Overview
Schiaparelli did not 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 mother, Maria-Luisa, was a Neapolitan aristocrat, and her father, Celestino Schiaparelli, was a renowned scholar and curator of medieval manuscripts. Her father was Dean of the University of Rome and an authority on Sanskrit. She was a niece of astronomer Giovanni Schiaparelli, who discovered the so-called 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.
Elsa led a refined life with a certain amount of luxury provided by her parents’ wealth and high social status. She believed, however, that this luxury was stifling to her art and creativity and so she removed herself from the “lap of luxury” as quickly as possible. Schiaparelli moved first to New York City and then to Paris, combining her love of art and design to become a couturier.
En route to London, Schiaparelli was invited to a ball in Paris. Having no ballgown, she bought some dark blue fabric, wrapped it around herself 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, Maria Luisa (nicknamed 'Gogo') was born.
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" (Skap) 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 and featuring sweaters with surrealist trompe l'oeil images.
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, ski-wear, and linen dresses. The divided skirt, a forerunner of shorts, shocked the tennis world when worn by Lili de Alvarez at Wimbledon in 1931.
She added evening wear to the collection in 1931, using the luxury silks of Robert Perrier, and the business went from strength to strength. In 1935, Schiaparelli moved from 4 Rue de la Paix, acquiring the renowned salon of Madeleine Chéruit at 21 Place Vendôme, nicknamed the Schiap Shop.
Collections:
- 1931/1932 Wooden Soldiers Collection (inspired by Indo-Chinese costumes)
- 1935 Stop, Look & Listen Collection
- 1935 Eskimo Collection
- 1936 Parachute Collection
- 1937 Paris 1937 (shocking pink color)
- 1937 The Things All Around Us Collection (butterflies, pineapples, bees, fruits, flowers,crayfish, lobsters, snails, and swans)
- 1937 Metamorphosis Collection (butterflies)
- 1938 Le Cirque (based on the circus, horses, clowns, balloons, elephants, acrobats)
- 1938 Pagan Collection (based on Botticelli, mythological creatures, insects, dragonflies, vegetables, pansies, violets)
- 1938 Astrology/Zodiac Collection (Zodiac symbols, astrology, celestial elements, sun ray, gilding, mirrors)
- 1939 Music Collection (music boxes, violins, bagpipes, accordions, pianos, musical notes, sheet music, bees, birds)
- 1939 Commedia dell'Arte Collection (18th century Italy, harlequin, masks, satin patchwork, ribbons, bright Italianate colors)
- 1940 Cash and Carry Collection
- 1946 Constellation Wardrobe Collection
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 City 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, Shocking Life, and then lived out a comfortable retirement between her apartment in Paris and house in Tunisia. Elsa Schiaparelli died in her sleep at her home at 22 rue de Berri, Paris in 1973 at the age of 83.
Artist collaborations
Modern art, particularly Dada and Surrealism, provided a significant source of inspiration for Schiaparelli. She worked with a number of contemporary artists to develop her imaginative designs, most famously with Salvador Dalí. From these artistic collaborations, Schiaparelli’s most notable designs were born. In addition to well-documented collaborations such as the shoe hat and the Tears dress, Dalí's influence has been identified in designs such as the lamb-cutlet hat and a 1936 day suit with pockets simulating a chest of drawers. Schiaparelli also had a good relationship with other artists including Leonor Fini, Jean Cocteau, Meret Oppenheim, and Alberto Giacometti. Chanel referred to her as 'that Italian artist who makes clothes'.
In 1937, Schiaparelli collaborated with the artist Jean Cocteau to design a jacket and an evening coat for that year's Autumn collection. The jacket was embroidered with a female figure with one hand caressing the waist of the wearer, and long blonde hair cascading down one sleeve. The coat featured two profiles facing each other, creating the optical illusion of a vase of roses. The embroidering of both garments was executed by the couture embroiderers Lesage.
Dalí
The designs Schiaparelli produced in collaboration with Dalí are among her best known. While she did not formally name her designs, the four main garments from this partnership are popularly known as follows:
Lobster Dress
The 1937 Lobster Dress was a simple white silk evening dress with a crimson waistband featuring a large lobster painted (by Dalí) onto the skirt. From 1934, Dalí had started incorporating lobsters into his work, including New York Dream-Man Finds Lobster in Place of Phone shown in the magazine American Weekly in 1935, and the mixed-media Lobster Telephone (1936). His design for Schiaparelli was interpreted into a fabric print by the leading silk designer Sache. It was famously worn by Wallis Simpson in a series of photographs by Cecil Beaton taken at the Château de Candé shortly before her marriage to Edward VIII.
The Tears Dress, a slender pale blue evening gown printed with a Dalí design of trompe l'oeil rips and tears, worn with a thigh-length veil with "real" tears carefully cut out and lined in pink and magenta, was part of the February 1938 Circus Collection. The print was intended to give the illusion of torn animal flesh, the tears printed to represent fur on the reverse of the fabric and suggest that the dress was made of animal pelts turned inside out. Figures in ripped, skin-tight clothing suggesting flayed flesh appeared in three of Dalí's 1936 paintings, one of which, Necrophiliac Springtime, was owned by Schiaparelli; the other two are The Dream Places A Hand on a Man's Shoulder and Three Young Surrealist Women Holding in Their Arms the Skins of an Orchestra.
Skeleton Dress
Dalí also helped Schiaparelli design the Skeleton Dress for the Circus Collection. It was a stark black crepe dress which used trapunto quilting to create padded ribs, spine, and leg bones.In 1933, Dalí was photographed by his wife Gala Dalí with one of her slippers balanced on his head. In 1937 he sketched designs for a shoe hat for Schiaparelli, which she featured in her Fall-Winter 1937-38 collection. The hat, shaped like a woman's high heeled shoe, had the heel standing straight up and the toe tilted over the wearer's forehead.This hat was worn by Gala Dalí, Schiaparelli herself, and by the Franco-American editor of the French Harper's Bazaar, heiress Daisy Fellowes, who was one of Schiaparelli's best clients.
Jewelry
During the 1930's her jewelry designs were produced by Jean Clemént and Roger Jean-Pierre, who also made up designs for buttons and fasteners. She was also one of the first people to recognize the potential of Jean Schlumberger who she initially employed to create buttons for her in 1936. His jewelry for Schiaparelli, which featured inventive combinations of precious and semi-precious stones proved successful, and at the end of the 1930's, he left to launch his jewelry business in New York.
In addition to Schlumberger, Clemént and Jean-Pierre, Schiaparelli also offered brooches by Alberto Giacometti, fur-lined metal cuffs by Méret Oppenheim, and pieces by Max Boinet, Lina Baretti, and the writer Elsa Triolet. Compared to her unusual couture 1930's pieces, 1940's and 1950's Schiaparelli jewelry tended to be more abstract or floral-themed.
Film Costumes
She famously dressed Mae West for Every Day's a Holiday (1937) using a mannequin based on West's measurements, which inspired the torso bottle for Shocking perfume.
Perfumes
While dressmaking was still a moneymaker, Schiaparelli went into the perfume business. In the end this proved far more profitable. Thousands who would never aspire to a Schiaparelli dress can and do buy bottles of her perfumes.
In 1928, she presented her very first perfume, which she named "S". It was housed in a black & white box. The 1928 ad below from Fairchild magazine, reads: "Mme. Schiaparelli has showed a marked preference for black and white, featuring this combination in her models and wearing it herself. For her perfume she continues the scheme, using a black and white box and a plain crystal bottle outlined in black and white with a stopper of white with a black [S] initial."
Starting with her signature 'S' in 1928, her earliest perfumes, eaux de toilettes and eaux de colognes were created in England by George Robert Parkinson, expert perfume blender who was involved in the perfumeries of Massenet and Jean-Louis Le Court Co. In 1934 Elsa Schiaparelli launched her first three scents globally: Soucis, Salut and Schiap.
Drug and Cosmetic Industry, 1940:
A perfume factory was built in Bois-Colombes, north-west of Paris, and the company created a separate division, named Parfums Schiaparelli was created in 1937.
Combat, 1952:
"G. R. Parkinson, was the director general of Parfums Schiaparelli, Paris, has arrived from London to assume charge of export trade Parfums Schiaparelli, New York. Mr. Parkinson, an Englishman who has lived in Paris for twenty years, was evacuated on the eve of the Nazi occupation. He made his way to Bordeaux and embarked for London with hundreds of other British refugees on a small boat which took four days to reach and English port and which narrowly escaped destruction by bombs."
A perfume factory was built in Bois-Colombes, north-west of Paris, and the company created a separate division, named Parfums Schiaparelli was created in 1937.
Combat, 1952:
"She likes women with changeable moods, those who two, three or four times a day will change their clothes and, thus transformed, will be different in appearance and mood. Why then would she not have sought to create the escape in her dreams? His “Sleeping” is the success. It evokes, in its bottle turned into a Christmas candle, rising from a flared pleated base and presented in a rhodoid cone, the Blue Train, the Riviera, the snowy slopes. And so as not to disappoint these women of changing mood, Mrs. Schiaparelli had the happy idea of bringing together without the same setting her four famous perfumes with names full of fantasy: "Shocking," "Salut," "Roy Soleil" and .."Zut."
Schiaparelli continued to produce perfumes at her factory in Bois-Colombes until 1961.
Roure, one of the pioneers of modern aromatic chemistry, were the first fragrance producer to offer the couture houses facilities for creating and manufacturing perfumes on their behalf, Schiaparelli being one of their first such clients.
Elsa Schiaparelli fragrances were made in collaboration with perfumers Jean Carles and Nathalie Feisthauer.
Schiaparelli's perfumes were noted for their unusual packaging and bottles. Drawing inspiration from the female form to Salvador Dali's surrealistic paintings, these bottles are highly collectible today and command strong prices at auction.
In 1958, the perfume company was acquired by Benesser Pikenz and renamed Schiaparelli Benessere Pikenz. Elsa Schiaparelli in 1971, remained the active head of the far-flung Schiaparelli perfume empire. After 1973 it was renamed Schiaparelli -Pikenz.
Other perfumes included:
- Salut (1934)
- Souci (1934)
- Schiap (1934)
- Sleeping (1938)
- Snuff (for men; 1939)
- Roi Soleil (1946)
- Zut! (1948)
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 Magazine 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 recognized that Chanel had assembled a fortune of some $15 million US dollars 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 colors, 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; Schiaparelli 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 specialty, from a jacket buttoned with silver tambourines to one with silk-covered carrots and cauliflowers.
Information used in this guide was culled from Wikipedia.
I have a souvenir of a Schiaparelli parfum in early 1972 and forgot the name
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