Elsa Schiaparelli

Elsa Schiaparelli (10 September 1890 – 13 November 1973) was an influential Italian fashion designer. Along with Coco Chanel, she dominated fashion between the two World Wars. Starting with knitwear, her designs were heavily influenced by Surrealists like her collaborator Salvador Dali. However unlike Chanel she never adapted to the changes in fashion after WWII 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 Giovanni Schiaparelli, who discovered the canals 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. They sent her to a convent until she went on hunger strike; at the age of 22 she accepted a job in London as a nanny.

The journey to London gave her a first introduction to fashion. En route, she 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; unfortunately the pins couldn't cope with the vigour of her dancing! In London Elsa spent most of her free time in museums and lectures. She was entranced by one lecturer in particular, Count William de Wendt de Kerlor, a Franco-Swiss spiritualist and theosophist, and they married a year later. His career thrived after WWI and in 1921 they moved to New York. Elsa embraced the modernity of New York and the freedom of its women, but her husband spent more and more time away from the city and had abandoned his family by the time their child was born. Maria Luisa Yvonne Radha de Wendt de Kerlor was better known as Gogo Schiaparelli and would become a noted socialite. Elsa's doctor at the time took pity on her situation, and introduced her to Gaby Picabia, ex-wife of French Dadaist artist Francis Picabia and owner of a struggling business selling French fashions in the city. Elsa began working for Gaby, who introduced her to artists such as Marcel Duchamp and Man Ray. When Gaby and Man Ray left for Paris, Schiaparelli followed.

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 stich 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

Notes and references

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

• "Shocking!" The Art and Fashion of Elsa Schiaparelli 28 September 2003 - 4 January 2004. Retrieved on 2008-04-26.. 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.
• www.fondationtanagra.com Go to Galleries and then High Fashion for text from the catalogue of the 1984 Hommage à Schiaparelli exhibition in Paris.
• Interactive timeline of couture houses and couturier biographies. Victoria and Albert Museum. .