Elsa Schiaparelli's Corporeal Fashion
Elsa Schiaparelli's Corporeal Fashion
Angels of the Anatomy
The Italian fashion designer Elsa Schiaparelli (10 September 1890 – 13 November 1973) is respected and admired as one of the most exciting and innovative minds of the 20th century. Known for Surrealism infused couture and collaborations with various Surrealist/Surrealist-adjacent artists, including Meret Oppenheim, Leonor Fini, and Salvador Dalí, her creations were bold, daring, and offered something her arch-rival Coco Chanel's clothing did not: the possibility of reinvention.
Schiaparelli’s reputation as a designer of wearable avant-garde art precedes her, but she was also classic and functional, beloved by everyone from homemakers to society dames and Hollywood stars to Royalty. (Wallace Simpson wore her Lobster Dress, for example, and Schiaparelli was responsible for eighteen items in her wedding trousseau). Schiap was the first designer to utilise zippers in dresses and day-to-night fashion and make footwear into iconic headpieces. Fascinated by allegories of metamorphosis, primarily as achieved through nature, the belief that clients would experience a sartorial ‘rebirth’ by wearing Schiaparelli's creations is not uncommon. Reinvention was critical to her designs and something very personal to the designer because Schiaparelli was a chrysalis herself.
As a child in Rome, Italy, Elsa Luisa Maria Schiaparelli contended with the knowledge and reminders that her sister was a great beauty. Constantly being told the opposite about her appearance — her childhood photos show a girl who, while not a ‘conventional’ beauty, was hardly unsightly — the constant comparisons impacted deeply and harshly within the young girl's psyche. In her famed, if contested, autobiography Shocking Life (1954), Schiaparelli (always writing in the third person) echoes similar sentiments, although in her own inimitable way. ‘She was always being told that she was as ugly as her sister was beautiful,’ she begins. ‘So Schiap [sic], believing that this was really so, thought up ways of beautifying herself.’ She then goes on to relay the unconventional methods her younger self would resort to in a bid to alter her physicality, including an occasion when she inserted seeds up her nose as a means of encouraging flowers to grow 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.
While ‘for Schiap, the chief disappointment was that no flowers grew to turn her into a beauty,’ Schiaparelli's designs would not fail. While the story’s authenticity has been debated, her fascination with nature’s ability for transformation later manifested in Schiap’s Pagan Collection (1938), a capsule range featuring butterflies, insects, and a celebration of all things within the natural world.
Schiaparelli’s insecurities around her appearance also influenced her Zodiac Collection (also 1938), which I consider her most personal legacy. As a child, she intensely disliked the cluster of moles on her left cheek until her favourite Uncle (the astronomer Giovanni Schiaparelli, who became known for discovering the water canals on Mars) informed her that they resembled the Ursa Major constellation. Due to this comment, the constellation became her very own symbol of luck. She had a brooch made in the constellation’s likeness and wore it constantly.
When the moment came for her to design jewellery, she had a brooch made to resemble that same constellation, with the stars pointed out in diamonds. She wore it constantly. Not more than five feet tall, with a small boned trim figure, she would assess her physical assets dispassionately, looking for clothes that were distinctive enough to mirror her inner state of mind and boost her self confidence.
This new perspective enabled Schiaparelli to see beauty in something that she had previously considered less than desirable. She latched onto this knowledge and became fascinated by the themes of physical transformation—particularly the idea that women could physically transform themselves by choosing a well-made garment, accessory, or piece of jewellery.
While I can talk and write forever about both the Zodiac and Pagan collections and their power of transformation, I am also interested in how Schiaparelli confronted mortality through what we wear on our bodies and how she confronted ideas surrounding mortality and transcendence of the physical body. Her Skeleton Dress of 1938 is the prime example of this, a deceptively simple yet incredibly effective masterwork providing the illusion of flesh and bone.
One of her best-known and provocative designs made in collaboration with Dalí, Skeleton Dress, toys with assumptions of the body. What should be a dress reveal, and what should a dress conceal? How much is too much exposure? A three-dimensional internal body structure that integrates Dalí's fascination with corporeality, the one-piece black dress, visually alike both front and back, closed with plastic zips on both the shoulder seams and right side of the body. Built-in padding emphasises and provides the illusion of the wearer's ribs and rib cage. The dress challenged and broke all the rules; it is a sartorial work of art that functions as faux anatomy.
Another artist who toyed with depictions of anatomy was Leonor Fini, who was especially fascinated by bones as relics and ideas surrounding corporeal beauty. When talking about her painting L'Ange de l'anatomie (The Angel of Anatomy), Fini beautifully described the skeletal structure by saying, ‘people like to forget that they are flesh and bones underneath. But the colours are wonderful.’ Fini then went on to describe how the painting is not any gender but represents everyone. Describes her death positive angel, Fini continues,
My painting is male and female, man and woman in one, wanting a state of the idea as the angel. How do we reach this ideal state – that would be wonderful to know. But people merely find the image morbid. People do not like to be reminded about what lies beneath.
The bones of the Skeleton Dress are rendered outside of the fabric; they appear tactile but almost marble in appearance and make the body statuesque. Like Fini’s angel, both serve as powerful reminders of what lies beneath.
To quote the Surrealist André Masson, ‘nature is also secret forces, invisible violence, germinations, metamorphoses, good and bad omens, death, blood, the marvels of night and bad dreams.’ Schiaparelli's story is one of rebirth, as her clothes allowed wearers to inhabit nature and transcend mortal realms to transgress through the means of materiality. Most significantly, she demonstrates how garments function to reinvent their wearer by signalling the death of their old self and the rebirth of the new.
Schiaparelli 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, in fact, was her skill at transforming women from their supposed ugly duckling states that I must relay and conclude with the following lovely 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.’
You’ve guessed it: she was staring at her self in the mirror.
Love Letters During A Nightmare is a series of newsletters by me, Sabina Stent, about things I adore. It’s currently free (for now), but if you enjoyed reading and would like to subscribe, please do! Also, if you enjoyed and would care to buy me a coffee/contribute to my research fund, you can do so via my Ko-Fi Page (I may, in time, eventually move things over to Patreon, but I will keep you posted). Thank you for reading.