There’s a mysterious allure about a woman in the most masculine piece of clothing: a tuxedo. Marlene Dietrich, with her love of on- and offscreen cross-dressing, knew it. Yves Saint Laurent knew it when he popularized the term le smoking to describe his take on black-tie eveningwear in 1966 to great fanfare. Women’s Wear Daily had a typical reaction: “Standing on the barricades he sows terror inside its institutions,” they said of the designer at the time. And fellow enfant terrible Hedi Slimane, who recently shot Abbey Lee Kershaw in one of his Saint Laurent suits, knows it. Here, our collection of women in the boundary-pushing classic.
This story was originally posted on May 15, 2014.