ART & FASHION SCHIAPARELLI
Elsa Schiaparelli was the first designer to turn surrealist art into fashion and her daring designs were worn by stars and royals. For this spring, Christian Lacroix created a capsule collection for the newly revived house. Justine Picardie explores the genius of Schiap and her label’s relevance today
In fashion, Italian couturier Elsa Schiaparelli has legendary status: “She was the only real artist in the couture,” according to Cristóbal Balenciaga. “When she died,” observed Yves Saint Laurent, “chic closed her eyes…” But legends cannot always pay their bills. Although her many fans included fashion legends Marlene Dietrich and The Duchess of Windsor, Schiaparelli filed for bancruptcy in 1954. By the time of her death in 1973, her couture house had been closed for nearly two decades.
So there was excitement in 2006 when the house of Schiaparelli was bought by Diego Della Valle, owner of the Tod’s luxury group. Since then, rumours have flowed about which designer might inherit the mantle of Schiaparelli—ex-Creative Director of Rochas, Marco Zanini did late last year. But in the meantime, Schiaparelli’s famous headquarters at 21 Place Vendôme have been restored, and last July, a couture show was staged at the Musée des Arts Décoratifs. Designed by Christian Lacroix, these new creations for Schiaparelli were not for sale. Instead, they were exhibited on a carousel, reflecting Schiaparelli’s original artistic take on the surrealist circus of fashion.
Christian Lacroix himself is regarded by many as one of the most gifted designers of his generation, yet four years ago he was also forced into closure by financial pressures. He is a lifelong admirer of the Italian couturière, nicknamed Schiap. “She is a tremendous inspiration to me,” he says, reminiscing about his teenage discovery of her work. “I spent all my pocket money on old copies of fashion magazines at the fleamarket.”
There, in the pages of Harper’s BAZAAR in the ’30s, Schiaparelli’s rise to fame was documented, including her 1938 Circus collection. Lacroix paid homage to it in his show, with pierrot hats, pompoms, and a candy-striped gown of duchesse satin. Lacroix did not want to recreate famous pieces from Schiap’s archives, like her famous shocking-pink cape or her surrealist skeleton-print dress. "I wanted to suggest the essence of Schiaparelli’s daring.”
Lacroix is adamant he will not return to fashion full-time; the presentation at the Musée des Arts Décoratifs was a one-off. He suggests the new designer should be younger, and a woman; perhaps Roksanda Ilincic, whose own outfit Lacroix admired at the party for the exhibition. “I thought the blue dress Roksanda wore was astonishingly beautiful— and so Schiaparelli.”
For all the poignancy of the decision to produce only a single, intensely creative Schiaparelli collection—18 pieces that will never be worn, or sold—it was a fitting way to honour Schiaparelli’s individualistic legacy. The strangeness and intensity of her work has passed into fashion history: her signature “shocking pink, ”colour, her fish-shaped buttons; upside-down shoe hats and her collaborations with artist Salvador Dalí—they created a lobster-print dress, most memorably worn by Wallis Simpson.
Schiaparelli herself—for all her skill in self-promotion— seemed almost defeated by her own mythic persona by the time she wrote her autobiography, Shocking Life, in 1954.
“I merely know Schiap by hearsay,” she wrote. “I have only seen her in a mirror. She is, for me, some kind of fifth dimension.”
Born in Rome in 1890, the daughter of an academic and niece of a renowned astronomer, Schiaparelli defined herself as “an ugly child.” In her memoir she refers to herself in the third person—which might provide a clue to the causes of her periodic bouts of depression. She describes her mother as “making disparaging remarks about her looks. She was always being told she was as ugly as her sister was beautiful. So Schiap, believing this was so, thought up ways of beautifying herself.”
Thus came about her first surreal act of decoration: Schiap collected flower seeds from the family gardener, “these she planted in her throat, ears, mouth… For Schiap the chief disappointment was that no flowers grew to turn her into a beauty.”
More disappointments followed, including her disastrous marriage to an impoverished European count, Wilhelm Wendt de Kerlor. He spent her dowry, then abandoned her and their newborn daughter, Maria Luisa (nicknamed Gogo), in 1920. Thereafter, Schiap wrote: “My memory fails me about this time. Everything seemed so hopeless… ” Drifting from London to New York to Paris, penniless and lonely, Schiaparelli found salvation in a friendship with the Paris couturier Paul Poiret.
Poiret gave her clothes and confidence, and encouraged her to create her first fashion piece in 1927, a black sweater with a white trompe-l’oeil bow. Schiaparelli’s success was rapid—from knitwear, she moved to designing dresses and much else, including outfits for aviators and sportswomen. Her rise was so swift a 1932 profile of her for The New Yorker, appeared under a single-word headline— “Comet” — and concluded “a frock from Schiaparelli ranks like a modern canvas.”
By November 1934, Harper’s BAZAAR pronounced her “the most daring and original talent in French dressmaking… with volcanic energy and a fantastically fecund sense of modern invention. Her signature silhouette is as architectural as a skyscraper.Her critics say her clothes are hard to wear. Her enthusiasts refuse to believe it.”
Carmel Snow, BAZAAR’s then Editor, was one of those enthusiasts, wearing Schiap’s designs and featuring them in the magazine. BAZAAR’s Fashion Editor, Diana Vreeland, was also unperturbed by Schiaparelli’s challenging modernism. In her memoir, DV, she recalled a favourite Schiap dress from the ’30s, “that had fake ba-zooms—these funny little things that stuck out here… all I can say is that it was terribly chic. Don’t ask me why, but it was.”
Vreeland also admired Schiaparelli’s use of the new synthetic fabrics, however disastrous the consequences: “I had a little string-coloured dress—it was like cotton but it was also like something out of a garden… I wore it quite a lot, and it was time for it to go to the cleaners because nothing stays immaculate forever. It didn’t come back, you see, because there was nothing to send; there was only this tiny, round piece of… glue… the fabric wasn’t totally tested.”
But the mishap did not prevent Vreeland from recommending the couturière’s unusual products to BAZAAR readers. In one of her famous “Why don’t you” columns she asked, “Why don’t you order Schiaparelli’s cellophane belt with your name and telephone number on it?”
Yet despite Schiaparelli’s avant-garde innovations, she was also fond of traditional fabrics, including Scottish tweeds. One of the more unlikely aspects of this great modernist’s life was her regular excursions to Scotland, where she acquired tweeds that she made into evening gowns, as well as daywear.
Like her great rival Coco Chanel, Schiaparelli’s talent for dress design was matched by her capacity for self-creation. Her love life was also colourful; she had romances with two British gentlemen (Sir James Allan Horne and his brother Henry—although not at the same time). This contributed to her decision to open a Mayfair salon in 1933. Her first London collection, entitled Stormy Weather, featured British fabrics. But perhaps it was also inspired by picnics with Sir James on overcast, pebbly British beaches. His son, the writer Alistair Horne says. “I have photographs, which still make me giggle, of the great coutourier partaking of Marmite sandwiches… shrouded in a heavy cloak.” Schiaparelli’s wartime years remain a mystery. She was a vocal opponent of the Nazis and soon after the fall of Paris in 1940, she left occupied France for New York. However, she travelled to Paris for a few months in 1941, which caused rumours of collaboration, which she vehemently denied.
When she returned to Paris in 1945, her business did not flourish; her own explanation was “the elegance we had known before the war was over” but the success of Christian Dior’s New Look had also supplanted her sartorial surrealism.
In an interview in later life, she mourned what she saw as the loss of creative freedom for designers: “It is regrettable they can no longer do what they like because of pressure to produce lines that sell. Daring is gone. No one can dream anymore.”
So I would like to think she would have approved of Diego Della Valle’s act of faith in letting Christian Lacroix work with absolute freedom; allowing Schiaparelli’s admirers to carry on dreaming of fashion in full flight.