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Elsa Schiaparelli
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Elsa Schiaparelli (10 September 1890 – 13 November 1973) was an inspired Italian fashion designer. Along with Coco Chanel, she dominated fashion between the two World Wars. Starting with knitwear, Schiaparelli's designs were heavily influenced by Surrealists like her collaborators Salvador Dalí and Alberto Giacometti. Her clients included the heiress Daisy Fellowes and actress Mae West.
Schiaparelli refused to adapt to the changes in fashion following World War II and her business closed in 1954.
aparelli was born at the Palazzo Corsini in Rome.
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Encyclopedia
Elsa Schiaparelli (10 September 1890 – 13 November 1973) was an inspired Italian fashion designer. Along with Coco Chanel, she dominated fashion between the two World Wars. Starting with knitwear, Schiaparelli's designs were heavily influenced by Surrealists like her collaborators Salvador Dalí and Alberto Giacometti. Her clients included the heiress Daisy Fellowes and actress Mae West.
Schiaparelli refused to adapt to the changes in fashion following World War II and her business closed in 1954.
Personal life
Schiaparelli was born at the Palazzo Corsini in Rome. Her father was Dean of the University of Rome and an authority on Sanskrit. She was a great-niece of astronomer Giovanni Schiaparelli, who discovered the canali of Mars, and she spent hours with him studying the heavens. She studied philosophy at the University of Rome, during which she published a book of sensual poems that shocked her conservative family. Schiaparelli was sent to a convent until she went on hunger strike and at the age of 22 accepted a job in London as a nanny.
En route to London, Schiaparelli was invited to a ball in Paris. Having no ballgown she bought some dark blue fabric, wrapped it around her and pinned it in place. In London most of her time was spent visiting museums and attending lectures. Schiaparelli went on to marry one of her lecturers, Count William de Wendt de Kerlor a Franco-Swiss theosophist. In 1921 they moved to New York, where Schiaparelli immediately responded to the modernity of the city. Her husband distanced himself from the city and had abandoned his family by the time their child was born. Maria Luisa Yvonne Radha de Wendt de Kerlor, better known as Gogo Schiaparelli, would become a noted socialite.
Schiaparelli was later introduced to Gaby Picabia, ex-wife of French Dadaist artist Francis Picabia and owner of a boutique selling French fashions in New York. Through her work there, Schiaparelli met artists like Marcel Duchamp and Man Ray. When Gaby and Man Ray left for Paris, Schiaparelli joined them.
Fashion career
In Paris, Schiaparelli - known as "Schiap" to her friends - began making her own clothes. With some encouragement from Paul Poiret, 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. Although her first designs appeared in Vogue, the business really took off with a pattern that gave the impression of a scarf wrapped around the wearer's neck. The "pour le Sport" collection expanded the following year to include bathing suits, skiwear and linen dresses. The divided skirt, a forerunner of shorts, shocked the tennis world when worn by Lili de Alvarez at the Wimbledon Championships in 1931. She added evening wear to the collection in 1931, and the business went from strength to strength, culminating in a move from Rue de la Paix to the Schiap Shop in the Place Vendôme.
Her relationship with the Dada and Surrealist movements continued in collaboration with Salvador Dalí, Leonor Fini, Jean Cocteau, and Alberto Giacometti. Chanel referred to her as 'that Italian artist who makes clothes'. Dalí designed for her a dress with a large lobster printed onto it, and a hat that looked like a giant shoe. Another hat was shaped like a giant lamb chop; both were famously worn by the Franco-American editor of the French Harper's Bazaar and heiress Daisy Fellowes, who was one of Schiaparelli's best clients.
Fellowes owned a 17.27ct pink diamond from Cartier called the Tête de Belier (Ram's Head). This inspired the colour of the box of Schiaparelli's first perfume, which was called "Shocking"; the shade called hot pink by Americans is still known as shocking pink in British English. The packaging, designed by Leonor Fini, was also notable for the bottle in the shape of a woman's torso, supposedly based on Mae West's tailor's dummy. West was one of a number of film star clients; Schiaparelli 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 production of Moulin Rouge.
A darker tone was set when France declared war on Germany in 1939; Schiaparelli's Spring 1940 collection featured "trench" brown and camouflage print taffetas. Soon after the fall of Paris on 14 June 1940, Schiaparelli sailed to New York for a lecture tour; apart from a few months in Paris in early 1941, she remained in New York until the end of the war. On her return she found that fashions had changed, with Christian Dior's New Look marking a rejection of pre-war fashion. The house of Schiaparelli struggled in the austerity of the post-war period, and Elsa finally closed it down in December 1954, the same year that her great rival Chanel returned to the business. Aged 64, she wrote her autobiography and then lived out a comfortable retirement between her apartment in Paris and house in Tunisia. She died on 13 November 1973.
Legacy
The failure of her business meant that Schiaparelli's name is not as well remembered as that of her great rival Chanel. But in 1934, Time placed Chanel in the second division of fashion, whereas Schiaparelli was one of "a handful of houses now at or near the peak of their power as arbiters of the ultra-modern haute couture....Madder and more original than most of her contemporaries, Mme Schiaparelli is the one to whom the word "genius" is applied most often". At the same time Time recognised that Chanel had assembled a fortune of some US$15m despite being "not at present the most dominant influence in fashion", whereas Schiaparelli relied on inspiration rather than craftsmanship and "it was not long before every little dress factory in Manhattan had copied them and from New York's 3rd Avenue to San Francisco's Howard Street millions of shop girls who had never heard of Schiaparelli were proudly wearing her models".
Perhaps Schiaparelli's most important legacy was in bringing to fashion the playfulness and sense of "anything goes" of the Dada and Surrealist movements. She loved to play with juxtapositions of colours, shapes and textures, and embraced the new technologies and materials of the time. With Charles Colcombet she experimented with acrylic, cellophane, a rayon jersey called "Jersela" and a rayon with metal threads called
"Fildifer" - the first time synthetic materials were used in couture. Some of these innovations were not pursued further, like her 1934 "glass" cape made from Rhodophane, a transparent plastic related to cellophane. But there were more lasting innovations; Schiparelli created wraparound dresses decades before Diane von Furstenberg and crumpled up rayon 50 years before Issey Miyake's pleats and crinkles. In 1930 alone she created the first evening-dress with a jacket, and the first clothes with visible zippers. In fact fastenings were something of a speciality, from a jacket buttoned with silver tambourines to one with silk-covered carrots and cauliflowers.
Family
Her daughter Countess Maria Luisa Yvonne Radha de Wendt de Kerlor, better known as Gogo Schiaparelli, married shipping executive Robert L. Berenson. Their children were model Marisa Berenson and photographer Berry Berenson, who married Anthony Perkins and perished tragically on American Airlines Flight 11 when it crashed into the North Tower of the World Trade Center.
In popular culture
In Nancy Mitford's 1949 novel Love in a Cold Climate, the heroine Fanny wants to wear the Schiaparelli label on the outside of a jacket "so that people would know where it came from".
In Muriel Spark's novel The Girls of Slender Means, the character Selina steals a Schiaparelli gown that was traded around the May of Teck Club in the climax of the story.
Schiaparelli is mentioned a number of times as a favorte designer of Mame Dennis-Burnside and Vera Charles in the books Auntie Mame and Around the world with Auntie Mame
In stanza XV of Louis MacNeice's epic poem "Autumn Journal" (1939), he namechecks Schiaparelli as a designer who epitomised modernity:
'Or give me a new Muse with stockings and suspenders
And a smile like a cat
With false eyelashes and finger-nails of carmine
And dressed by Schiaparelli, with a pill-box hat.'
Further reading
- Recent edition of Elsa's autobiography, originally published by Hudson in 1954.
- Published to coincide with the Philadelphia exhibition below Apparently has a 10 page feature on Schiaparelli
External links
- Major exhibition of Schiaparelli's work at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, with a good website ("Explore the Exhibition"). Searching the museum website will also turn up dozens of Schiaparelli pieces in the main collection, with photos.
- Go to Galleries and then High Fashion for text from the catalogue of the 1984 Hommage à Schiaparelli exhibition in Paris.
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