In Praise of Adele and the Long Black Dress

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 speckled with nipples (you read that right). 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.