Coco Chanel (Getty Images)
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In 1913, a young Italian socialite, Elsa Schiaparelli, was invited to Parisian ball. She had nothing to wear, so she bought 4 yards of dark blue crêpe de Chine and 2 yards of orange silk and draped them carefully around her body, creating a sash with half the silk and a turban with the rest. “Thus [I] sailed happily into the ball!” she would later write in her 1954 autobiography, “Shocking Life.”
The dress was her “first couturière’s failure” she explained, because as she danced the tango on the ballroom floor, the pins began giving way, and the dress unraveled. “Had it not been for [my] partner dancing [me] off the floor and out of the room, [my] first meeting with the Tout-Paris might have resembled an act out of the Folies-Bergères,” she wrote, though in the book she refers to herself in the third person or by her nickname, “Schiap” — pronounced “Skap.”
The daring dress — and the carefree attitude about her near denuding — set the stage for one of the most interesting and whimsical careers in fashion.
The designer was, along with rival Coco Chanel, the most influential style maven between the World Wars, says Valerie Steele, museum director of the Fashion Institute of Technology. She dressed the chic women of her day: Mae West, Marlene Dietrich and Greta Garbo, and was hailed as a genius on a 1934 cover of Time magazine.
“Madder and more original than most of her contemporaries, Mme Schiaparelli is the one to whom the word ‘genius’ is applied most often,” the article read. She is now the subject, along with Miuccia Prada, of the spring Costume Institute Exhibition at the Met, which runs from May 10 through Aug. 19.
“Her influence on fashion, along with Prada’s, is extraordinary,” says Andrew Bolton, curator of the Costume Institute. “They both upend ideas of good taste and bad taste, They provoke and challenge what we mean by fashion and what is considered fashionable.”
In the introduction to the show’s catalogue, Judith Thurman lists the innovations Schiaparelli gave us, among them the popularization of “shocking pink” fuschia: “wraparound dresses, shirtwaist jackets, culottes, the overall, the jumpsuit, swimsuits with a built-in bra . . . wedge heels, folding eyeglasses, mix-and-match separates and the power suit.”
But her most memorable looks are those she created with Salvador Dalí. The impish pair made chapeaus shaped like shoes, pork chops and even a vagina. They designed a white organza dress with a lobster painted on the skirt and sprigs of parsley affixed to the bodice, as well as a black “skeleton dress” with ribs sewn on.
A central figure in the Parisian Surrealist movement, she counted among her friends Man Ray, Jean Cocteau and Marcel Duchamp, and met everyone from President Roosevelt to Hollywood stars. “She goes everywhere, knows everybody, follows all the artistic activities of painting, sculpture, music and the theatre,” Vogue wrote in 1931.
One person she knew, but apparently wished she did not, was Coco Chanel, whose little black dresses could not have been more different than Schiaparelli’s madcap designs.
The two exchanged famous barbs. The aristocratic Schiaparelli called Chanel: “That dreary little bourgeosie” and “that milliner.” Chanel clawed back by referring to Schiaparelli as “That Italian artist who makes clothes” — meaning her art was okay but her clothes were not. Their animosity ignited at a high-society costume ball in the late ’30s.
There “was a near-disaster when Chanel . . . dared Schiaparelli . . . to dance with her and, with purposeful innocence, steered her into the candles,” fashion writer Bettina Ballard recalled in her memoir. “The fire was put out and so was Schiaparelli — by delighted guests squirting her with soda water.”
Schaiparelli was born in Rome’s Palazzo Corsini in 1890. Her father was a professor and her uncle an astronomer who discovered the canals of Mars. In her frequently outlandish (and not always accurate) autobiography, she claims that as a child she jumped off the roof of her home clutching an umbrella, hoping it would act as a parachute. She says she published a book of sensual poems as a 14-year-old without her parents knowing. When they found out, she was shipped to a convent where she promptly staged a hunger strike until she was brought back home. (Scholars say the poems were actually published when she was in her 20s.)
At 23, she left Rome for London to work as a nanny, but met the Count Wilhelm de Wendt de Kerlor and married him a year later. He got her pregnant, took her to New York, and abandoned her, allegedly for the dancer Isadora Duncan. Eventually she moved to Paris with her daughter, Gogo, and met the designer Paul Poiret, who encouraged her dress designs although she had no formal training and couldn’t even sew.
Her breakthrough came when she saw a woman wearing a sweater that seemed particularly shapely. “It was hand-knitted and had what I might call a steady look . . . it did not stretch like other sweaters,” she recalled in “Shocking Life.” She had one made, with a trompe l’oeil scarf around it, and wore it to a fashionable luncheon. Lord and Taylor ordered 40, and Schiaparelli’s career had begun.
“All the women wanted one, immediately. They fell on me like birds of prey,” she wrote. “Soon the restaurant of the Paris Ritz was filled with women from all over the world in black-and-white sweaters.”
Knowing little of dressmaking, she opened a small salon, which she soon outgrew. Eventually she would buy a 98-room mansion on the Place Vendome that held her salons and workshops, and also became a center of the Surrealist movement.
There she designed a butterfly-themed collection, a Zodiac-themed collection and a circus collection. She designed a coat with Jean Cocteau that depicted two ladies’ faces and a vase of roses. She launched the perfume “Shocking” in an hourglass bottle modeled after Mae West’s figure. She and Dalí made their outlandish wearable art together.
When war broke out in Europe, Schiaparelli went to New York. When she returned to Paris, however, the public no longer had a taste for her outré designs.
Instead, they wanted Coco Chanel’s little black dresses and uniform-like suits, says Steele. With Karl Lagerfeld’s reinvention of the line in 1983, Chanel is a household name, and Schiap has been mostly forgotten, she says.
But Schiaparelli, who died in 1973, is finally back in the spotlight — although she most likely wouldn’t have wanted to share it with anyone, even Miuccia Prada.