comes to an end and with it what may have been the most striking series of LBDs since Audrey Hepburn stepped out of a cab in “Breakfast at Tiffany’s” wearing Givenchy. Those initials don’t just stand for little black dress anymore.

By the time the artist takes her last bow, she will have worn more than 50 long black dresses in Vegas (to say nothing of her concerts in Munich and London, where she also wore LBDs) — a different one every weekend. She started in an off-the-shoulder velvet Schiaparelli, with a long satin sash caught up by a gold buckle. She wore David Koma with crystal roses on Valentine’s Day 2023. She channeled Morticia Addams on Halloween that fall in Arturo Obegero. She got Loro Piana to make its first va-va-voom gown this month.

She has worn, in no particular order, LBDs from Stella McCartney, Dior, Carolina Herrera, Harris Reed, Prada, Vivienne Westwood, Robert Wun, Proenza Schouler, Armani, JW Anderson and Ralph Lauren, to name but a few. All were custom-made. She has worked with names from across the industry and rarely repeated a designer twice.

The only guidelines, according to Fernando Garcia, the co-creative director of Oscar de la Renta, who made the glittery sunburst number she wore for her Christmas 2022 performance, were that they be black, long, cut on the curve to show off her waist and needed to have enough give to let her lungs go.

Adele has fancied the LBD for almost as long as she has been in the public eye (see the night-sky Armani LBD she wore to the Grammys in 2012). But the sheer number of black gowns she has worn during her residency, the variety and the consistency of her presentation, marks a new milestone in what may be the most timeless garment in the fashion pantheon.

At a moment when the gravitational pull exerted by social media means that it is often the most outré outfits that are rewarded by the attention economy — most colorful! And crazy! And fringed! And feathered!— in a setting that effectively invented the rhinestone X games, Adele’s wardrobe has been a riposte to the status quo. Hers is essentially a one-woman campaign to remind the world of the power of elegant understatement.

“When everything is about being seen,” choosing a different approach is, ironically, “one way to stand out,” said Sarah Collins, the associate chair of fashion marketing and management at the Savannah College of Art and Design, which in 2012 held an exhibition on “The Little Black Dress.”

In the physics of fashion, in which for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction, the pendulum may be swinging Adele’s way — just in time for the holiday season. According to data from Tagwalk, the fashion search engine, there were more than 800% more black dresses in the fall 2024 collections than in 2023.

At Valentino, then-designer Pierpaolo Piccioli offered 63 variations on the black dress, 45 of them extending from below the knee to the floor. Black, he said, was “interesting because it’s the color of these times, and it’s very universal but very individual.”

He was talking about the sense among some of dark days upon us, but the LBD has always transcended its era. The long black dress, the more formal variation on the little black dress that Coco Chanel made famous in 1926, actually preceded that particular garment in notoriety by centuries. Its power was immortalized in the 17th-century court portraits of Diego Velazquez, and by John Singer Sargent’s 1884 portrait of Madame X (actually Virginie Amélie Gautreau), which was unveiled at the 1884 Paris Salon and scandalized the world thanks to the juxtaposition of skin, cleavage and black velvet.

Audrey Hepburn gave the LBD a boost when she teamed up with Hubert de Givenchy, whose LBD, cut to expose her shoulder bones, was both minimal and provocative. A few decades later, Elizabeth Hurley did it again when she walked the “Four Weddings and a Funeral” red carpet in a Versace LBD with safety pins protecting her modesty. When the Museum of Modern Art held its 2017 “Items: Is Fashion Modern?” exhibition, dedicated to identifying the garments that defined the 20th century, curators included the LBD in the assemblage along with jeans, loafers and the hoodie. Indeed, it opened the whole show.

At this point, you can read into black what you will — revolution, existentialism, Goth, sophistication, mystery, magic, power, grief, solemnity, formality — which means that the LBD can be all things to all people. “It means that many things go together,” Yohji Yamamoto once told The New York Times. “You need black to have a silhouette. Black can swallow light, or make things look sharp.”

Either way, what it does, unquestionably, is put the focus on the person wearing it. As Paola Antonelli, the MoMA curator who organized the “Items” show, said, “The LBD allows one to control one’s presence in a room or in the city, a fine-tuning of the whole attitude.”

There are a variety of theories about why Adele loves black. (She herself is not explaining.) In 2013, her former stylist, Gaelle Paul, said that her decision to wear black was an ode to Johnny Cash, otherwise known as the man in black. But while it may have started out that way, Jamie Mizrahi, Adele’s current stylist, who worked closely with each designer to create the custom looks for Las Vegas, offered another interpretation. It’s about “déjà vu in the right way,” she told The Wall Street Journal at the beginning of the residency. It’s about the multitudes of references, the history that came before, much like Adele’s music.

As a result, Collins said, “It fits her.” Literally and artistically. The black dresses center her on the stage, acting as a backdrop to her music. The length hides her feet, which are often bare (or in sneakers) for comfort’s sake. And, like her peers Taylor Swift and Beyoncé, she works with designers across the industry rather than one in particular, so the result is less redolent of marketing than creative mind-meld. When she wore Gaurav Gupta at the end of October — a couture LBD with an off-the-shoulder neckline that resembled wings and took 93 hours to make — Gupta called it “a defining moment.”

Yet, despite the fabulousness, the LBD translates relatively easily into the everyday, which is also part of the appeal. “It’s democratic — everyone can wear it,” Collins said. “It’s sophisticated. It focuses attention on the silhouette.” “And it is timeless,” she continued, pointing out that while colors go in and out of style, black is eternal. That means it is a good investment.

“I think we’ll still be looking at Adele’s residency 10 years from now as a master class in how to dress up,” Garcia said.