The middle of Autumn is a perfect opportunity to share this piece from my files/archive on Elsa Schiaparelli’s Pagan Collection (adapted from various lectures I have given on this topic over the years).
In 1938, Elsa Schiaparelli unveiled her Pagan Collection. Inspired by mythology, Botticelli’s paintings Primavera and The Birth of Venus, and Ovid’s epic Latin poetic work Metamorphoses or ‘The Books of Transformation,’ one advertisement described the collection as honing the power of ‘Pagan Charm’ and ‘radiating the pagan joy of living’. Seventy models presented the outfits and accessories in a manner echoing the paintings — dresses detailed with flowers, necklaces with insects, embroidered and appliquéd leaves and wildflowers adorned slim-fitted evening gowns. Jackets and coats included owl and caterpillar plastic buttons, a lavender gown emulated the pinks and cornflowers painted by Botticelli, while apple blossoms and wild strawberries decorated a half pink, half yellow evening dress.
Schiap’s intentions for the collection were metamorphoses and transformation. However, this was not necessarily a unique idea; it is a subject we repeatedly see in Surrealism in various artworks and significant to multiple female artists. Author Whitney Chadwick has noted that ‘all Surrealist visions of women, from the femme-enfant to the sorceress, converge in the image of the fairy Melusine’, who identifies the figure of woman with the mysterious forces and regenerative powers of nature, the source of the Surrealist myth of metamorphosis.
Meret Oppenheim’s connection started from birth: named after the Meretelein or ‘Little Meret’ of Gottfried Keller’s 1855 novel Green Henry, a story ‘based on the life of an actual eighteenth-century child whose unconventionality deemed her a witch’ assisted to fashion Oppenheim’s earliest self-image as a ‘child of nature’.
“Woman is close to earth,” Oppenheim remarked in 1973. “One could imagine that the first state was matriarchal…And the big old snake Nature in the Tree of Knowledge told Eve to give the apple to Adam (she eats too!). The old snake Nature wanted him to take the way of intellectual development. Eve has been damned, and the snake with her — by men.”
Eileen Agar would combine classical references with mythical animals and lush vegetation. Meanwhile, Ithell Colquhoun ‘transformed this identification of woman’s creative powers with those of generative nature into an intuitive alchemy of natural forms. Her paintings, based on automatic process, and her writings, which use natural forms as a starting point for divinatory explorations, make a strong argument for the woman artist’s tendency to — in the words of Chadwick ‘link the unconscious with the occult nature rather than with latent sexual desire’.
The same year as the Pagan Collection, 1938, Andre Breton wrote L’Union Libre, a work where he lyrically extols the parts of a woman’s body as herbs, trees, and plants. This identification of woman and nature is, as Xavière Gauthier points out in 1931’s Surréalisme et Sexualité, a theme which he and other Surrealist poets constantly return as they compared women, specifically their sexual organs, to flowers. In ‘André Masson et la nature’, he states, “…nature is also secret forces, invisible violence, germinations, metamorphoses, good and bad omens, death, blood, the marvels of night and bad dreams”. (As we know, nature is protection as well as destruction).
Schiaparelli grew up in Palazzo Corsini, a sprawling Roman mansion with ‘gilding, tapestries, frescoes’, and ‘vaulted ceilings depicting Graeco-Roman mythology — all contributed to the serene atmosphere of history and enlightenment’. Its holdings reflected similarly broad interests: everything from botany and Orientalia to architecture, mathematics, astrological, alchemical, and hermetic texts.In her famed, if contested, 1954 autobiography Shocking Life!, Schiaparelli (always writing in the third person) reflects: ‘She was always being told that she was as ugly as her sister was beautiful. So Schiap [sic], believing that this was really so, thought up ways of beautifying herself’. She relays the anecdote in her biography of sticking seeds up her nose so that flowers would grow all over her face:
To have a face covered in flowers like a heavenly garden would indeed be a wonderful thing! And if she could make flowers sprout all over her face, she would be the only woman of her kind in the whole world. Nasturtiums, daisies, morning glories all in full bloom! With some difficulty she obtained seeds from the gardener, and these she planted in her throat, ears, mouth. She felt they ought to grow faster on her warm body than in the soil outside. Thus she sat waiting for the result.
Yet, ‘for Schiap the chief disappointment was that no flowers grew to turn her into a beauty’.
This childhood anecdote — tall tale or truth, who can say — feeds into a memorable piece of Surrealist performance art. In 1936, at the Surrealist’s ‘Phantom of Sex Appeal Event,’ the artist Sheila Legge walked into Trafalgar Square with her face covered in flowers. (This same year Salvador Dalí unveiled his painting Three Young Surrealist Women Holding in Their Arms the Skins of an Orchestra). The image of Legge would appear on the cover of the International Surrealist Bulletin, no. 4.
Schiap loved the idea of women ‘blossoming’ and transforming during their lifetime, and she also loved butterflies. She first used a butterfly motif in 1937’s summer collection with a print that could very well have taken inspiration from Man Ray's early 1930s photographs of butterflies. As the curator Dilys Blum said, ‘for the Surrealists butterflies symbolised metamorphosis, the evolution from ugliness to beauty.’ Schiap favoured butterflies because they signified transformation and freedom — both Max Ernst and Man Ray were also fascinated with symbolic representations of metamorphosis.
Of the Pagan Collection, Blum noted how ‘women were literally transformed into butterflies.’ (Schiap incorporated butterflies, fruits and leaves on hats, shoes, bags, gloves and even hair clips. She continues, ' Butterflies fluttered onto printed dresses and alighted on hats and gloves. The collection included several butterfly printed evening gowns that were worn with “cage” coats of coarse wide mesh – the butterfly caught in a net transformed into the liberated woman imprisoned.’
As well as the dresses, the accessories were hugely popular. Schiap designed three-dimensional garlands by incorporating plastic mouldings into the floral and leaf embroideries and acorn necklaces. However, her insect necklace was the talk of the collection.
'Owned by Schiap aficionado Millicent Rogers, it was made from glasslike transparent Rhodoid (cellulose acetate) and set with gold or brightly coloured insects, and made to be worn with a low collared evening gown. I like it alongside with this lovely purple design, whose flowers are very similar to the necklace.'
The Pagan collection proved so successful that department stories started Schiaparelli-inspired merchandise. Bonwit Teller, for example, produced a line of “Field and Forest” jewellery, which featured ‘blown-glass grapes and enamel and glass flowers that were displayed in the store window against backgrounds reminiscent of Botticelli paintings’.
Schiap once told an interviewer, “you must dress for your self, the self you wish to show the world, not only friends who know you well, but to co-workers and casual acquaintances who are appraising you constantly.” So successful was her ability to transform women from their supposed ugly duckling states that I must relay and conclude with the following anecdote:
As she mounted a staircase surrounded by mirrors, Schiaparelli noticed in the reflection a chic woman ‘who reminded her of Paris’ in the crowd of otherwise shabby people:
“There,” Elsa said to her, “at last a smart looking woman.”
“Heavens!” exclaimed Jerome [Zerbe, the American photographer], “but don’t you recognise yourself?”
A brilliant post bringing so many threads together from fashion and surrealist art. And it's so good to see you using Chadwick's work in new ways: she really is still the best all-round source for women and surrealism even after so long. Her book came out in 1985, in case people don't know. I assume it's still in print?
It is fascinating to see the same motifs occurring across 'high' and 'low' art. When I was doing my doctoral research on the poet H.D. (Hilda Doolittle), who wrote some of the earliest feminist versions of Greek myths, I remember finding magazine sources where 'goddesses' were all the rage in the 1930s fashion pages. Now I see that they were almost certainly inspired by Schiaparelli and, indirectly, surrealism.
Keep up the great work: I feel like you are doing my research for me, Sabrina, and I can just go on playing around and writing my weird stuff on surrealist women's art!