September 6, 2011 |
FROM THE VAULT (SUMMER 2011)
“She slapped Paris. She smacked it. She tortured it. She bewitched it. And it fell madly in love with her.” That’s Yves Saint Laurent on Elsa “Schiap” Schiaparelli, the great surrealist designer of the modern era, who transformed 1930s fashion with her outré couture that could vie with art. As YSL implies, like many hugely driven, creative geniuses, she was something of a despot and equally given to pithy, final-word-on-the-matter pronouncements. Her autobiography, Shocking Life, is full of them, and she even wrote her own 12 Commandments for Women. Schiap went two up on God, but 10’s a good number. Here are our pointers.
1) BRAINS AND MONEY RAN IN THE FAMILY. Schiaparelli was born in 1890 in an Italian palace. On her mother’s side there were wealthy aristocrats, and Schiap’s childhood was an easy one, though she would grow up to reject this life of moneyed leisure as a hindrance to making art. She came from a line of overachievers. Her father was dean of the University of Rome and a Sanskrit expert. Giovanni Schiaparelli, her uncle, was the famed astronomer who discovered the canals of Mars.
2) SHOCKING BECAME SCHIAPARELLI’S WATCHWORD. The succés de scandale was a trick she learned early. Consider these oft-quoted youthful escapades: as an impish waif studying philosophy in Rome, she published a book of saucy poems that resulted in her family sending her to a convent, where she promptly went on a hunger strike. Not long after this she ditched the convent for an independent life as a London nanny. En route to the big smoke, she was invited to a ball on the spur of the moment. Without a suitable dress, she decided to wear little more than a ream of dark blue fabric wrapped around her body, which predictably began to unwind.
Later in Schiap’s career, her progressive innovations brought the shock of the new. In 1931, tennis champ, Lili de Alvarez, caused a mass intake of breath wearing Schiaparelli culottes for Wimbledon. According to the Daily Mail, any female daring to wear “that divided skirt should be soundly beaten”. The designer’s signature colour was shocking pink, a hue certain to draw all eyes in the room to its wearer. She used it to package her hugely successful perfume, also named Shocking.
3) IT WASN’T ALL ROSES, THOUGH. “Poverty forced me to work, and Paris gave me a liking for it,” Schiaparelli said. Indeed, anyone worried about children draining their creativity should look to her. At 24 she married a philanderer husband called William de Wendt, a theosophist whose lectures she attended in London. When he went AWOL before her daughter was born, her unexpected situation as a single mum spurred her on to become a fashion high-flyer. Her child would grow up to become girl about town Gogo Schiaparelli, or Countess Maria Luisa Yvonne Radha de Wendt de Kerlor to use her full, titled name; their mother-daughter fashion collaborations included designing uniforms for American Red Cross volunteers during the Second World War…
4) EVERYONE NEEDS A MENTOR. Schiaparelli’s Yoda figures included Paul Poiret, the seminal designer who encouraged the young Italian in creating gowns for friends when she first arrived in Paris in 1915. Ten years her senior, this so-called Picasso of fashion created clothes that shocked with their “brazen modernity”, as Schiap’s would a generation later. He also had a gift for PR, designing lavish window displays and throwing wild parties – novel marketing techniques that would rub off on Schiaparelli. Her fanfare fashion shows and press releases printed on fabric turned new collections into major events.
5) “A DRESS CANNOT JUST HANG LIKE A PAINTING ON THE WALL, OR LIKE A BOOK REMAIN INTACT AND LIVE A LONG AND SHELTERED LIFE.” So said the woman as well known for her surrealist shockers as her practical innovations. This chum of Picasso and Dali certainly considered herself an artist. As Janet Flanner wrote in The New Yorker in 1932, “A frock from Schiaparelli ranks like a modern canvas.” In fact, turning the tables on the usual male-female creative balance, you could say that artists were Schiaparelli’s muses. And it seems anyone she didn’t cross paths with really wasn’t worth knowing. Her friends and admirers are a who’s who of Modernism’s major league, including Meret Oppenheim, Marcel Duchamp, Pablo Picasso, Alberto Giacometti, Man Ray and Francis Picabia. One of Jean Cocteau’s drawings was embroidered on a cape she designed. Her most famous artist collaborations, though, are with Salvador Dali.
The surrealist duo co-created the lobster dress notoriously worn by Wallis Simpson – she was photographed wearing it, by Cecil Beaton, it in the garden of the Against the snowy white skirt, the fiery red crustacean seems to crawl from between Simpson’s legs, pincers at the ready. Further fashion high jinks between Dali and Schiaparelli include her black silk-crepe skeleton dress. Inspired by a “human skeleton” sideshow act, padding along its elegant curves suggests the curvature of a spine and exposed ribs in a neat sex/death conflation.
6) WHEN IT CAME TO THINKING OUTSIDE OF FASHION’S USUAL CONFINES, SCHIAPARELLI WAS AN ESCAPE ARTIST PAR EXCELLENCE. She tapped into the wider world around her – and its underbelly. According to the designer, the huge ruffle at the back of her “speakeasy” dress was there for women to hide a bottle beneath during the Prohibition era. Recalling the fetishistic fur teacup, saucer and spoon created by her friend Oppenheim, Schiap designed shoes that had gone feral with overgrown monkey fur. Gloves came with red snakeskin fingernails. One of her best-known pieces is a hat shaped like a shoe – another Dali alliance. And how many designers turn to politics for their inspiration? When France declared war on Germany in 1939, Schiaparelli worked the earthy colours of the trenches and camouflage into her 1940 collection.
7) “NEVER FIT THE DRESS TO THE BODY, BUT TRAIN THE BODY TO FIT THE DRESS,” the diva designer declared. With a dictum like that it’s no surprise that the women who became well known for wearing Schiaparelli were steely souls, equally capable of speaking their mind. Those who loved her clothes’ demanding cubist angles and razor-edged silhouettes as much as her clingy, sexy numbers included German movie goddess Marlene Dietrich and the icon of masculine tailoring, Katharine Hepburn. One of her most committed supporters was the French-American editor of Harper’s Bazaar in Paris, the heiress Daisy Fellowes.
8) OF COURSE, SCHIAPARELLI WASN’T THE SOLE CONTENDER TO THE PARIS FASHION CROWN. Coco Chanel was her great rival, though she seems like the yin to Schiap’s yang. Where the Italian embraced eccentric flamboyance, Chanel was all simple, minimal elegance. Yet, in spite of their creative differences, Schiap and Coco still managed to tread on one another’s toes. They not only moved in the same circles but also similarly started out in knitwear and pioneered sportswear as acceptable day attire. Schiaparelli’s very first studio where she sold her designs was called Pour le Sport. Certainly, they didn’t like each other much. According to Chanel she was “that Italian artist who makes clothes”.
9) SCHIAPARELLI’S OUT-THERE SURREALIST DESIGNS HIT A VERY PARTICULAR CULTURAL NERVE – a period of experimentation, when the kind of wide-eyed youthful decadents Evelyn Waugh writes of in Vile Bodies embraced all things modern. The decline of her label might be put down to an inability to move with the times. Soon after the Second World War broke out, she fled to New York, where she worked as a fundraiser for French relief charities. When she returned to Paris, the world had changed. She might have created (unrealised) designs for a practical wardrobe for Soviet working women in the 1930s, and pioneered “off the peg” fashion, but post-war austerity was not what Schiaparelli was about; plus there was a new boy in town called Christian Dior. The House of Schiaparelli closed its doors in 1954.
10) WHEN SHE DIED IN 1973, SCHIAPARELLI LEFT AN INDELIBLE LEGACY TO THE FASHION WORLD. Her innovations have been homaged, developed and pastiched time and again. Indeed, as her daughter Gogo said, “Everybody has copied Mummy.” To quote just a few examples of her lasting influence, most recently Lady Gaga’s look has been claimed as a descendent of Schiap’s; she was the touchstone for Dolce & Gabanna’s 2009 RTW collection with gloves used as hats and scarves; Lulu Guinness said that when she discovered Schiaparelli, “everything fell into shape”; and the female torso of her perfume bottle has found its mass-market twin in Jean Paul Gaultier’s Classique. The wedge sole was her creation, so too mix and match sportswear, knitwear patterned with big bows, ties and belts, and outsize novelty buttons. Those wanting to tread in her footsteps though, might consider these words of Schiaparelli wisdom: “Fashion is born by small facts, trends, or even politics, never by trying to make little pleats and furbelows, by trinkets, by clothes easy to copy, or by the shortening or lengthening of a skirt.”
Shocking Life: The Autobiography of Elsa Schiaparelli is published by V&A Publications
by Skye Sherwin
