Elsa Schiaparelli

by Meryle Secrest

  As Schiaparelli tells it, she continued to take her protests against her parents farther and farther afield. The year she started school, 1896, marked a period of mass rioting in large cities throughout Italy over worsening economic conditions and the rising price of bread. Rome was one of them. One fateful afternoon schoolchildren were out in the Piazza Venezia engaged in planting trees when there was a massive uprising. Some children were actually trampled to death and many more were wounded. Rather than being frightened, the six-year-old Schiaparelli later claimed she was simply curious and excited. The shouting crowds were surging into the Piazza del Quirinale and demonstrating in front of the royal palace. Elsa joined the throng, jumping, shouting, and waving her arms, having a wonderful time. Meanwhile, her parents reported to the police that she had disappeared. Finally, in the small hours, she decided to come home. She called a taxi, or that century’s equivalent, a horse and carriage. Was she tired, hungry, repentant? Did she throw herself into her mother’s waiting arms? Not a bit of it. She coolly said, “Please, Papa, will you pay the cab?”

  There are no competing accounts, and at this date no witnesses, but this can only be sheer invention. Wealthy children in those days did not run around town without adults, and the idea of a six-year-old hiring a cab at two or three in the morning can be dismissed out of hand. The same is true of another “stunt” she recounts: since she hated piano lessons, she feigned hysterics with such conviction that the lessons stopped. It is also unlikely that, when obliged to go to bed early one night because some grown-ups were coming to dinner, she concocted a terrible revenge. “I collected with great patience and skill a number of fleas which I put into a jar.” She quietly hid under the dining room table until the guests were seated and the meal was being served. Then she let out the fleas and caused havoc. “I was … not merely sent to bed early but locked in.” Did she really do this? Where did she find the fleas? Why was her absence not noticed? Where were her nurse and mother when she was jumping into quicklime and out of windows? Could it be that a headstrong, passionate girl, with a vivid imagination and few outlets for her feelings, felt crushed in a household where self-control and conformity were the reigning virtues? These stories sound like the kinds of protests she wished she had made.

  One does believe her account of the first school she attended and the likelihood that it was, as she describes it, plain, cheap, and dull. The food, presumably the noon meal, was particularly dreadful, but her parents dismissed the criticism, which was seconded by Beatrice, who went to the same school. So the two of them stole some soup from the cafeteria and smuggled it out in a bottle. They persuaded Rosa, their excellent cook, to serve it to their mother—the rest of them were spared. Maria-Luisa took one spoonful and was horrified. The girls explained what they had done and the battle was won. In future they were sent to school with homemade lunches.

  Her happiest times were when she went to stay with her uncle Giovanni and his family in their “Napoleonic” villa outside Milan. “I used to spend many happy hours crouching in a corner of the hearth while the national dish of Lombardy, polenta, was being cooked.” Family meals were leisurely and taken at a long table, after which there were walks up and down an alley of cypresses which she remembered vividly. This brilliant scholar, with five children of his own, had time for his small niece, to whom he seems to have given special attention. “He used to take me to look at the stars through his great telescope, holding me in his arms, explaining why he believed that Mars was inhabited by people like ourselves.” Her fascination with astrology, reincarnation, the power of dreams, palmistry, automatic writing, telepathy, mediums, and spiritualism can perhaps be traced back to these magical evenings when she looked through a vast telescope into the infinite heavens and listened to Uncle Giovanni describe what life must have been like on the planet Mars.

  It is true that as she grew older, the French term jolie laide—not pretty, but not plain, either—would have fitted her. Her lustrous eyes and high forehead were all lovely, but her nose and upper lip were a trifle too long, her mouth a little too wide, and her chin a little too firmly set for conventional prettiness. In addition, she had seven moles on her left cheek and down her chin that she was self-conscious about. She may even have told Uncle Giovanni that she did not like them. On the contrary, he replied, these beauty spots were placed exactly like the constellation of the Great Bear. What good luck to have this very distinguishing and unusual mark! When the moment came for her to design jewelry, 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. As for Uncle Giovanni, he was her ideal. It is easy to see why.

  She had, she writes, “a too ardent temperament.” In 1903, when she was thirteen, her father took her to stay at the houses of friends in Tunisia. She spent most of her time in the harems. Whatever she had expected—perhaps silken couches, huge cushions, fountains playing, hanging draperies—the reality was very different. The rooms were full of ugly modern department-store furniture, including huge wardrobes covered with mirrors. While she was there she received an offer of marriage from someone who had somehow caught a glimpse of her, “one of the most powerful Arabs in the land,” she writes. It was something out of a fairy story; he catches sight of a girl and is fired with passion. He arrives at her window in flowing white robes and on a black horse, accompanied by a retinue of identically dressed and mounted guards. She is not supposed to look, but cautiously watches from behind a curtain. He bows, gesticulates perhaps. Then he lifts his flashing sabre, they all shout and unveil their weapons and careen below her in a dazzling display of horsemanship. It is the Arab “fantasia,” and fantastic it is, romantic, passionate … She instantly wants to marry this handsome man and be carried off, one assumes across the back of his horse. Of course her father refuses to give her hand. Writing about the incident years later, she was still sure she could have lived a happy life in this miragelike milieu, a piece of delusional thinking possible only to someone who has never tried it.

  Once back in Rome her mind was full of romantic and poetical thoughts. How wonderful men were! How marvellous life was! How soon could she take part in this magical world? The discovery of cultures so removed from her own became linked in her mind with the procession she witnessed at night after her father left the palazzo and they moved to a new house in the Via Nazionale, one of the main roads through the city. Each spring and fall, shepherds and their flocks from the Campagna Romana would pass beneath their windows late at night. The bleating of the sheep and barking of the dogs would ricochet between the tall stone houses with their heavy shutters. The shepherds, wrapped in black cloaks and with wide-brimmed black hats, would pass through with shuffling feet. The strangeness of the nightly pilgrimage, the echoes, the scuffling sounds, the barking dogs and the hypnotic pace of the men and animals, assumed a mysterious, almost mesmeric allure. She would creep back to bed, “and then I would give myself up to the joy of singing in my mind the poem that I would write the next day.” And what poems they were, full of “sorrow, love, ardent sensuality, and mysticism, the heritage of a thousand years …” Thinking about them years later still made her blush. At the time they reflected “my deepest thoughts. I was possessed …” One day she had enough poems for a book and showed them to Uncle Giovanni’s son Attilio. He submitted them to a publisher, and they were printed. The collection was named Arethusa, after a follower of Artemis, the Greek goddess of the hunt, virginity, and young girls. To escape the persistent and unwanted attentions of Nereus, one of the river gods, Arethusa is turned into a stream. Whether Schiaparelli understood all the connotations and implications of the name she chose is not known. She did, however, throw down a kind of gauntlet with her dedication. In Italian, it reads, “A chi amo/A chi mi ama/A chi mi fece
soffrire” (“To those I love/To those who love me/To those who made me suffer”).

  Like any memoirist worth her salt, Schiaparelli is highly selective about dates and casual about sequence in the larger goal of telling a good story. In this case she links cause and effect—family’s horror, banishment to a boarding school—with the appearance in print of her poesia. In fact, Arethusa was not published until 1911, when she was twenty-one and too old for penal servitude with cold water and hair shirts. An investigation reveals the much more plausible possibility that she wrote the poems when she was fifteen, that is to say, in 1905 or 1906, and the family read them while still in manuscript. This was, no doubt, the moment when she was shipped off to a Swiss convent deemed sufficiently strict and lacking in poetic sensibility.

  Her description of what she found there is what one would expect. There were the usual spartan menus, there was icy disapproval and also constant supervision: that was to be expected. All letters were scrutinized before being mailed. That was also to be expected. What caused her to revolt centered around dress, or the lack of it. Elsa, with her relaxed Italian attitude toward the body, was stupefied to learn that during a bath, no square inch of naked skin was to be exposed. Some kind of shapeless sack had to be worn, and all undressing had to take place underneath it before she could be submerged. This was ridiculous. She put the offending garment aside and bathed in the ordinary way. But she had somehow been observed and was summoned to explain herself to the mother superior. So she donned a pair of long black gloves, a curious, perhaps significant detail, and went to do battle. She was accused of immodesty and insubordination. There was a bruising fight. Schiaparelli held her ground, showing that determination to challenge the status quo which would be such a help in life. Then she took to her bed and went on a hunger strike.

  This was not easy, because she was expected to attend lessons and daily mass in the usual way. She was beginning to weaken. Then, in this school for wealthy girls, she discovered that one of her classmates, daughter of the prime minister, was about to go to Rome on vacation. Would she get a message to Elsa’s parents? She did. Elsa described the outcome, as if from afar. “As soon as Schiap’s father received this message he hurried to Switzerland, looked sharply at his daughter and took her home without a word.” After just three months, that was the end of the cold-water experiment.

  Her account of what happened in those crucial years is cursory and gives the strong impression that she was marking time, waiting for real life to begin. As a Schiaparelli, she must have read widely, and perhaps this was so taken for granted that she does not bother to mention it. Perhaps she learned to cook—her skill was much admired in later years. She had learned the rudiments of sewing, because she describes buying fabrics for blouses, once she had an allowance, and edging them with lace to her own naive satisfaction.

  Girls of her class were prepared for marriage as they had been for centuries, with attention paid to their clothes, hair, skin, figures, manners, deportment, and all those little refinements that make a young woman’s company agreeable, like singing, playing an instrument, dancing, and recitation. Such a girl would be expected to devote her life to the financial and emotional well-being of her husband and children, to entertain friends, deal with servants, manage a household, cure infections, and, above all, get married. It went without saying that without any marketable skills, she would have to marry somebody, preferably someone with money. For him, looks would be secondary. Everyone’s ideal ange de la maison was clever, wise, self-sacrificing, sympathetic, and subservient.

  So Schiaparelli learned languages, went to parties, made friends in the right circles, and developed the arts of conversation in French, English, and German, although she always said she never could shake off her Italian accent. She went to concerts and wished she could sing. She wrote poetry and reviews. She sewed and knitted, learned to cook, and sneaked into courses on philosophy at her father’s university—it went without saying that she could not enroll. She made her first forays into the world of taste and imaginative daring that she would explore once she had a life of her own.

  Her occasional references to her parents, curiously, always concern her father, never her mother, who seems totally absent from her life. At some point, certain superstitions begin to develop—her belief, for instance, that four was her lucky number, and an irrational fear of riding in taxis—although whether she ever, like one of her grandchildren, consulted astrologers and mediums is unknown. Certain traits of character are coming to the fore, such as her bravery and determination when she tackles the mother superior, and the curious symbolism suggested by a pair of long black gloves. There is a resourcefulness, too, grace under pressure and a willingness to take risks. Opposition merely stiffens her resolve, but she is disarmed by charm, shared interests, and the poetic gesture. Most of all she longs, she writes, for what she has missed: “My youth, my ardour, and a tremendous need for affection [make] my heart beat passionately …” She falls in love with a painter, whose studio is beyond the city boundaries—but he is already engaged. Then she meets “a real child of the South, intelligent and warm,” who comes up from Naples to visit her and sends her boxes of tuberoses. But then her family sends him away.

  Her parents have already chosen her husband. He is ugly, a Russian with “tiny, slanting eyes and a rounded beard,” who is, however, very wealthy. He visits every day, spends the entire evening staring at her, writes tender letters all night long, and delivers them the next morning at breakfast. He has offered her everything he possesses including some extremely beautiful jewels inherited from his mother. No doubt she has seen them because, she would recall with some asperity, he was the only suitor who ever offered her anything as valuable. He wanted marriage, but her parents said she was too young. Time passed and he was back again, a fixture in their drawing room. This time he would not be put off. She must marry him. Her parents, no doubt mindful of the comfortable lifestyle their daughter would enjoy, pressed her to accept. What was it about him that she did not like? She does not say. Was it the slanting eyes too close together? Was he much older? She adds that he would die under mysterious circumstances in a skiing accident. Was it the doglike devotion, the fussy beard, a certain emanation? All she will say is that she is determined to leave home, and the date could have been 1913, two years after she has come of age and published a book. To escape from Nereus, a river god, Arethusa is turned into a stream. Crossing open water will do just as well. A friend has offered her a position helping to care for orphans in a British country house. She jumps at the chance. “ ‘This is going to be for ever!’ I cried. ‘There will be no coming back!’ ”

  She went to London by train via Paris, breaking her journey there for a few days. By chance she met a family friend who was living there, a historian and specialist on Napoleon named Alberto Lumbroso. He had been invited to a ball at the home of a well-known sculptor and her businessman husband, a couple named Henraux, on the Rue Jasmin in the chic 16th arrondissement. Would Schiaparelli like to join him? Schiaparelli, who never turned down a party in her life, certainly would. But then she reflected she had nothing to wear.

  Schiaparelli had arrived in Paris at a pivotal moment. As Colin Jones has described it in Paris: The Biography of a City, a new wave of prosperity and material comfort had followed the groundbreaking Exposition of 1900. “The show seemed to demonstrate that style—a rather feminized, decorative style at that—was the substance which made Paris so distinctive, so radiant, so up-to-date, so modern. The Exposition put the spotlight on the city as the home of the modernist good life, a heady consumerist mix including bright fabrics, haute couture … patterned wallpapers, bicycles, cameras … sewing machines and sundry home comforts available through the grands magasins.” The Grand Palais and Petit Palais had just been built to house the fine arts. The Eiffel Tower, emblem of all that was technically advanced and quintessentially Parisian, had risen in 1889. The Métro subway system had opened in 1900, telephones were arriving along wit
h indoor plumbing, and the population was expanding.

  By 1910 the horse began to vanish from the city streets, replaced by omnibuses and the demon motorcar. The airship named for its inventor, Count Ferdinand von Zeppelin, appeared magically in the skies. Then there was the undeniable fact that something radical was happening to women’s clothes. For decades they had been wearing full-length skirts and tiers of petticoats that hampered their movement, corsets that tortured and deformed their bodies, upswept hairstyles, and monstrous hats that ripped away in the least wind. As James Laver wrote, “There was a wave of Orientalism following the extraordinary excitement caused by the [Ballets Russes’] production of Scheherazade, the costumes for which were designed by Leon Bakst. The colours were striking, even garish, and society adopted them with enthusiasm. The old pale pinks and ‘swooning mauves’ were swept away; the rigid bodices and bell-shaped skirts were abandoned in favour of soft drapery … It was as if every woman—and this in the very year of Suffragette demonstrations—was determined to look like a slave in an Oriental harem.” The great couturier Paul Poiret had been among the first to abandon the corset, the S-shaped silhouette, and rigid tailoring for a more natural shape that conformed to the figure. Such a radically new look depended upon skillful drapery.

  This, then, was the context for Schiaparelli’s simple problem: whatever was she going to wear to the ball? Showing that spectacular instinct for taking the lead, if not actually being in front of it, Schiaparelli went to the Galeries Lafayette, looking, not for a dress, but for fabric. She bought four yards of a heavy dark-blue crepe de chine, at the considerable price of ten francs a yard. She also bought two yards of orange silk. Then she began to invent her dress. She found a way to keep the blue crepe in place by draping it around her body and passing it between her legs “to give a zouave effect,” she explained. These complicated maneuvers were held in place by pins. The orange silk was used as a sash, and what was left over became a turban. Off she went to the ball.