Our Favorite Black Bodycon Dresses Right Now

There was a stretch, maybe four years ago, when I would have told you the black bodycon dress was a young person’s problem, the kind of thing you wear at twenty four with the confidence of someone who has never once thought about what a chair does to fabric that has no give in it. Then somewhere around thirty I came back around on it, fully, and now I own five, which is a number I only counted because writing this made me go look.

The case for it, on paper, is actually strong. One dress, minimal decision making, reads as put together for a client dinner and a work happy hour with zero adjustment required, which is the entire fantasy of dressing for a schedule like mine. The case against it is everything that happens between putting it on and taking it off. Sitting through a two hour dinner in something with no stretch built into the right places is its own kind of cardio.

Getting into a car, specifically the back of one, in a tight skirt and heels, is a maneuver I have never once executed gracefully, and I’ve stopped pretending otherwise in front of coworkers.

The trend that turned out worth the fuss was the one with actual structure through the body, something with real weight to the knit so it holds its own shape instead of asking your posture to do all the work for eight hours. The one that wasn’t worth it was the ultra thin, almost slip weight version everyone had for one summer, the kind that looked incredible in a still photo and looked like a rumor of a dress by the second glass of wine, clinging to everything it shouldn’t and doing nothing supportive in return.

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I bought that one on a Tuesday I don’t fully remember the reasoning for and wore it exactly once.

This is not a dress for a big meal, and I’ll say that plainly instead of dancing around it. I have sat through one client dinner in bodycon and spent the entire entree calculating how a second course was going to be received by a waistband that had already made its opinion known after the first. If you know you’re eating, and eating properly, plan the dress around that truth, not around how it photographed on the hanger.

It also takes a specific kind of nerve that not everybody wants to spend on a Tuesday, and that’s fine, that’s not a flaw in the dress. Some of my closest work friends wouldn’t touch this shape with someone else’s dry cleaning budget, and their reasoning is sound, not everyone wants their outfit doing quite that much talking before they’ve said a word. For the version of me that does want that, it’s earned its place. For the version of me eating a full dinner in one, less so, and I’m still figuring out how honest I’m willing to be about that at the table.