“One is never over or under dressed in a little black dress.” – Karl Lagerfield 

We take it for granted, but the “Little Black Dress” was not always a thing. Believe it or not, the LBD is a fairly recent fashion invention. Women of today accept it as a staple of the modern woman’s wardrobe, but the history of the little black dress is less than 100 years old.

Image: Vintage Style via Shutterstock

The Birth of the Little Black Dress

The LBD has a relatively short history in the history of fashion. It was Coco Chanel who first created the LBD in the 1920s. Chanel’s creation, which first appeared in Vogue magazine in 1926, was a deceptively simple drop-waist sheath dresses in black. It quickly became “the” dress for ’20s flappers.

Prior to this period black clothing was a symbol of mourning (made popular during the Victorian era) and most women would not have worn black except in mourning. Chanel, inspired by the peasant widows of World War I, elevated the black dress into a chic and elegant piece. Chanel also marketed the dress as “the dress” that every woman should own for its versatility and practicality. It was this notion that led its to staying power–the Great Depression made frugality a necessity for many.

Image: Film Noir via Shutterstock

The Next Chapter for the LBD: “New Look” and the Era of Hollywood Glamour

The LBD had a new life under the Christian Dior’s post World War II “New Look” and under the new influence of Hollywood glamour. The utilitarian necessity of the Depression era LBD was a thing of the past, but Dior and Hollywood reinvigorated the LBD and made it the dress of choice for Hollywood divas and temptresses. Stars like Rita Hayworth and Ava Gardner, both of whom epitomized the femme fatale in film noir, added to the glamorous image of the LBD.

Image: Inspired by Breakfast at Tiffany’s via Shutterstock

“Breakfast At Tiffany’s”: Audrey Hepburn and Givenchy

When one thinks of the LBD in film, Audrey Hepburn may be first to come to mind. She and Hubert de Givenchy made the LBD of the 1960s a cultural icon. His “Breakfast at Tiffany’s” design is easily counted amongst the most iconic movie dresses of all time (with only Marilyn Monroe’s white “Seven Year Itch” dress being more well known) and easily the most famous little black dress.

It was this design that cemented the LBD as fashion royalty. The timeless style will forever denote polished sophistication (at least until the next fashion icon comes along).

Image: LBD via University of Salford

The Little Black Dress of Today

Whether long or short, the little black dress is now a staple in most every woman’s closet. It is appropriate to wear to work, while running errands, or out for the evening on the town, and, yes, it still works at funerals. The key to the occasion is in the design and the styling, of course. One can truly never go wrong with adding another little black dress to a wardrobe.

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Top Image: Little Black Dress via Shutterstock

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Karl Lagerfeld hosted a staged protest feigning support for women’s rights during the highly-anticipated Chanel catwalk show during Paris Fashion Week last month. Was he making a mockery of women? Or truly embracing the issues women face today?

Rightfully so, it’s hard to take anything Karl Lagerfeld does seriously. After all, he once said: “Everything I say is a joke. I myself am a joke.” No one would dare argue with him over that. But he’s also made crude and insensitive remarks, particularly about women, like dismissing their concerns over size-zero models as nothing more than the whinings of “fat mommies with bags of crisps,” reports the Guardian. He’s said “no one wants to see curvy women” – a blanket statement that shows his prejudice and insensitivity.

So, what then was he doing in Paris sending Cara Delevingne out onto the catwalk with a megaphone and plopping a banner reading “Women’s Rights are More than Alright” into Kendall Jenner’s hands? Emma Watson’s He for She campaign, designed to help the world understand and support the principles of gender equality, was also represented in the show. “To a soundtrack of Chaka Khan’s I’m Every Woman broadcast from transistor radios on classic Chanel gold chains, which swung from the young women’s shoulders like the brand’s signature 2.55 bags, models including Gisele Bündchen and Georgia May Jagger came in two or threes, smiling and chatting. The mood this set was very different from the usual silent, single-file parade, which as a rule exudes about as much joie de vivre and personality as a queue for airport customs,” reports the Guardian.

The looks just happened to match the protest theme, even with a masculine edge to them: “[P]sychedelic, with paint-splatter coats, rainbow tweeds and pastel tie-dye bags, worn with peacock-toned eyeshadow and flat gold shoes. The protest theme was hinted at in accessories: a crystal-studded whistle worn as a pendant, nestling among strands of pearls; a bag printed with the legend Make Fashion Not War.”

What everyone seems to want to know is whether or not Lagerfeld has truly developed a sensitivity to women’s issues, or could he just be co-opting them to sell more products?

“I think he was harking back to Coco Chanel’s feminist values – she was very much a strong and empowered woman. I think this just shows that fashion, feminism and empowering women do not have to be mutually exclusive,” Trish Halpin, editor-in-chief of Marie Claire told the Guardian.

Yes, Coco Chanel was a strong and empowered woman. Karl Lagerfeld? Not so much. Plus, in its post-Coco iteration, the Chanel brand has scored an “E” rating—the lowest possible sustainability rating from the group Rank a Brand. In other words, while Coco may have stood for female empowerment, it’s not a hallmark credential in manufacturing its products today. Cara Delevingne may get a megaphone with her makeover, but what about the woman who sewed her Chanel bag? Does she even get a lunch break?

Co-opting feminism to push a runway agenda, which perpetuates a number of myths about women, isn’t a boon for empowerment. It hides the inequality going on behind the runway–the horrors the fashion industry creates for all women—from those forced to create the products, to those forced in other ways to buy them season after season. If Lagerfeld really wanted to send a message of empowerment for women, he would have sent the signs out onto the runway all by themselves, and sent the models out for ice cream.

Find Jill on Twitter @jillettinger

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Your first trip to the ocean. A dusty old book. Your mother’s silk scarf. An English rose garden. These are the fragrances you remember, have internalized and equate with a memory. Perfumes are nothing more than the scents that become a part of us, are at once an embodiment of these momentary memories.

Natural fragrances, those straight from nature like frankincense, orange blossom, jasmine and vanilla, reach deep into our core and storied biographies, conjuring to mind poignant memories that comfort us. Long before the Industrial Revolution such scents were all we knew.

“Up until the turn of the last century, perfumes, like Mille fragrances [worn by the ladies of Versailles], were blended in apothecaries for royalty from nothing but natural essences,” says renowned natural perfumer Mandy Aftel of Aftelier Perfumes.

“When synthetic chemicals were created in the 1880s, perfumes became a subconscious art,” says Aftel, referring to brands like Coty, Chanel (beginning with Chanel No° 5) and Guerlain. But, she says, their perfumes and all other synthetics lacked complexity, mystery and emotional depth.

“There is no romance in perfume without its close relationship to nature,” Aftel believes.

It’s a simple equation that seems to add up: humans, are natural beings craving the primitive and organic. Ayala Moriel, whose eponymous line of perfumes was originally inspired by Aftel’s book Essence & Alchemy, describes the attraction of scent and our ties to it.

“What’s really unusual, is that it’s not actually our nose that smells. Our sensory system is really part of the brain – part of our unconscious. Our nose is just a breathing organ connected to our olfactory bulbs [our sensory organ that detects smell] at the front part of our brain. That’s why smell is so immediate, and that’s why we have such a strong memory with scents. This is also where our most primal emotions and functions live, things like appetite, libido and fear,” says Moriel.

It’s no wonder that intrinsically, the journey lived by natural essences is entwined with our own. Aftel and Moriel agree that there is a truth to naturals, an authenticity that is connected to our past and even used by our ancestors to perfume their temples and to heal.

Amanda Walker of A Perfume Organic, who also studied with Aftel, takes a modern meets old age approach to perfumes.  She began her boutique and certified organic perfume house after working in the fragrance world with the likes of Victoria’s Secret.

“I have really bad allergies and asthma, and I realized it’s from these [conventional perfumeries] putting acetone and unnatural ingredients in their products,” says Walker.

According to an Investigation of Chemicals in Perfumes conducted by Greenpeace, of 36 unnatural eau de toilettes and eau de parfums, all but one contained phthalates and synthetic musks, linked to health concerns such as hormone disruption and lung restriction, along with environmental toxicity concerns.

Simple as it may sound, the realm of naturals is vast – from the variable types of ingredients to the way in which they are extracted. Some perfumiers like Walker, eschew alcohol or a chemical solvent known as hexane, widely used to extract the complete and complex plant essence. Others, like Aftel appreciate their depth.

“With a good absolute, you get the richness and rounded, voluptuous smell of lavender for instance, compared to the pointy, sharp top note of pure lavender essential [extracted via steam distillation—an age old method].  And, all traces of hexane are removed.”

For Aftel, she feels like a painter picking just the right color from her palette, knowing when to use a certain essence or isolate, like geraniol, one of more than 200 components in rose oil and also found in the geranium plant. Moriel advises the super natural at heart, “The purest form of perfume is to just take rose petals and rub them on your wrists.”

True to nature and the volatility of plants’ precious essential oils, natural perfumes tend to blend with the skin, fading from top note, to heart and base note without strong staying power.

Kate Growney, a former beauty magazine editor and now founder of Saffron James Parfum, also takes an “inspired by nature” approach to her line. While not a perfumer herself, she has a clear vision for her line of perfumes, based on exotic flowers like the treasured Pakalana from her native Hawaii. Growney says that her perfumes contain between 80 to 99 percent natural ingredients, depending upon the blend. The mixture of synthetics and naturals is discernable, with her more potent fragrances lasting for hours on end.

Dawn Spencer Hurwitz, of DSH Perfumes, offers both mixed media and 100 percent natural perfumes to her clients. As a painter, she also takes a unique approach to aromatic storytelling, pairing perfumes with wall art to create what she calls “aroma art expressions.”

Some, like Aftel, Moriel and Hurwitz, offer clients a bespoke fragrance experience. Each essence these perfumers create, like each wearer, has its own traveled journey. The art is in finding the perfect marriage between the two.

“We take you on an olfactory journey,” explains Moriel.

“We stroll along the different essences, starting with the top notes and moving through the heart and the base, and we select the ones that you really love. It’s really interesting to see people connect to a part of their life they might have left. And the perfume is yours. We will only re-blend it upon your request.”

Coco Chanel once said: “A woman who doesn’t wear perfume has no future,” these perfumiers might add or olfactory connection to their memory.

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The trend for the double cuff makes a strong aesthetic statement and gives a feeling of indestructibility to the wearer.

For the past few seasons, cuffs have been decorating the wrists of fashion’s most stylish models and muses. The big, indestructible-looking bracelets looking like shields of armor, are studded and gilded in gemstones, one on each arm. You’d be forgiven if the trend reminds you of Wonder Woman striking her signature battle pose, crossing her wrists and deflecting bullets with her cuffs.

Coco Chanel’s iconic Maltese Cross Vendura cuffs were inspired by Byzantine artwork discovered during her travels. The cross was the symbol of the Knights of Malta, a Christian military order charged with the defense of the Holy Land after the First Crusade. 

Superhero powers aside, it’s a bold, powerful look that has appealed to warrior women through fashion history. Audacious and assertive, Coco Chanel was rarely photographed without her iconic Maltese Cross cuffs designed for her by Vendura in the 1930s. Matching cuff mainstays moored Harper’s Bazaar editor Diana Vreeland indomitable style through the 1960s. Leading the charge for modern day lionhearted style is Elle’s Kate Lanphear, whose chunky cuffs work to assert her cult androgynous and punky aesthetic.

Elle’s Style Director and modern day fashion icon, Kate Lanphear’s all-black looks are often armored with a mixture of leather studded cuffs.

While combined with other jewelry, the look is most definitely an eccentric style statement. Worn alone, matching cuffs look clean and modern. Match the scale of your cuffs to your sleeves. With a delicate cuff go with a simple sleeve, with ornate, embellished cuffs balance with a strong shoulder or architectural sleeve. Feel the power of an accessory that can transform a look from glamor girl to amazon in a flick of a wrist.

The growing love for cuffs means there are plenty of options to choose from this season, from plain gold or silver to studded and ornate. 

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It’s the end of June already, and the earth’s half-spin around the sun has brought us ladies plenty to wring our delicate little hands about. From Iranian clerics blaming earthquakes on our breasts to oil spills wreaking havoc on our pregnancies, 2010 has made us reach for the smelling salts on numerous occasions. Here at EcoSalon, we’ve covered women and the environment with vim, bringing you celebratory communiques alongside melancholic missives. Below, you’ll find a roundup of the news in 2010 thus far. If the past six months are any indication, the rest of the year will be a doozy. Feeling faint yet?

• Is GINK the new DINK? It used to be that childfree couples were called DINKs – Double Income, No Kids. But the great American greenwash has influenced reproductive choices as well, with an increasing number of couples citing the environment as a reason to go kidless. A recent study by Oregon State University added fuel to the fire, revealing that not having kids is 20 times more environmentally friendly than any other day to day green task, like recycling. Lisa Hymas of Grist coined the term GINK – Green Inclinations, No Kids – to describe childfree tree huggers like herself.

• Condoms came under attack earlier this year, with women’s health writers and scientists bemoaning the prophylactic’s sorry environmental record of sullying our beaches and clogging up our landfills. While greensters wondered whether condoms are biodegradable (likely not – their decomposable latex is mixed with human-made chemicals), we asked another question: why have this conversation in the first place? Condoms, as a blogger at EcoGeek noted, are “the single most important environmental innovation” ever, curbing environmentally-catastrophic population growth.

• Congress attacked killer chemicals this spring when members of the House and Senate introduced versions of the Safe Chemicals Act, a bill meant to fortify a toothless, decades-old law against allowing dangerous chemicals in household products (we all know how well that one worked…hello bisphenol-a). Uteruses in America rejoiced at the news: the Safe Chemicals Act is a boon to women, whose reproductive systems have been under siege by infertility-causing chemicals in water bottles and other plastics.

• In April, an Iranian cleric asserted that women who don’t cover up cause earthquakes. His declaration–meant to dissuade Iranian women from unveiling–ignited a response in the U.S., when blogger Jennifer McCreight organized a Boobquake, a day in which women wore low-cut tops without tectonic incident to prove the cleric wrong. But what could have been a bold political stunt turned into a ho-hum protest, with men egging on their breast-baring peers while feminists complained that the plight of Iranian women became fodder for a Girls Gone Wild spectacle.

• As if the earthquake itself didn’t cause enough damage, sexual violence rates spiked in Haiti in the months after the disaster. According to an article in Women’s eNews, aid workers in a major Port-au-Prince refugee camp fielded daily reports of rape, prompting the United Nations to send a special unit of 130 female Bangladeshi soldiers to address the violence. Lamentably, the post-disaster rape crisis was not unique to Haiti alone; many Hurricane Katrina survivors were similarly re-victimized.

• On the 50th anniversary of the birth control pill, we noted that the pill’s invention by women’s rights crusader Margaret Sanger initiated the era of modern family planning, allowing women to choose the number and spacing of their children – a boon for their health and the health of their babies alike. But while the pill has done its part to keep our skyrocketing population in check (if you think things are bad, just imagine the world without it) its environmental record isn’t spotless – the hormones in the pill, excreted into waste water through urine, cause fatal mutations in fish populations.

• When a Houston tanning salon called upon the spirit of Coco Chanel to promote its new earth-friendly false tanning beet spray, we called foul. As legend has it, Chanel sparked the tanning craze in America when she stepped off a boat in Cannes with perfectly bronzed skin. Though Coco was a pioneering designer, breaching the boundary between menswear and womenswear, the tanning trendsetter didn’t galvanize women to leave the drudgery of housework in order to bask in the sunshine. Rather, Coco inadvertently created another unrealistic beauty standard.

• While much of the initial news surrounding the BP oil spill focused on the disaster’s effect on wildlife, we asked about its impact on human livelihoods. Coastal Women for Change, a community organization that sprung out of the post-Katrina haze to bring attention to the need for improved childcare in Biloxi, Mississippi, has stepped up after the spill by serving as a conduit for information from the Environmental Protection Agency to the local fishers. The biggest challenge? Getting fishers of different ethnic and economic backgrounds to rally together for their interests.

• Last year, journalists Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn published their book Half the Sky, a groundbreaking tome arguing that international aid is more effective when directed toward women. While Kristof and WuDunn described women as the gatekeepers of health and well-being in their communities, they left out one green detail: the fact that women also hold the keys to conservation. In Indonesia, the Environmental Ministry has begun offering classes on water conservation to women in rural areas who are responsible for fetching and distributing water to their families.

• Men are from Mars, women are from Venus, but we all care equally about the earth, right? Wrong. According to several articles this year, men and women display their green pride differently, with men working for big picture sustainability while women, ever the quibblers, take on recycling and composting projects. We pointed out the ludicrousy in this theory, noting that a handful of anecdotes don’t constitute a trend. With all this talk about men, women, and their green differences, we lose sight of the why we should go green at all.

• As if the oil spill wasn’t dangerous enough, the chemical dispersants used to clean it up could spell health risks for pregnant mothers and their unborn children. According to information recently released by the Environmental Protection Agency, chemicals that caused health problems in the cleanup workers on the 1989 Exxon Valdez spill are being used again today. Pregnant women have been advised to stay as far away from the contaminants as possible – a tall order for those women who actually live in the Gulf.

Image: xjyxjy

The post A Look Back at Women and the Environment in 2010 appeared first on EcoSalon.

A Houston salon is home to the next big eco beauty trend: fake tanning using beet-based dyes. According to a recent story in CultureMap, a Houston entertainment site, a “body hueing” salon called Throwing Copper has developed a spray-on solution from the deep red root. The so-called “green tanning” trend is a boon for those who want a sunless tan without the harsh chemicals. But Throwing Copper has also managed to conflate bronzed skin with women’s lib, a claim that’s as artificial as it gets.

According to the CultureMap story, Throwing Copper owners Samantha Buchanan Curry and Stephani Adams were inspired to join the tanning trade by Coco Chanel, the frontierswoman of modern female couture. As the story goes, Coco Chanel ushered in the bronzed era in 1923 when she disembarked from a yacht in Cannes with perfectly tanned skin, rousing women to ditch their umbrellas in the summer months. While Chanel’s storied sunburn may have galvanized the tanning trend, cultural mores surrounding skin tone had been in flux for decades. Pale skin was once a characteristic of the elite, a way for privileged individuals to differentiate themselves from day laborers and farm workers who toiled under the sun. When the industrial revolution brought low wage jobs indoors, pale skin transcended socioeconomic lines. Around the same time, white aristocrats began sunning themselves while on vacation in the French Riviera. And doctors began recommending tanning as a remedy to cure tuberculosis and other illnesses.

Coco Chanel may have initiated a tanning craze when she stepped off that boat. But she did not initiate women’s liberation, as Throwing Copper’s Curry and Adams would have you believe. According to the spa’s web site, Chanel’s tan empowered women. “Chanel revolutionized fashion trends by designing women’s clothes that revealed more skin, and in the process redefined social norms by making it ‘au courant’ to acquire a sun tan. Women stepped out of the house and started enjoying outdoor life”¦”

Chanel’s menswear designs for women upended gender norms in the fashion world. But her tan? It was the promise of paid employment – not the promise of bronzed skin – that propelled women to step out of their homes. The only thing that sunbathing has brought us – aside from melanoma – is another pointless beauty standard.

But if it’s one you adhere to, best to take Curry and Adams’ advice and go green. A fake tan without the chemicals is better for your skin and the environment. It just won’t guarantee gender equity.

Image: love like blue

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