How many fashion designers can
boast collaborators like writer and artist Jean Cocteau, surrealist painter
Salvador Dalí and sculptor Alberto Giacometti? Clients like the Duchess of
Windsor, Mae West, Marlene Dietrich and Katharine Hepburn? None, except Elsa
Schiaparelli, affectionately known to all as ‘Schiap.’ Between the late 1920s
and early 1950s, together with Coco Chanel, Schiaparelli was one of the most
creative designers of her time. Long after
her death, she continued to influence the work of younger couturiers like Yves
Saint Laurent and, more recently, Jean-Paul Gaultier and John Galiano.
The late child of a noble woman and a distinguished
university professor and niece of Giuseppe Schiaparelli, the famous Italian astronomer
who discovered the canals of Mars, Elsa Luisa Maria Schiaparelli was born at
Palazzo Corsini in Rome
on September
10, 1890. Convent educated and reminded frequently as a
child that she would never be as beautiful as her older sister, she was
rebellious, leaving home at 22 to work as a nanny in London.
On a quick trip to Paris,
within days of meeting Count William de Wendt de Kerlor, a Breton-Swiss
theosophist, she married him. In 1921, the couple moved to New
York, where she worked as a film
scriptwriter and translator and dabbled in selling French dresses to wealthy
American friends. Her husband had as brief affair with the dancer Isadora
Duncan, and then he abandoned Schiaparelli soon after the birth of their
daughter, Maria Luisa Yvonne Radha, known as Gogo.
Since arriving in New
York, Schiaparelli had mixed with an
‘arty’ crowd of surrealists and dadaists, among them Marcel Duchamp, Man Ray
and Francis and Gaby Picabia. In fact, the Picabias took her and Gogo to Paris,
where, to support herself and her child, she began her career in fashion in
earnest. In 1927, after becoming a French citizen, she presented her first
collection of knitwear and not long afterwards opened her own ‘maison’ at no. 4
rue de la Paix.
In 1935, she moved to the fashionable Place Vendome,
where she was the first designer to introduce catwalk shows with music, entertainers
and models. Yves San Laurent described her impact on the world’s fashion
capital: ‘She slapped Paris.
She smacked it. She tortured it. She bewitched it. And it fell madly love with
her.’ Her clothes, which caused an immediate sensation, were soon being copied
in dozens of small dress factories in New
York’s garment district.
A tiny, dark-haired woman with
penetrating eyes, she produced de-signs combining whimsicality with elegant simplicity and linearity. Flamboyant with colour, especially her signature hot pink,
to which she dedicated her first and most famous perfume, ‘Shocking’, marketed
in a bottle shaped like Mae West’s hourglass figure, Schiaparelli was a
fountainhead of innovation. In the 1930s, she was the first to open a boutique
for ready-to-wear clothing, introduce the padded shoulder, pioneer evening
jackets and sweaters, develop the wrap dress, experiment with new synthetic
fabrics and use visible zipper fastenings. Schiaparelli adored embroidery on
her clothes, and she invented amazing buttons and clasps featuring all kinds of
animals and insects, cupids-even clowns.
This was also the period of her famous artistic
partnership with Dalì. Just the names of their dresses conjure an image of
their dazzling originality and eccentricity: the lobster dress (1937), the
tears dress (1938) and the skeleton dress, these last two part of her Circus
Collection. Dalì also designed the bottle for her Le Roi Soleil perfume.
In the 1940s, she added lingerie
trimmed with rhinestones and fur, and in the 1950s, after returning from New York, where she had spent the war years, she launched
‘shortie’ coats in vivid colours. Her legendary hats were extravaganzas, among
them the ‘shoe’ hat, with its bright red heel and the toe, worn tilted to one side
over the wearer’s forehead.
Although she gradually expanded her business into
perfumes, cosmetics and jewellery as well as haute couture and sportswear, from
bathing suits to skiwear, Schiaparelli, unlike her rival Coco Chanel, failed to
adapt to the new fashion scene she found in Paris after
World War II, then dominated by Christian Dior. Bankrupt, she closed her
atelier in 1954. After completing her memoirs, she died peacefully in her sleep
on November 13,
1973.
Her socialite daughter Gogo, who married American
diplomat and shipping executive Robert L. Berenson, gave her two grandchildren:
model and actress Marisa Berenson, and Berry Berenson, photographer and widow
of actor Anthony Perkins, who died on American Airlines Flight 11 when it
crashed into the World Trade Center on
September
11, 2001. They were also the great-grandnieces of art
historian and critic Bernard Berenson (1865-1959), who lived and worked at
Villa I Tatti in Florence.
