La Petite Robe Noire
" clic to view gif "The little black dress is chic, it’s very Parisian, and it’s very feminine. The little black dress sends out a message of vulnerability and seduction. Flirting and dreaming about love affairs is a way of being in the present. For the objectives of Cécile Plaisance, the Barbies that we usually see in pink attire and sequins, will themselves be wearing little black dresses. Here, the artist has given them real eyes. They now have the gaze of a woman, rather than of a doll. They gradually become human, like creatures of the future, who are at once us and something other. Stripped of their original clothes, they are perhaps the women of the great undifferentiated mass of tomorrow. The little black dress is, for a woman, a way of forgetting her age, her origins, her milieu, of everything that marks her either socially or culturally. It’s simultaneously a uniform and a way of being sexy. It’s at once clothing and nudity, woman in all her truth and simplicity. Yves Saint Laurent had these charming words to say: “The most beautiful piece of clothing that a woman could ever wear are the arms of the man she loves. But for those who haven’t had the chance to find such happiness, I’m here.” Françoise Sagan seems to have replied to him in advance in Vogue in 1969. “We dress to undress. A dress only has any meaning if a man wants to take it off you.” The article was reprinted in a collection called La petite robe noire. Here, Cécile Plaisance rediscovers this classic and reminds us of the universality of femininity, present on all the world’s continents, whether constrained or happy, hidden or in full bloom. We speak endlessly of equality between the sexes; we say that all men are proud. We speak less about how all the women in the world share a taste for love.
by Charles Consigny