The little black (Biba) dress

One of the most pressing problems - in the late sixties, anyway - of living in Liverpool and being twenty, was that you couldn't buy fashionable, cheap clothes. In earlier summer holidays at home I would go to Biba's but now I was a postgraduate it had become more difficult to spend time away back in London.

starless and bible black
Under Milk Wood Dylan Thomas

The Biba catalogue, therefore, was the answer to a girl's prayers - beautifully designed, long and thin, strong folding card with fabulous black and gold curly-wurly Biba graphics on the front. In the autumn of 1969 I bought a black Jersey minidress. It was shown on a typically doll-like, sooty-eyed, fragile Biba girl, with silvery ash pincurls under a little black hat with dotted veiling; a dress with a hem way above the knee, slightly flared, long trumpet-shape sleeves, and a neat, unrevered collar, fastening primly with three little buttons at the top of the breastbone. Severe;apart from the breathtakinglack of length.

Too black for heav'n, and yet too white for Hell
The Hind and the Panther John Dryden



At first I wore it with high, chunky shoes and a long chiffon Liberty scarf falling over the collar but I thought the dress made my legs look big. At the time you couldn't wear black opaque tights. Don't ask me why; they were just not of the moment. So I had to wear it with the very pale, almost white tights of the late sixties…and I was not happy with how my knees looked
beneath the exquisitely neat triangle of the little dress. I was thin enough, god knows, but I had fallen out of love with my knees when my younger brother had said they looked like King Edwards.

Black Swan.
See Rara Avis

Blackthorn Winter. The cold weather which frequently occurs when the blackthorn is in blossom. See ICE SAINTS: PEEWITS PINCH
Brewer's Dictionary of Phrase and Fable 14th edn. p 122

So by the winter of 1969 the black Biba dress was resting while I worked out what to do, too much in thrall to it to throw it out. At about the same time it became clear we had to face the demise of the mini, by then on the last of its pretty legs. In an attempt to deal boldly with the future I bought a long -really long, floor length in fact - black wool skirt in Church Street C & A's basement. It sat low on the hips with a side button fastening, and flared out very slightly towards the ankles. It was a million miles more sophisticated than anything else I had; for a few weeks I was not quite sure how to wear it.

...another dark figure is the black Sarah (Sarah-al-Kali), the patron saint of the gypsies at the shrine Les Saintes Maries de la Mer in the south of France....

Dictionary of Symbolism Hans Biedermann p.42


Then a sudden insight into the possibilities of pairing it with the Biba dress suggested itself. I put the dress on over the skirt. I wore it for a couple of evenings in pubs and it felt good; new, maxi-ish before too many people had seen the ankle­-length look coming their way.

Encouraged by its success as a tunic, I went a step further and unpicked the seam beneath the buttons. Lo and behold - a long, elegant jacket. Somehow releasing the seam made the hem of the jacket echo the flare of the skirt. It was the most serious outfit I had ever possessed, almost what a suffragette or difficult Chekhov heroine might have worn. But I liked that. I had danced away enough time in tiny, knicker-showing, dolly rocker frocklets.

We - I was married, young as I was, & it was not to last - had an invitation to a party late one night at Bob and Sarah Smiths's, the most glamorous, fastest couple of our acquaintance, mainly because Brian was a whole shocking ten years older than Sue and on top of that had been married before. In keeping with this status they lived in a Hope Street house, glorious with art and intellectual pretension; a party there was new territory for me.

Things that cannot be compared

Summer and Winter. Night and Day. Rain and sunshine. Youth and age. A person's laughter and his anger. Black and white. Love and hatred.

The Pillow Book of Sei Shonagan
c.995 a.d.

I wore the Biba dress-now-jacket and the long skirt. My hair was at last very long, parted in the middle, and I pushed back it behind my shoulders, with a string of not-real pearls wrapped three or four times round my neck like a choker. It was the first time I went to a party feeling I looked like a woman rather than a girl. All that black, and the pearls.

During the late evening, or early hours of the morning, when the party had worked its way up into the surrreality of the attic, I was in a corner, talking to a couple of friends, when a boy
I had adored - no, not too strong a word at a distance for four years without ever meeting, came into the room. He glanced at me over his shoulder. Then again. I've done it, I thought. I've made him turn his head to look at me. I've caught his attention.

Develop as conclusive definition

a pattern of black and white,

For I wish to see me reassembled

in that dark room of your mind

from Identi-Kit, Veronica Forrest- Thomson

We didn't talk. Not ever. He didn’t walk across the room later, and say something like I think I know you or Aren’t you the girl who? But I’ve never forgotten the moment, nor the sense of power bestowed on me for a few seconds by the black dress elevated by its new role as a party jacket aided and abetted by a few rows of Woolworth pearls.


blackstump.Australian
the mythical starting point for the back of beyond

Bloomsbury Dictionary of Contemporary Slang 1991

A split second of shining, pure joy like a door opening on an unexpectedly perfect, untouched morning. Disconcerting how the brain holds on to fragments like this, that they become the points which mark out the boundaries and edges of the past. This happened, that happened. Or did not. That dress, that moment, that glance. And everything else forgotten. Just that, as fashion magazines tell us, though we fight to doubt their indifferent veracity.