PARIS — The little black dress is an iconic French invention, right?

Created nearly a century ago by Coco Chanel as emblematic of Gallic chic and worn by Edith Piaf as she sang about love and loss, the dress did make it to America, perhaps most notably as Audrey Hepburn’s costume in the 1961 movie “Breakfast at Tiffany’s.” But that dress was, of course, made by the Paris couturier Hubert de Givenchy.

So it may come as a surprise in “Little Black Dress,” an intriguing exhibition in Paris at the Mona Bismarck American Center for Art & Culture (until Sept. 22) to encounter first a black lace dress worn by the American designer Marc Jacobs to the 2012 Metropolitan Museum gala by the Japanese designer Rei Kawakubo of Comme des Garçons and a sleek dinner dress, worn by the artist Rachel Feinstein, made by Mr. Jacobs.

Created at the Savannah College of Art and Design (SCAD) in Georgia, the exhibition pits a framed Karl Lagerfeld example of the classic black Chanel dress, as worn by Anna Wintour, the editor-in-chief of American Vogue, against the feisty cutaway Latex dress by Norma Kamali, or even a body-revealing lace and jet-beading creation from Tom Ford.

The man behind the artistic organization of textures, shapes and nuances of shades, all shown against sanguine red walls, is André Leon Talley. Long known as a contributing editor at American Vogue and now an editor-at-large for the Russian version of Numéro magazine, Mr. Leon Talley used his connections with high society to enrich the collection that opened in in 2011 at the SCAD Museum of Art in Savannah.