On Black, Imagination and the Clothes We Keep Coming Back To 

October changes the light, and with it something changes in the way we dress. Mornings become darker, trees slowly give away the colors they have been carrying since spring, we start reaching for layers again, lighting candles earlier and spending a little more time indoors. After all the color of summer and early autumn, black suddenly feels right again - calm, simple and somehow very comfortable in its own skin. 

October also has its own mystery. Halloween arrives at the end of the month, followed closely by All Saints’ Day and All Souls’ Day here in Lithuania and across much of Europe, and although these traditions come from different histories, they all circle around the same very old human questions: darkness and light, life and death, memory, the people who walked before us, and all those things we know belong to being human but still cannot fully explain. 

So we thought October was a very good month to talk about black. And once we started talking about black, there was really no way around talking about the Little Black Dress. 

Calling black simply a color almost seems unfair when it has carried so many meanings over the centuries. Black has been worn for mourning and devotion, authority and rebellion, modesty and seduction; it has belonged to priests and widows, royalty and artists, intellectuals and schoolgirls, punks and women simply heading out for dinner. At different points in European history, beautifully dyed black fabric was expensive and difficult to produce, so the very same colour that could represent humility or grief could also communicate wealth, refinement and status. 

For women, the history of the black dress is especially interesting because for a very long time its meaning was often decided for them - by religion, mourning customs, social expectations and rules around what was appropriate to wear and when. During the twentieth century that started to change, and the simple black dress gradually escaped many of those prescribed meanings and became something a woman could choose entirely for herself. 

The Little Black Dress eventually came to represent a wonderfully practical kind of freedom: one good garment that didn't need a special occasion to justify its existence, simple enough for daytime, elegant enough for evening and open enough to interpretation that the same dress could become something entirely different with shoes, jewellery, a coat, a scarf, a white collar - or nothing at all. 

And we think this has quite a lot to do with why women are still wearing it - a black dress leaves room for the woman. 

Black Linen has been part of the Son de Flor wardrobe for years, and when we started looking through our own collection, we realised how many of the pieces our ladies return to again and again are also among the simplest: the Classic Dress and Classic Skirt, Wrap Dress and Wrap Skirt, Carmen, Ophelia, Pinafore and others that have travelled through many seasons with us. Quite a few of them are already waiting in our Ready to Ship section, and seeing them together tells a nice little story about what happens when a garment is allowed to stay. 

A black linen dress can go to work, dinner, a concert, a birthday, a funeral, a celebration, or simply for a walk on an ordinary Tuesday. It works with boots in October and bare feet in June, with a wool clothing such as cardigans or coats when it is cold and nothing but linen when summer comes back. It can belong to a twenty-five-year-old woman and then somehow become even better on her at forty-five. 

A black linen dress doesn't particularly care what year it is. 

And the older Son de Flor becomes, the more interested we are in clothes like that. We have spent almost a decade designing new things, and every year teaches us a little more about the difference between making something new and making something worth returning to. We still love creating - we probably couldn't stop even if we tried - but there is a special kind of satisfaction in watching certain silhouettes quietly refuse to leave because women keep choosing them long after the excitement of their launch has passed. 

A good black dress is almost the perfect example. It doesn't need to be the loudest or newest thing in the wardrobe. It just needs to keep being useful, beautiful and ready when you reach for it. 

Of course, celebrating the Little Black Dress without playing with it a little would not be very Son de Flor, so for October we took several of our newer silhouettes and started imagining what would happen if we stripped away their existing colors and simply made them black. 

The Margot Dress, with her beautifully open back, becomes more mysterious in black linen. The Dawn Dress gains a little drama, while our Wander Dress, which only entered the Son de Flor world this year, suddenly feels as though she could have been walking through old university corridors or European streets many decades before we actually designed her. 

Then someone added white, and naturally we couldn't stop there!

We imagined Margot in Black Linen with a White Collar, then Dawn with a White Collar and white cuff details, and these familiar silhouettes immediately started telling completely different stories. A little old-school, a little literary, a little Wednesday Addams if you wish, a little heroine from an old novel who probably knows more than she is telling you. 

Black and white has always been wonderful like that. Two colors - or technically, an argument could be made about whether they are colors at all - and already the imagination is travelling through decades. 

These particular dresses are not joining our permanent Ready to Ship collection for now. They are Made to Order, little October possibilities that we wanted to put in front of you and see where your imagination takes them. A small seasonal offering, available to order until October 20th.

Sometimes we don't need another new dress to make a wardrobe feel new; changing one element is enough to make us look at a silhouette we already know with completely different eyes. 

The Color That Leaves Room 

We started thinking about why black works so well, and generosity was not the first word that came to mind, but strangely it might be the right one. Black doesn't compete very much. It lets the texture of linen show itself, it lets the construction of a dress become visible, it lets a white collar suddenly become the whole story, it accepts almost every other color beside it and it can move from a rainy October morning to a summer evening without requiring much explanation. 

Most importantly, it doesn't decide too much about the woman wearing it. 

A bright red dress enters the room carrying its own energy. A floral dress already has part of its story written. Black waits for you to finish the sentence, and the older we get, the less interested we seem to become in clothes telling us which woman we should be. 

We already contain enough women by then - the one going to work, the one going dancing, the one celebrating something, the one grieving something, the one who wants to disappear for a day and the one who, finally, would quite like to be seen. It is rather wonderful when one dress can keep up with all of them. 

And this brings us back to October. 

Nature itself is entering its season of letting go. Leaves fall, gardens become quiet, daylight retreats and everything that looked almost endlessly alive only weeks ago begins returning to the earth. We know spring will come again, but nature doesn't seem particularly interested in skipping the darker part of the story to get there. 

Of course, human beings being human, we have never been particularly good at simply watching darkness arrive without giving it meaning, so over centuries we created rituals around this strange point in the year. Halloween meets darkness with imagination, stories, costumes and humour, while All Saints’ and All Souls’ traditions turn our attention towards remembrance, continuity and the people whose lives somehow continue inside our own. 

Different traditions and different beliefs, but underneath them sits an understanding that darkness is not automatically something bad. 

Night belongs beside morning, autumn beside spring, silence beside conversation. There are seasons when life asks us to bloom outward and seasons when it gathers us back in, and neither one is more alive than the other. 

Black has accompanied us through both. We have worn it in grief and celebration, sacred spaces and rebellious ones, at endings and beginnings, and we keep returning to it because black doesn't insist that life must always be bright in order to be beautiful. 

We like carrying that thought into October. 

So this month, our Little Black Dress Edit turns to the new silhouettes of Fall & Winter 2026, imagined in black linen for the first time. These are new shapes, still becoming part of the Son de Flor wardrobe, now given another possibility in a color with its own quiet character. Each one is Made to Order, allowing you to choose the silhouette and let it take on a darker expression. This possibility will be available until October 20, at no additional customisation fee.

After almost ten years of making clothes, we keep learning that the best pieces in a wardrobe are rarely the ones demanding our attention all the time. They are the ones we simply keep reaching for.