Shocked: My Mother, Schiaparelli, and Me

by Patricia Volk

  “What’s that?” she said.

  “I don’t know. What do they buy?”

  “They wear the same thing you wear, dear.”

  I was trying to figure out what men liked. I suspected they cared deeply about visual cues and wanted to get it right. I wound up with waist-high opaque. Larry was disappointed. So for Artie I got see-through red. He wanted me to look like a schoolgirl.

  “When you take off your clothes, your personality also undresses and you become quite a different person—more true to yourself and to your real character, more conscious, sometimes more cruel,” Schiap writes. I imagine she wears what my grandmothers wear, the French version. That is, until 1940, when it’s clear war’s inevitable and the Paris of haute luxury vanishes. Men head for the front. Women take their jobs. Servants become scarce. Cloth, food and gas are rationed. These three shortages pervade every aspect of French life. Paris is a city hospitable to bicycles but suddenly eleven million are registered, three times more than the year before. Out of necessity, the jackets in her Cash and Carry Collection have enormous pockets a woman can load with her shopping while keeping her hands free to steer. Simultaneously Schiap reinvents the panty. If the lady of the house must launder her lingerie herself, dress quickly and ride her bike to get places, underpants need to be less complicated and time-consuming. Schiap gets rid of the pleats, length, volume and silk. Because food is scarce, she replaces buttons with elastic at the waist. She uses fabrics that are wrinkle-free and drip-dry. For the first time, French undies don’t need to be ironed. They feel good on a bike. Reading this I think, wasn’t she a genius to understand that war changes everything, even underpants.

  Sometimes on eBay, a pair of Schiaparelli panties turns up. They’re what today we call “tap panties.” They don’t stop at the crease where the thigh meets the pelvis. They look a bit like shorts from vintage girlie calendars, that length. But the fabric is translucent. And something special is going on, something Schiap: chevrons of drip-drip lace or contrasting trim. It’s the crotch that dates them. It was thought a woman needed ventilation, that she had to “breathe.” The crotch hangs like a hammock. Tampax, invented by Dr. Earle Haas and patented three years before the war, was still looked upon as potentially life-threatening.

  My grandmothers’ corsets were made of whalebone, bombazine and elastic. (illustration credit 9.1)

  Wartime panties with a double nylon crotch panel by Schiaparelli. (illustration credit 9.2)

  chapter ten

  Gainful Employment

  If I have become what I am, I owe it to two distinct things—poverty and Paris. Poverty forced me to work, and Paris gave me a liking for it and courage.

  —Elsa Schiaparelli

  If it weren’t for Jo Ann, I’d have been a lawyer.

  —Audrey Volk

  Men hold doors and pull out chairs. They carry luggage. In restaurants, after a brief consultation—“Have you decided what you’d care for?”—men do the ordering:

  “My wife would like the sweetbreads and the sole.”

  They park the car, change chandelier bulbs and tip. They open the wine at home and give the nod to sommeliers in restaurants. They sharpen the knives and carve the roast. Men support their families. They work.

  Women work too, but only if they work beside their husbands. Women don’t have careers unless they’re in show business like Aunt Honey. In the greater world, they can also be teachers, nurses, speech pathologists or, bottom line, salesladies like Aunt Gertie, whose husband gambled away their savings then died of pneumonia.

  It is a bona fide tragedy for an adult woman to live without a man, although some poor souls have no choice. A woman who lives without a man—who never married, who is widowed or divorced—is spoken of with pity:

  “What a shame. How tragic. She has nobody.”

  “I was pre-law,” Audrey tells my sister. “Then I got pregnant with you.”

  Jo Ann says nothing even though she went back to school after her kids were born. She raised three while simultaneously getting a master’s in social work, setting up practice and patenting four inventions. It doesn’t matter to Jo there’s a hole in Audrey’s logic. Audrey believes her myth. Whether it’s true or not, Audrey thinks it’s true and that’s enough to make Jo the culprit. My sister has diminished her own mother’s life by virtue of existing. Because Jo Ann was born, Audrey didn’t go to law school. Instead, our mother is the charming hostess of Morgen’s West Restaurant, where she is much admired for her style and refinement. She mans the velvet rope, smiling, gracious, exquisitely dressed. Adversity in Audrey’s universe takes the form of her firstborn. The unwanted pregnancy that shaped her life. My sister knows this is not fair. That doesn’t affect how bad she feels.

  Audrey works for free. Working for free has its compensations. She sees Cecil for two and a half hours every day. She’s got him to herself until the first customers swing through the doors. Tables will turn over three times before the line begins to wither. But until what I think of as Showtime!, before the wild rumpus starts, Audrey and Cecil sip coffee at a table for two, alone together in a sea of white tablecloths and 230 empty chairs. For twenty minutes, the charming, handsome man everyone wants a piece of is hers. And then it’s lunch. Two hours of mania. Top models swan in on the arms of proud designers. Pigeon-breasted manufacturers proudly tap their hankies. Hatcheck girls glow and do a brisk business in cigars and breath purifiers called Choward’s Violet. Everybody knows everybody. Everybody checks everybody out. Lunch is party time, Morgen’s is packed—a “garment center hang-out,” Douglas Martin calls it in The New York Times, “… a beehive of designers, tycoons, models and hangers-on who waited with showy impatience behind a red velvet rope until a table was open.” Working the bronze hook of that red rope, Audrey keeps her eye on everything and everyone, including Dad, who is only too happy to join customers at the bar.

  “Did Mom ever get paid?” I ask Aunt Barbara, who was in charge of the rope at Morgen’s East.

  “We didn’t work for money, Patty,” she says.

  Not that Audrey wants for anything. It may be she prefers being taken care of. Audrey does not aspire to enormous wealth. When I ask, “Are we rich?” she answers, “We’re comfortable.” She buys what she wants but she isn’t reckless. Eventually though, the adjustment to inflation, the new price of certain things, baffles:

  “What? Twelve dollars for a tossed salad?”

  “Two hundred dollars for an orchestra seat?”

  “You spent what on those shoes?”

  And:

  “You gave the delivery boy ten dollars, Patty?”

  “Yes, Ma. In Nigeria, he was a brain surgeon.”

  “Better in your pocket than his.”

  One of Audrey’s favorite things to do is take everyone out for a Ruth’s Chris Steak House dinner on her American Express points. She smiles like she’s getting away with murder, giddy at the thought of it, steaks for free.

  In 1920, Schiap lives on the two cheapest foods you can buy in New York: oysters and ice cream. Her dowry is gone. She’s broke. After five miserable years of marriage, de Kerlor has left her. She is twenty-nine when she gives birth alone. Because the baby gurgles, Schiap nicknames her “Gogo.” Countess Maria Luisa Yvonne Radha de Wendt de Kerlor sleeps in an orange crate in a rented room in Greenwich Village. I read about Schiap’s “gnawing, black hunger” and don’t understand. Her childhood is so much like mine—an intact family, lessons, books, museums, loving caretakers—and she’s starving?

  When my father increases my allowance to a dollar, I start saving.

  Patty’s Budget

  45 cents—ham sandwich at Schrafft’s

  5 cents—Coke

  10 cents—tip

  25 cents—movie

  5 cents—Jujubes

  I put 10 cents away every week. When I see my grandfather, he reaches into his pocket, stirs his change, and says, “Are you broke?”

  “No,” I can honestly say.

 
To help her impoverished daughter, Signora Schiaparelli ships her late husband’s prized gold-coin collection to New York. Schiap sells it and stretches the proceeds as long as she can. But then she is moneyless again until, by chance, she has a bit of pure luck: “One night I went for a walk and a piece of paper fluttered at my feet. I picked it up. It was a twenty dollar bill.” She treats herself to a steak dinner and the next day, with what’s left of the twenty, buys “two small objects” in a pawnbroker’s shop downtown. She sells them uptown for a profit. She chops off her hair and sets out to find work. But women of her class are not trained to do anything. Selling imported French dresses for a friend, Schiap discovers that rich New York women prefer sailing to Paris to shop for their clothes. She grabs whatever job is offered—reading tickertapes on Wall Street, typing letters for a Russian relief fund. Stieglitz gets her stand-in work on a movie project in New Jersey. All day Schiap poses under blazing lights until she goes temporarily blind.

  And then she gets lucky a second time: A friend invites her to Paris. The woman wants a quick French divorce and Schiap is fluent in French. In Paris, Schiap decides she’d like a divorce too. To pay for it, she becomes a “picker,” shopping Paris flea markets for an antiques dealer. Schiap has “an eye.” Since she can’t afford a dressmaker and she can’t sew, she cobbles her clothes, “my head full of wild ideas.” She finesses what she can’t engineer under shawls, scarves and fur. She works up sketches and makes appointments with couturiers. At the House of Maggy Rouff, she is told, “You would do better to plant potatoes than to try to make dresses. You have no talent or métier.”

  What is it about Elsa Schiaparelli? Strangers have faith in her. They can’t wait to help her. In 1925, a wealthy American admires Schiap’s style and backs her in a tiny dress shop, “Madame Lambal,” on rue Saint-Honoré. The press raves about Schiap’s “individuality.” Soon she has her own place thanks to a silent partner. She insists Monsieur Kahn set her up on the most fashionable street in the world. At 4, rue de la Paix the attic is so small, no chairs or changing rooms can fit. The heat doesn’t work. A terrier, brought in to keep the rats at bay, is terrified of rats. Customers must climb six flights of stairs. They’re happy to.

  And then one day, walking down the rue de l’Université, Schiap notices a woman wearing a sweater knit in a look she calls “steady.” She tracks down the knitter. An Armenian refugee named Aroosiag Mikaelian explains how the complicated stitch, using two different colors of wool, works.

  “If I make a design will you try to copy it?” Schiap asks.

  “Mike” agrees to try.

  “So I draw a large butterfly bow in front, like a scarf round the neck—the primitive drawing of a child in prehistoric times. The poor darling, not at all disturbed by such a mad idea, struggled to work it out. Indeed, this was something I was to discover throughout my career, that people would always follow my ideas enthusiastically, and try without discussion to do what I told them.” (Schiap’s friend Dalí calls this effect “paranoiac delirium.” He too believes he can bend people to his will and make them act out his ideas.)

  Schiap folds her love of Surrealism into the design.

  The pullover sports an ecru butterfly bow and deep cuffs knitted right into the sweater.

  On her third try, Mike gets it right.

  What happens next makes Schiaparelli world-famous: She’s invited to a fashion luncheon for American buyers at the Ritz. She times herself to get there late. Everyone is already seated when Schiap makes her entrance in the sweater. There is a collective gasp as she wends her way to her table. Lord & Taylor orders forty on the spot. American Vogue calls the surreal sweater “an artistic masterpiece.” The House of Schiaparelli is launched. A crew of Armenian knitters knit for Schiap full-time. The sweaters touch a nerve. What is in the air for art is in the air for fashion.

  Schiap designs more surreal sweaters with trompe-l’oeil designs—men’s ties, crossword puzzles, tattoos—knitted into them. She makes a hat with the crenellations of a brain. She collaborates with Dalí on La Lanterne, an evening bag that has a tiny battery-operated street lamp on the outside. She asks the artist Jean Dunand to adopt an airbrush technique from the automobile industry and paint surreal folds on a white evening gown. Visiting Copenhagen, Schiap notices women in the fish market wear hats made out of newspapers. She pastes together a collage of her newspaper reviews, has it printed on silk, then makes shirts and scarves out of it. She introduces the first jumpsuit, the wrap dress and paper clothes. During the day, for work, her Transformable Dress grazes the knees. For evening, a ribbon is pulled and the dress descends into a floor-length evening gown. She invents foldable eyeglasses and wins patent after patent. Schiap is the first designer to have people pay to publicize her name. In 1929, she buys out Monsieur Kahn and becomes the sole owner of “Schiaparelli.” (Chanel will never own more than 20 percent of “Chanel.”) Her umbrellas slip into scabbards. Her gloves have gold talons. She designs costumes for thirty movies and twenty-nine plays. Joan Crawford falls for Schiap’s tray shoulders. Marlene Dietrich sprouts her black rooster “wings.” Vogue calls Schiap a “clothes carpenter.” Jean Cocteau says she is “a young demon who tempts women, who leads the mad carnival in a burst of laughter.” He refers to her atelier as “a devil’s laboratory.” Harper’s Bazaar calls the House of Schiaparelli “The House of Ideas.” She opens a tiny shop next to 21, place Vendôme. She invents the word “boutique” from the French word bouticle, a store on the first floor of a business establishment. For the first time, French women can buy clothes on the spot, prêt-à-porter, and not wait for them to be custom-made. Janet Flanner (the American “Letter from Paris” correspondent known as “Genet”) profiles Schiap in The New Yorker: “A dress from Schiaparelli ranks like a modern canvas.”

  She brings new materials to couture: latex, straw, rubber, cork, mattress ticking, Rhodophane. She designs the first shoulder bag for women, the Bandolier, based on a French railway guard’s bag. Time magazine says, “Mme. Schiaparelli is the one to whom the word ‘genius’ is applied most often.” Dresses flaunt her “Telegram Print” with a message: ALL IS WELL. MOTHER-IN-LAW IN TERRIBLE SHAPE. After King Edward abdicates the throne so he can marry the twice-divorced Wallis Simpson, Mrs. Simpson buys eighteen Schiaparellis for her honeymoon, including the Lobster Dress, painted by Dalí. The dress is a phallic joke. The predatory claws fall between the legs. The Duchess of Windsor doesn’t get it. She believes the dress will show the world she has a sense of humor.

  By 1934, Schiap is the most famous couturier in the world. My dazzling mother could have been anything. What stopped her? Cecil owns a restaurant, holds several patents, and sculpts and paints on the side. Jo has a busy practice and she’s an inventor too. I’m a writer. Once when the four of us are having dinner together, Audrey says: “You know what my job is here? You know what is expected?”

  We wait for her answer.

  She looks at each of us, going from Cecil to Jo Ann to me. Then she claps.

  The sweater that launched the House of Schiaparelli. (illustration credit 10.1)

  Wallis Simpson in the Lobster Dress. She didn’t get the joke. (illustration credit 10.2)

  Dad believed his patent for the double-sided garbage-can brush was stolen by the car wash industry. (illustration credit 10.3)

  The Five Vices by Cecil Sussman Volk. (One vice was painted over.)

  chapter eleven

  The Vicissitudes of Beauty

  There are only two aunts and one uncle remaining and I am now a grandmother of five but at any gathering of the clan, I can still hear the soft tones of my elders saying, “Look at her.”

  —Audrey Volk (journal entry)

  To have a face covered with 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.

  —Elsa Schiaparelli

  A man stops Audrey in the playground:

 
“Excuse, please?”

  Vuk Vuchinich, the Time magazine cover artist, is looking for faces.

  “Please, miss. You may to let me draw you, yes?”

  Audrey’s used to it. On vacations, the hotel’s portrait artist cajoles her into sitting for free. Guests hover in the lobby as my mother is immortalized in Las Brisas, the Ocean Club and Mauna Kea. Photos are turned into paintings. Paintings are transferred to porcelain.

  “She looks just like Lana Turner!” people say.

  The Lana Turner opposition bristles. “She most certainly does not! She’s the spitting image of Grace Kelly.”

  They take sides.

  Every woman who isn’t beautiful wonders at some moment in her life what life would have been like had she been beautiful. I have friends who never had to work. I call their existence “The Curse of Inherited Wealth.” Extreme beauty is inherited wealth. But what chance does a beautiful woman have? To be constantly admired for something she can’t take credit for, something that every day disappears a little bit more. Yet beauty matters. According to Audrey, beauty is a woman’s greatest asset, the most valuable thing a woman can have. She makes this clear. After running into an acquaintance, as soon as she’s out of earshot, Audrey comments first on how that person looks:

  “She used to be so pretty.”

  “Poor thing. You can’t hide that kind of skin.”

  And the one that terrifies: “Tsk, tsk. Isn’t it a shame? She’s lost her looks.”

  Every September, when she escorts me on the opening day of school, I check, panicky, to make sure my mother is the youngest and most beautiful. She is.