Memory of the Black Dress: Passion and Women’s Empowerment

Medium: Digital drawing (Photoshop)

Subject: Three women wearing elegant black dresses

Theme: Protecting memories, passion for moving forward, and women’s strength

Artist: Visual Story Artist Kazue Shima

Black is the color that guards the memory of one person’s warmth — most deeply, most quietly.

Those who wear black with ease know. Moving forward carries passion, and a little fear. A black dress is the garment that transforms that into energy, every time. How far the hem trails behind, how it moves in today’s wind — every woman who wears black knows this.

Black. Black in fashion, in particular, has always meant something to me. When I entered the world of modeling in the late 1980s, I was barely out of my teens. I was a girl with no real idea how to exist in a world I had never seen before. In Japan, women had only just been granted entry into professional life, and the excitement of that permission — how many women must have felt it.

But I was still at the end of my student years, and I remember thinking black was a color for fighting. I didn’t yet know what it really meant. The years that followed, through so many experiences, taught me what it means for a woman to be truly strong, and what it actually means to move forward. Those were years I am grateful for.

Whatever the era, whatever the backdrop of fashion, what moves a person forward is different for everyone. For me, even now, the thing that straightens my back and sends a small heat through me is a black garment.

This work is a digital drawing made in Photoshop. The brushes reference the texture of a PILOT crayon — a product the company discontinued, with no successor planned. The rough shadow of the black clothing and the muted rose tone of the skin are both built from layered brushwork that carries the quality of that analog material.

The composition — three women walking in the same direction — depicts collective forward movement rather than individual. The gaze of the figure in front, the trailing hem of the figure behind: each moves at a different speed and weight, yet all toward the same place.
The hair is original to this piece. I drew the dresses first, then decided to give each figure something more avant-garde in the silhouette above.

My POP series draws on my experience as a runway model in the 1980s. Clothing in this work is not styling — it is the carrier of emotion and will.
The black dress returns throughout this series because it is the garment most widely shared among women as the thing they reach for when they need to move.