Some clothes are discreetly perfect and leave you to admire in silence. Schiaparelli’s clothes are conversation pieces. They start people talking, and they speak for themselves in an assertively ingenious language of trompe l’oeil jokes, provocative pockets, shapeshifting zips, reversible layers and glitteringly embroidered allusions. You can tell the Schiaparelli dress at a party: it’s the one with a lobster printed on the front. The Schiaparelli gloves are the ones in bright green doeskin with gold fins on the fingers, bizarrely suggestive of dragons. They ought to look ridiculous; instead they exude a superbly sinister appeal.
Schiaparelli’s life story, engagingly told here by the American biographer Meryle Secrest (whose previous subjects include Bernard Berenson and Salvador Dalí), appears as improbable and fascinating as her clothes. She had a habit of doing things suddenly. In her early 20s, on the run from the Italian family she loathed, she attended a theosophy lecture in London and agreed next morning to marry the lecturer. Had she paused, she might have worked out that he was a conman about to be deported for fraudulent palm-reading, but off she went to a shady life between addresses in the US, assistant to a charlatan hypnotist. Photographed with a crystal ball circa 1918, she did not look like the next haute couture sensation.
Unfazed, turning every obstacle into an opportunity, she extricated herself and started again in Paris, where Paul Poiret noticed the way she improvised a dress. In 1927 she made jumpers with trompe l’oeil scarves, and within the year, she owned a major business. By 1932, La Schiap was employing 400 staff across eight ateliers, planning the launch of Schiaparelli Inc in America, and being classed in Vogue as one of the great designers of all time.
How was it possible? People clearly adored her. She won and retained the loyalty of a brilliant majordomo, Bettina Shaw Jones. “She never turned down a party in her life”, and every hostess wanted her at theirs. Rarely delayed by bouts of thoughtfulness or empathy, she could be ruthless and left casualties along the way. Secrest traces the sad story of her daughter, Gogo, paralysed by polio and nicknamed for the gurgling noise she made as a toddler to a mother who was always “going”. But the magnetism with which Schiaparelli lured clients was personal as well as sartorial, and so, through the 1920s and 30s, the orders came in, from Nancy Cunard (who left Chanel for her), Daisy Fellowes, Wallis Simpson and Marie-Laure de Noailles.
It was the age of Hollywood. Schiaparelli found a “plain-looking girl” in the salon, who turned out to be Katherine Hepburn. When she launched her perfume Shocking Pink, she made a bottle the shape of Mae West. It was the age of the Bright Young People, when socialites loved to be “amusing”, when extravagant stunts became an art form, and insouciance was the demeanour du jour. Jean Patou painted the trees for his Silver Party; Elsie de Wolfe replied with a ball where everything was gold. “Masked parties, Savage parties, Victorian parties, Greek parties”: Evelyn Waugh began to find it sickening, but Schiaparelli had less guilt, and less of a hangover. She was working by 8am each morning, busy with a circus-themed fabric or an upside-down shoe, tirelessly inventing to schedule. She responded to a culture of transience by making intricate things that would last.
The interest in the unconscious and the uncanny that had led her to marry a palm-reader now led to more fruitful collaborations, especially with Dalí and Cocteau. One may doubt her self-declared status as a surrealist artist in her own right – but then just look at the way she deploys a bark-textured fabric so that a column dress very subtly turns into a tree.
A dreamer, myth-maker and magician, she also liked to emphasise the practicality of her clothes. They were made for the modern action woman who looked fabulous walking fast down the Rue de la Paix calling out instructions to left and right. We are not, of course, talking about a raincoat and flats. There was a flexible wraparound dress (tied in six baffling stages), a cunning little jacket that became a headpiece at short notice, a speakeasy dress with a hidden pocket the size of a hipflask. The quick-witted costumes came with a liberating ethos: Schiaparelli’s aim was always that an outfit should empower a woman rather than constrain her. Few social histories would mention even in a footnote that she made decorated jackets fashionable as eveningwear; it is a small thing to have saved the rich from shivering. Yet who can say how conversations at dinner ran differently when women were less conscious of their chests than their words?
Somehow (and Secrest takes pains to discover exactly how), Schiaparelli contrived to be still drinking champagne and designing clothes in 1941. She wanted to get on with her next collection, but she did it at a cost. Her friends were Vichy officials and she took the protection they offered. Both Charles de Gaulle and the FBI had spies on her. The House of Schiaparelli never recovered from the war. Partly it was 1950s conformity that brought it down, epitomised by Dior’s ultra-feminine New Look. Certainly it was also the taint of collaboration. As she closed the huge panelled doors on the Place Vendôme in 1954, Elsa published Shocking Life, a third-person narrative of herself, full of signs and symbols, a book of legends. She described an unhappy girl who planted seeds in her ears, hoping that beautiful flowers would grow over her face. She wrote about how Schiap became a couturier by accident and then designed for the world. She intended her clothes and their stories to be remembered. And so they should.
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