The Scandalous History of the Little Black Dress (LBD)
How this simple dress became a fashion staple
On a warm May day in 1884, Madame Avegno, “bathed in tears,” burst unannounced into John Singer Sargent’s cluttered studio apartment overlooking the Seine. Catching the twenty-eight-year-old artist off guard, she let loose a tirade.
“All of Paris is making fun of my daughter. She is ruined!”
She demanded Sargent remove his portrait of her daughter from the Paris Salon.
The shy, young artist was always uncomfortable around women. But with his awkward, schoolboy hair flopping to one side, he suddenly found the courage to defend his painting.
“Nothing said about Madame Gautreau at the Salon was any worse than what the fashionable world had said of her already.”
Sargent did have a point. A longtime target of scandal sheets and rumored affairs, Virginie Amelie Avegno Gautreau, was no wallflower. As a celebrated socialite, Sargent pursued his “unpaintable beauty” for years, trying to get her to sit for him. The resulting uncommissioned portrait, now titled “Madame X,” was finished in 1884 and entered into the most prestigious art show, the Paris Salon.
The painting bombed.
