Tonight the 97th Academy Awards will take place. It marks the starriest night in film and heralds the grand finale of cinema’s awards season. While many celebrities have donned Schiaparelli in recent years, I have been thinking about what links couture Schiaparelli - and by that I mean Elsa Schiaparelli herself - to the awards ceremony. While the current iteration of the House of Schiaparelli continues to outfit a variety of names for various glamorous occasions, the great Surrealist Couturier never dressed anyone for the Oscars (not as far as I am aware anyway). However, she did dress various Hollywood stars in their everyday lives.
There’s a lovely extract in Merle Secrest’s Elsa Schiaparelli: A Biography (Penguin, 2015), where Schiap’s assistant Bettina Bergery is quoted as saying:
The prettiest and neatest of all the Hollywood stars…is little Norma Shearer. All the girls in the shop love Claudette Colbert — Merle Oberon and her waves of perfume that make them faint — Katharine Hepburn choosing the things that all American girls always buy in the boutique — Lauren Bacall with her aristocratic Polish face and her hoarse gutter voice. How Garbo was the best-dressed person at your last year’s cocktail party—how small she looked and how she never stopped talking…and how Ginger Rogers, a day after an airplane [sic] from New York danced all night…
One star not mentioned in the paragraph above but also mentioned on the same page is Marlene Dietrich. In book Bergery is quoted as saying, “Marlene Dietrich tried on hats, crossing her celebrated legs and smoking a cigarette exactly as she does in a film, but no one has ever done in real life before [sic].”
Dietrich was only nominated for an Oscar once, in 1931, for her performance in Josef von Sternberg’s Morocco (1930). It was Dietrich’s first English speaking role and the second of her six collaborations with the director. Travis Banton was the uncredited costume designer on Morocco - the “uncredited” part being something Schiaparelli knew all too well: when Marcel Vertes picked up the Best Costume Design Oscar for John Huston’s Moulin Rouge (1952), Schiaparelli - who had designed Zsa Zsa Gabor’s unforgettable gowns - received none of the acclaim or adulation (more on this another day).
Dietrich can be seen wearing Schiaparelli twice: the first was when she was pictured wearing the gorgeous midnight blue evening jacket from Schiap’s 1938 Zodiac Collection (date unknown), and the second was in Paris, 1944, when Lee Miller photographed her wearing a Schiaparelli evening coat.
The Lee Miller Archive on Instagram shared a similar sentiment.
I wonder how many stars will wear Schiaparelli tonight?