THE UNSUNG HERO OF SURREALIST FASHION : Elsa Schiaparelli
Born: 10 September 1890, Rome,Italy.
Died: 13 November 1973, Paris, France.
Books: Shocking Life
Early Years:She was the great niece of Giovanni Schiaparelli, who discovered canals on the planet Mars.Hailing from upscale stock she at a young age seemed to be driven to upset her aristocratic mother and scholarly father. After high school she enrolled at the University of Rome where she studied philosophy and soon published a book of poetry that was deemed so sensual by her parents that they directed her to a convent school in Switzerland. To expedite her release from the convent she went on a hunger strike. Her craving for adventure and exploration of the wider world led to her taking measures to remedy this, and when a friend offered her a post caring for orphaned children in an English country house, she saw an opportunity to leave.
In London, Schiaparelli met teacher Count William de Wendt de Kerlor who was a theosophist. She was immediately attracted to this charismatic charlatan and they got engaged on the very next day of their first meeting.The couple soon relocated to New York. Almost immediately after their child, Maria Luisa Yvonne Radha was born on June 15, 1920 de Kerlor moved out leaving Schiaparelli alone with their newborn daughter.
She returned to New York attracted to its spirit of fresh beginnings and cultural vibrancy.She relied greatly on the emotional support offered her by her close friend Gabrielle Gaby Buffet-Picabia the wife of Dada/Surrealist artist Francis Picabia. There she began working at a boutique specialising in French fashions and soon cultivated her own taste in clothes and accessories. Following the lead of Gabrielle Picabia and others and after the death of her lover Laurenti Schiaparelli left New York for France in 1922. Upon her arrival in Paris, she took an expansive apartment in a fashionable quarter of the city taking on the requisite servants, cook and maid.
Fashion Career:Schiaparelli’s design career was early on influenced by couturier Paul Poiret who was renowned for jettisoning corseted, over-long dresses and promoting styles that enabled freedom of movement for the modern, elegant and sophisticated woman. In later life she referred to Poiret as a generous mentor dear friend.She had no training in the technical skills of pattern making and clothing construction. Her method of approach relied on both impulse of the moment and the serendipitous inspiration as the work progressed. She draped fabric directly on the body, sometimes using herself as the model. This technique followed the lead of Poiret who too had created garments by manipulating and draping. The results appeared uncontrived and wearable.
House of Schiparelli: She started her own business but it closed in 1926 despite favourable reviews. She launched a new collection of knitwear in early 1927 using a special double layered stitch created by Armenian refugees and a series of sweaters featuring Surrealist “trompe l’oeil” images which would come to serve as her trademark caught the attention of the fashion world including French Vogue.She followed her initial success with another well received collection of bathing suits and ski-wear as well as the divided skirt an early form of women’s shorts. In 1931, she divided skirts which were worn by tennis champions. That same year “Shiap” as she was known, expanded her work into evening-wear.
Not surprisingly she connected with popular artists of the era one of her friends was painter Salvador Dali, whom she hired to design fabric for her fashion house. She was worshipped by some of the world’s best-dressed women including Daisy Flowers, Lady Mendl and Millicent Rogers.She also designed clothes for film and the theatre. Her work appeared in more than 30 movies over the course of her career most notably in Every Day’s a Holiday, starring Mae West, Moulin Rouge and Zsa Zsa Gabor.
Final Years:Schiaparelli discontinued her couture business in 1951 and closed her design house three years later but continued to work in fashion designing accessories and wigs. In 1954, she released an autobiography Shocking Life.
She died on November 13, 1973 in Paris, France. In the decades since her death she has continued to be regarded as a giant in the fashion world. In 2012, New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art featured her work along with that of Italian designer Miuccia Prada in a major exhibition.
Butterflies By Night: While butterflies often symbolise springtime, lightness and new beginnings these pieces in the FIDM Museum collection refashion them as creatures of the night equally at home in the darkness of winter.
Notable Designs-
Fastenings: She is one of the designers credited with offering the first clothes with visible zippers in 1930.Rather than being concealed, zippers became a key element of her designs visibly fastening necklines and running down sleeves and skirts.She was also renowned for her unusual buttons, which could resemble candlesticks, playing card emblems, ships, crowns, mirrors and crickets or silver tambourines and silk-covered carrots and cauliflowers.
Jewellery: One of her most directly surrealist designs was a 1938 Rhodoid (a newly developed clear plastic) necklace studded with coloured metallic insects by Clément giving the illusion that the bugs were crawling directly on the wearer’s skin. Compared to her unusual couture 1930s pieces, 1940s and 1950s Schiaparelli jewellery tended to be more abstract or floral-themed.
Artist Collaborations: In 1937 she collaborated with the artist Jean Cocteau to produce two of her most notable art-themed designs for that year’s Autumn collection.An evening jacket was embroidered with a female figure with one hand caressing the waist of the wearer, and long blonde hair cascading down one sleeve.A long evening coat featured two profiles facing each other, creating the optical illusion of a vase of roses.
Dali: The designs Schiaparelli produced in collaboration with Dali are among her best known. While Schiaparelli did not formally name her designs, the four main garments from her partnership with Dali are popularly known as follows:
Film Costumes: She designed the wardrobe for several films, starting with the French version of 1933’s Topaze and ending with Zsa Zsa Gabor’s outfits for the 1952 biopic of Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec.She famously dressed Mae West for Every Day’s a Holiday (1937) using a mannequin based on West’s measurements, which inspired the torso bottle for Shocking perfume.
Perfumes: Her perfumes were noted for their unusual packaging and bottles. Her best-known perfume was Shocking (1936)contained in a bottle sculpted by Leonor Fini in the shape of a woman’s torso inspired by Mae West’s tailor’s dummy and Dalí paintings of flower-sellers. The packaging, also designed by Fini was in shocking pink, one of Schiaparelli’s signature colours which was said to have been inspired by Daisy Fellowes.
