Before 1910, black had rarely been associated with high style. Thanks to that year’s Ascot, its potential began to be realised. Far from submerging its wearers in a faceless mass, the obligatory black – chic, svelte, dramatic – had, paradoxically, a liberating effect. The correspondent of the Bystander was ecstatic. Black Ascot was, he believed, ‘the Englishwoman’s charter of emancipation from the belief that her beauty owes aught to clothes. The eye, having little sartorial to occupy it, fell upon faces, to discover, to its delighted astonishment, that we can put together decidedly more
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