Elsa Schiaparelli was many things, but boring wasn’t one of them. I can confirm this having spent the past few weeks rereading Elsa Schiaparelli’s memoirs (which oddly are written in the third person, as are Christian Dior’s), and combing through archives and biographies to assemble a timeline of some of her many achievements in fashion before “Shocking! The Surreal World of Elsa Schiaparelli” opens on July 6 at the Musée des Arts Décoratifs in Paris. My editor, Nicole Phelps, asked me what I learned in the process.
Well, the answer would be a lot, but what surprised me was biographer Palmer White’s assertion that “after her arrival at Place Vendome [in 1935] one of Elsa’s most spectacular innovations was to give each collection a theme”—something we take for granted in fashion today. I’d never stopped to think about the origins of that tradition. Viewers, consumers, and collectors benefit from Schiaparelli’s way of conceiving and organizing shows around fantastical themes like the circus, the commedia dell’arte, astrology, etc. and it seems these frameworks encouraged the designer’s creativity as well.
“Schiaparelli was the only house that presented its mannequins completely dressed from head to foot, with hat, gloves, scarf, jewelry, shoes, and carrying an umbrella and a handbag,” White reports. “In many cases Elsa now refused to sell the elements of a ‘number’: you had to take the entire ensemble or nothing.” Which means we need to add the “total look” concept to the list of Schiaparelli innovations, too. Read about them all here.
