Art of Schiaparelli

It is a great pity that Elsa Schiaparelli is not more widely known than her rival Chanel. Maybe that’s why it’s so hard to pronounce his name. Is it ‘shap’, ‘skap’ or ‘skyap’? Tristram Hunt, director of the V&A, responds with a quip from Schiaparelli himself: ‘No one knows how to say it, but everyone knows what it means.’

A new V&A exhibition Schiaparelli: Fashion Becomes Art traces the network of influences around one of the great couture houses of the 20th century. Like Coco Chanel (I hate comparing them), Elsa Schiaparelli made clothes for the modern, independent woman – it’s common to say that but they ‘pushed the boundaries’. Unlike Chanel, however – who is often summed up by the silly word ‘chic’ – Schiaparelli was bold, smart, tough and surprising.

‘Schiap’, as he liked to call himself, began his career in fashion in 1927. He had found himself alone in Paris with his baby, Grandma, after breaking up with a failed magician. Not exactly a seamstress – Chanel mocked Schiaparelli’s lack of training, calling her ‘that Italian dressmaker’ – she started designing knitwear. The V&A is showing three sets of the lovely black and white jumpers – with sailor-smoke and pussybow patterns – that made her so popular. The style was starved of America but mass produced, and quickly moved on to the next thing – and, when that was copied, the next thing: sportswear, working daywear and finally eveningwear.

His broad-shouldered suits, split skirts and svelte, androgynous silhouettes became the uniform for socialites and intellectuals in Paris, London and New York. American Vogue‘s Bettina Ballard described Schiaparelli’s style as a woman ‘shielded by the armor of witty conversational wit’; she wore, among many others, Peggy Guggenheim, Josephine Baker, Marlene Dietrich, Katharine Hepburn and Greta Garbo. Her signature color was a stunning pink: a modern blinding, hot, magenta.

Schiaparelli often played with her pet fascinations: manifestations, death, metamorphosis, the stars, the mind, our primitive emotions. A shoe can become a hat. A set of drawers would become a suit. She placed Salvador Dali’s lobster (she called it ‘the most sensual of animals’) in an unmistakably masculine place in one outfit – worn by Wallis Simpson. Schiaparelli’s skeleton dress, which opens the exhibition, is a beautiful but small piece, also designed with Dali; the black cloth is folded and stretched around the closed bones like a second skin.

He and Dali collaborated on matching hats, suits and mirrors. He was one of several artists – including Pablo Picasso and Man Ray – who created paintings inspired by his pieces. Jean Cocteau’s paintings were emblazoned on Schiaparelli’s jackets. Marcel Vertès created advertising images for his Horrible cosmetics, Leonor Fini designed the bottles, and the interior of his salon was the work of Alberto Giacometti and Jean-Michel Frank.

But can fashion really equal capital-A Art? The title of the exhibition blurs the line between the two and aims to confirm Schiaparelli’s claim to a place within the realm of surrealism. He must have felt insecure about that divide between fine and practical art. In her autobiography, she wrote that her collaboration with designers made her feel ‘understood’ more than the ‘horrible and boring reality of making a dress to sell’. André Breton criticized the other surrealists for “selling their souls to commerce”, but the buying process was in keeping with the movement. René Magritte ran an advertising agency. Dali designed logos (including that of Chupa Chups) and window dressings for Bonwit Teller, a New York store. None of that should be surprising. After all, what is marketing and sales but a game of our unconscious desires?

Schiaparelli is credited with inventing the travel store. The windows of her salon on the ground floor of Paris Place Vendôme (see below) were lined with ready-to-wear jumpers, dresses, blouses, and perfumes, tiaras and other accessories. Cocteau, writing about Harper’s Bazaarit called it a ‘devil’s laboratory’ in which women emerged ‘coiffed, disguised, deformed, or transformed according to Schiaparelli’s ideas’. In the center of the Place Vendôme is a statue of Napoleon, dressed, magnificently, like a Roman.

Schiaparelli was born between a prison and a lunatic asylum in Trastevere, Rome, and grew up under the influence of the slightly insane Italian nobility. His father, a scholar of medieval Islam, had been appointed librarian of the Accademia dei Lincei by King Victor Emmanuel II. One uncle, a famous astronomer, discovered canals on Mars – Elsa remembers saying ‘he believed Mars had people like us’ – while another relative discovered Nefertiti’s tomb in Egypt.

He was drawn to the supernatural from an early age, and saw through the outward appearance of hidden light. As he prepared for his confirmation, he trembled in awe of the ‘beautiful blue and white robes’ of the nuns who, like the upper garments, kept the altar fire burning, ‘praying silently with their long trains sweeping behind them like mystical wedding gowns’. This scene makes me think of one of his most famous pieces, the teardrop dress he designed with Dali. White and covered, it has a pattern of trompe l’oeil rips – from a distance, they look like burning candles. Underneath the seemingly torn fabric is deep pink. Is it another explosive costume – a kind of chrysalis? Or a layer of minced meat?

Transforming anatomical insides is an idea that Schiaparelli’s current boss, Texas-born Daniel Roseberry, continues to play with. The V&A is placing her lungi dress, with gold dendritic chest protection, pulmonary veins, next to Schiaparelli’s skeleton dress. It was worn by model Bella Hadid on the red carpet of Cannes in 2021.

Schiaparelli liked to play ‘little jokes’ that often turned into “great influences”, Janet Flanner wrote in her 1932. The New Yorker developer position. Buttons were often a victim of his delirium: he made them out of defunct French coins to mock the devaluation of the franc, and put carrot and radish buttons on his dinner jacket when food shortages hit German-occupied France. He made the dollar sign a coat of arms ‘at a time when the dollar had lost its ability to do both’, Flanner wrote.

Roseberry, too, has a bad streak. The lung dressing was a gesture to Covid, he said Vogue‘the reputation of the concept of breathing’. Hmmm. If you don’t like to please the bourgeois more than his predecessor, he can still create amazingly beautiful pieces.

Another Schiaparelli original is almost identical to Roseberry’s. I swear I can see Sex and the City‘s Carrie Bradshaw in a Schiaparelli print dress – in fact Carrie was John Galliano’s vintage Dior. I could hear some guests crying, ‘I can wear that!’ and ‘that would be in Liberty windows!’. That praise may also be a clue as to why Maison Schiaparelli closed in the 1950s. At some point, the avant-garde becomes the main area of ​​Liberty. (His use of zippers, if you can believe it, was once controversial.)

Schiaparelli is a difficult designer to have a modern vision. His pieces suggest his sense of humor and humor, but how often did he feel the struggle, the discontent, the victory? He believed that the world, once created, no longer belongs to him; someone got into it, sometimes ruining it or turning it into a caricature of what he intended it to be. Designing clothes was also, to some extent, a way to correct his mistakes. He believed he was ugly and felt that his life had begun with the shame of being named after a Wagnerian hero: ‘Never was a name more fitting.’

After the second world war, Christian Dior’s New Look gave women the opportunity to return to simple, traditional femininity. The house of Schiaparelli declared bankruptcy in 1954 and its founder retired. He turned his back on the Place Vendôme – which was ‘too tyrannical’ – to write his autobiography. A scary life and, like a monk or mystic, to free oneself from ‘excessive materialism and jealousy’.

I wonder, then, what he would do with Harrods, just down the road from the V&A. The London Schiaparelli boutique is housed in a department store, which truly feels like the devil’s laboratory – although not in the way Cocteau intended. Down corridors that look like a construction site, following the signs for the loos, you’ll find Schiaparelli in the ‘superbrands’ hall. Fashion becomes art becomes beauty. I guess we can thank the surrealists for turning us into shopaholics.