Elsa Schiaparelli

Elsa Schiaparelli (1890-1973) was an outsider in many ways, but she successfully made her way to the heart of French haute couture in the interwar years, operating her business between 1927 and 1954. She was born in Rome in 1890, the daughter of an orientalist scholar, and left Italy for the first time in 1913. In 1914, she traveled to London via Paris and married a theosophist named Wilhelm Went de Kerlor. During World War I, she and her husband traveled between Europe and the United States in artistic and cosmopolitan circles. Schiaparelli returned to Paris with her young daughter after her divorce from her husband in the early 1920s. There she met Paul Poiret, who frequently lent the impoverished young woman dresses to wear.

Elsa Schiaparelli's Early Career

Schiaparelli began designing clothes and selling her designs on a freelance basis to small fashion houses with Poiret's encouragement. In 1925, she briefly worked as the designer for a small house called Maison Lambal before opening her own atelier in 1927. Schiaparelli's first collection included hand-knitted trompe l'oeil sweaters, including an extremely popular black-and-white "bow-knot" sweater that was featured in Vogue and sold out immediately in the United States. Her subsequent collections included dresses and suits, swimsuits and beach pyjamas, ski costumes and sports jackets, in addition to sweaters. In the early 1930s, her "Mad Cap," a simple knitted hat with distinctive pointed ends that could be pulled into any shape, was a runaway success in the United States, where it was widely copied by mass-market manufacturers, much like the "bow-know" sweater. S, her first perfume, was released in 1928.

Schiaparelli was primarily a sportswear designer in the late 1920s and early 1930s, with geometric patterns and sleek lines that suited the mood of the time. Nonetheless, these early collections bore many of the hallmarks of her later 1930s styles: the innovative use of fabrics, often synthetic; striking color contrasts; unusual fastenings such as zippers; and eccentric or amusing costume jewelry such as a white porcelain "Aspirin" necklace designed by writer Elsa Triolet.

Schiaparelli's designs were popular with both Parisians and New Yorkers. Despite the 1929 economic crash, which severely harmed the fortunes of French haute couture, Schiaparelli was still able to work successfully with American manufacturers and sell her models to exclusive importers like William H. Davidow and stores like Saks Fifth Avenue in New York in the early 1930s. She would later say that the more outrageous her designs became, the better they sold to a conservative clientele. Despite her reputation as an artistic designer, Schiaparelli was always commercially successful.

The fashionable silhouette changed throughout the 1930s; beginning in the early 1930s, Schiaparelli developed the boxy padded shoulders that would characterize her mature style. A "tree-bark" dress—actually crinkled rayon—and a "glass" evening cape made from a new synthetic material called Rhodophane were two notable 1934 designs. Schiaparelli benefited from significant textile developments in the 1930s, but she was never solely motivated by technology. Rather, her work was inspired by themes of masquerade, artifice, and play, which were closely related to the changing status of women during the interwar years, as well as the avant-garde discourse of surrealist artists and their circles, with whom she collaborated in the 1930s.

The Later 1930s

In 1935, Schiaparelli moved her boutique to the Place Vendôme and hired Jean-Michel Franck to decorate it. Their ever-changing décor included, at various times, a stuffed bear dyed shocking pink and fitted with drawers in its stomach by artist Salvador Dal, a life-size dummy of Mae West, and a gilded bamboo birdcage for the perfume boutique. Schiaparelli launched themed collections in 1935, beginning with Stop, Look, and Listen for summer 1935. A recent review of Stop, Look, and Listen stated, "Schiaparelli collection enough to cause crisis in vocabulary," (Schiaparelli, p. 87). Schiaparelli outdid herself in 1938, presenting four collections in a single year: the Circus Collection in summer 1938, the Pagan Collection in autumn 1938, the Zodiac or Lucky Stars Collection in winter 1938-1939, and the Commedia dell'Arte Collection or A Modern Comedy in spring 1939. Her performances were more akin to shows or plays than the typical mannequin parade. They were dramatic and lively, incorporating stunts, tricks, jokes, music, and light effects, and admission was as sought after as tickets to a new play.

Schiaparelli introduced the color "shocking" in 1937, along with her perfume Shocking!, packaged in a bottle designed by the artist Leonor Fini and based on the shape of Mae West's torso. The Shoe Hat ensemble, a black suit with pockets embroidered with lips and an inverted high-heeled shoe for a hat, debuted the same year. The hat was available in two styles: all black and black with a shocking pink heel. The 1938 Circus collection included a black evening gown with a padded skeleton stitched on it, boleros with circus themes heavily embroidered on them, and an inkwell-shaped hat with a feather resembling a quill pen. The 1938 Zodiac collection included more heavily encrusted embroidery, such as the mirror suit, which embroidered inverted baroque mirrors on the front panels of the jacket and included real mirrored glass. Schiaparelli pushed the embroidery firm Maison Lesage to revive techniques from medieval ecclesiastical vestments as well as eighteenth-century military uniforms. As a result, a series of intricate evening jackets and accessories were created, with the decoration of the garment serving as a carapace or form of female armor.

While Schiaparelli was clearly established as a commercial fashion designer, she also maintained many personal and professional connections with surrealist artists. During World War I, she met Francis Picabia and his then-wife Gabrielle in New York, who introduced her to the artist Man Ray and the painter/sculptor Marcel Duchamp. Man Ray photographed Schiaparelli twice, once in the early 1920s and again in 1930. Man Ray photographed for fashion magazines such as Vogue and Harper's Bazaar on a regular basis; some of his photographs also appeared in the surrealist magazine Minotaure, which was published between 1933 and 1939. Man Ray's photographs of Schiaparelli's hats were used to illustrate a 1933 essay by surrealist writer Tristan Tzara. She then commissioned many surrealist artists to create accessories for her. Elsa Triolet, a writer, created jewelry for Schiapiarelli and other designers, with her husband Louis Aragon acting as the salesman. Schiaparelli commissioned Alberto Giacometti to create brooches, while Meret Oppenheim created furlined metal bracelets. Schiaparelli's designs, as well as many of the program covers for her openings and fashion shows, were illustrated by Christian Bérard. The designer used drawings done for her by artist Jean Cocteau as trompe l'oeil embroidery on two evening gowns, a blue silk coat and a grey linen jacket, in 1937.

However, Schiaparelli's collaboration with Salvador Dal, which began in 1936, resulted in a series of the most striking designs: chest of drawer suits (with horizontal pockets that looked like drawers and buttons that looked like drawer handles) in 1936, an evening dress with lobster print and a shoe hat and suit in 1937, and an evening dress with a tear design in 1938.

Apart from these accredited collaborations, Schiaparelli produced many surrealist designs of her own from the beginning of her career, some clearly in homage to her contemporaries, others apparently her own inspiration: black suede gloves appliquéd with red snakeskin fingernails inspired by Man Ray; a telephone-shaped handbag inspired by Dal and a brain-shaped hat made of corrugated pink velvet; buttons in the shape of peanuts, padlocks, and paper clips; Meanwhile, Schiaparelli kept in touch with the fashion industry in both the United States and the United Kingdom, collaborating with textile and accessory designers on specific collections and selling model gowns through exclusive importers. She also worked as a costume designer in both theater and film, most notably dressing Mae West for the film Every Day's a Holiday.

Schiaparelli continued to travel throughout the 1930s, many times to the United States and once to a trade fair in the Soviet Union in 1935. Despite being based in Paris, she opened a salon in London in 1933. Lady Mendl, Wallis Simpson, and other titled Englishwomen were among Schiaparelli's international clients; she frequently designed costumes for elaborate costume balls of the decade, such as the honorable Mrs. Reginald Fellowes' Oriental Ball in 1935 and Lady Mendl's Circus Ball in 1938. The stylish and distinct Daisy Fellowes served as Schiaparelli's unofficial mannequin; the designer dressed her for free, and she drew international attention in newspapers and magazines as one of the few women who wore Schiaparelli's more daring designs. If Daisy Fellowes embodied the Schiaparelli look, Bettina Bergery, née Jones, represented the designer's spirit. Bergery was the editor of French Vogue between 1935 and 1940, as well as Schiaparelli's assistant, and was responsible in the late 1930s for the witty and iconoclastic window displays in Schiaparelli's salon on the Place Vendôme.

The 1940s and 1950s

After the Germans occupied Paris in 1940, Schiaparelli, who had obtained French citizenship in 1931, embarked on an American lecture tour. She chose to return to the occupied city in January 1941, but was forced to leave again shortly afterwards for New York, where she spent the rest of the war. Throughout the war, Schiaparelli's Paris house remained open and produced collections, though they were not designed by Schiaparelli herself. Her early wartime designs, created before she left for the United States, frequently employed military themes but in a lighthearted manner, such as a one-piece "air-raid shelter" trouser suit. In her Cash and Carry collection for spring 1940, she also pioneered many innovative pocket designs. She returned to Paris immediately after the occupation ended in 1945 and resumed her design career, picking up where she had left off in 1940 but focusing more on unusual cuttings and draping. Among Schiaparelli's designs from this time period were a bird's nest hat with nesting birds, illusion bustle dresses, and inverted necklines that rose to cover the cleavage but dipped to reveal the breasts.

Schiaparelli continued to make merchandising and licensing deals with several American companies throughout the late 1940s and early 1950s, but in terms of innovative design, Cristóbal Balenciaga and Christian Dior took the lead in the 1950s. Dior's New Look of 1947 marked the beginning of a new era in fashion. After that, Schiaparelli's fortunes gradually declined; in 1954, the same year that Coco Chanel returned to Paris couture, Schiaparelli's Paris salon declared bankruptcy. Following that, the designer spent a lot of time in Tunisia, where she had bought a house in 1950. Shocking Life, her autobiography, was published in 1954. Schiaparelli died in 1973 in Paris at the age of 83, leaving behind her daughter Gogo and granddaughters Marisa Berenson and Berinthia ("Berry") Berenson Perkins.

Shiaparelli's fashion legacy was a vast body of designs that were endlessly inventive and original. To explore the themes of illusion, artifice, and masquerade, she created elaborate visual jokes in garments that layered images deceptively on the body. "For us, 'Schiap' was much more than a natter of mere dresses," Nadia Georges Port recalled, "through clothes she expressed a defiance of aesthetic conventions in a period when couture was in danger of losing itself in anemic subtitles" (Musée de la mode, p. 125). However, it is less well known that, despite her seemingly avant-garde designs, she always maintained successful business relationships with American middle market manufacturers. In this regard, she is a modern designer's model, combining a fertile imagination and dramatic showmanship with a pragmatic and commercial foundation.