Elsa Schiaparelli

by Meryle Secrest

  Gaston Bergery (illustration credit 5.11)

  No doubt the relationship lasted for so many years because there were aspects about Bettina that complemented and contrasted with those of Schiaparelli. It is probably true, as the latter insists, that she was actually very shy, and having to start talking to a complete stranger put her in a panic. This was not a problem for Bettina Shaw Jones. She would greet one with a smile, launch into a safe subject, and before one knew it one was totally at ease and stimulated by this winning personality. Bettina could look exactly right in anything and became famous for carrying off some of Schiaparelli’s wilder ideas—her stunts, as she called them. By contrast, Schiaparelli only looked right in a few silhouettes. For her it was a constant trial to appear as distinctive as she wanted to seem, and she did not always succeed.

  The fashionably slim Bettina, modeling one of Schiaparelli’s summer concoctions. She was obliged to borrow a pair of shoes to match that were too large, and called the resulting image “Big Feet.” (illustration credit 5.12)

  Bettina never seemed to be going anywhere in particular, and liked to claim she looked her best doing nothing at all. It is true that she could relax into poses that were as effortless as a dancer’s. But in fact she had a quicksilver energy that matched Schiaparelli’s, and the same antic imagination, the same impulse to épater les bourgeois, the same instinctive understanding of art. Both, needless to say, had seen it all and were mostly unshockable. As an aspiring author and full-time diarist, Bettina Shaw Jones could have become Elsa Schiaparelli’s Boswell, although she never wrote the book. It is likely, even probable, that Bettina’s diaries began in her teens, if not before, and there were surely records once she began working for Schiaparelli in 1928, but none have been found. The Beinecke Library at Yale University has the later diaries, which are voluminous but do not start until the fall of France in 1940.

  Bettina in the early 1930s, in a dress and matching jacket by Schiaparelli (illustration credit 5.13)

  In those early days a handful of women presided over a corps of employees that was tripling and quadrupling almost by the week. One of Bettina’s few flaws was her penchant for parties that went on forever. She drank little, so she could be bright and charming into the small hours, and particularly enjoyed meeting the dawn with coffee and croissants, if any were offered. Then she had to go home and write it all down before she forgot. This made her useless to anyone in the morning. It was her rather grand custom to begin the day with lunch and go on from there.

  This portrait of Schiaparelli, inscribed to Bettina post—World War II, celebrated a friendship that lasted until the end of her life. (illustration credit 5.14)

  By contrast Schiaparelli awoke on the dot of eight a.m. no matter how late she went to bed the night before. While sipping lemon juice in water, along with cups of tea, she would read the papers, write notes, make telephone calls, plan the day’s menu, and select her outfit for the day. By ten every morning she was at her desk. Punctuality was her mantra, and lateness was not to be tolerated in anyone else, either. She opened every letter, signed every check, and negotiated every contract, a simple but effective way of finding out where the money went. She liked to wear a white cotton smock over her clothes and similarly stage-managed every aspect of a new design from conception through to successful sale, or not, in which case she wanted to know why. At openings she was to be seen tying each scarf, adjusting each wig, and fastening each belt. Her energy was prodigious and celebrated. Her success had as much to do with her ability to attract young talent as with her own gifts, and when she found someone she wanted, she was hard to resist. She took one of Jean Patou’s best tailors, along with his choice clients, after a determined campaign. The same thing happened with several young saleswomen from Patou, who would also have brought their pet clients. Presumably, she offered them more money.

  One of these saleswomen was Michèle Guéguen, a Breton in her late twenties, nicknamed Mike. Within three months Mike had taken over the salon as directrice, and she stayed with Schiaparelli to the end. Yet another brilliant choice was Hortense MacDonald, an expert promotion director, whose sharp American eyes were always looking for the next opportunity in a most un-French way. She was also ready to embellish what was often plodding promotional material with high-flown analogy: “This is a pagan collection,” she wrote of a new show. “Pan has piped in materials as soft as thistledown … The soil, the grass, the trees, the wild life of field and forest have come up to Paris from Tuscany hills.”

  Schiaparelli’s staff of workers uniformly dressed in black and wore curious round white collars that made them look faintly like choirboys. They were looked after and also well paid, harking back to the days when Elsa knew what it was like to be poor. So they were loyal, even though she was not easy to work with. Gogo recalled: “When she singled out a nonfavorite, she could make that person’s life perfectly miserable … She could be quite scary, even to me …” Schiaparelli designed on the model, with shears and toile, or on paper, but her best ideas usually came when she was in motion, i.e., walking, on a train, or in her car, and she showed seventy new models punctually twice a year. Her personal habits were spare: rice, spinach, and a sip of wine, dining on black porcelain and a mixture of silver plate, from inherited family pieces to modern Swedish. She smoked. She was always on the move. The mother who had to “go, go, go” became the designer who was seen everywhere, at a New York theatre opening, wearing a velvet cape massively topped in silver fox, or at a museum opening, a dinner party, or a weekend in the country. As she grew more successful, she took a small cottage in the forest of Ermenonville, near Paris, that once belonged to the gardener of La Rochefoucauld and where Rousseau once lived. She was a great skier and loved to swim. Her starkly furnished apartment on the Boulevard Saint-Germain began to fill up with paintings, such as a study of seashells by Pierre Roy, and curious conceits, like a footstool made from the hipbones of a horse. She posed constantly for pictures, wearing her own creations. That was common for women designers; Chanel did it all the time. Schiaparelli had learned early the trick of being photographed from below, one Frank Lloyd Wright also used, to make her look taller. This was achieved to great effect in a picture taken in 1930 in which she wears a dress of black crepe satin, the skirt draped to tuck in at the waist, white gloves, and her habitual black cap.

  Most of all, she worked.

  The subject of clothes designed by and for women versus clothes for women designed by men might make an interesting study. Whatever one wants to conclude about the latter—and they certainly are the dominant force in today’s world—it is safe to say that clothes designed by women in the 1930s were always becoming, and some look quite irresistible even today. Whether this, during the Great Depression, was absolutely necessary or whether fashion designers were too conservative is a moot point. It is certainly true that women designers, in addition to designing clothes for everyone else, designed for themselves, Chanel being one example. Schiaparelli was another. Over and over again one finds clothes ideally suited to short stature and trim outlines. They were meant to minimize her figure faults and emphasize her assets but, happily, they also flattered the majority of her clients as well. This harmonious relationship worked flawlessly for much of her career.

  So when she invented clothes with big shoulders that were narrow through the hips, she was flattering the average female figure as well as her own. Shoes with medium heels, hats that soared upwards, dark colors that disguised superfluous rolls of flesh, a slightly raised waistline that made legs look longer—these trends, however conservative they look to modern eyes, were absolutely right for the period.

  The strong sculptural qualities of Schiaparelli’s look, along with the wearable nature of her clothes, are evident in this 1934 example of a slim, military-style coat of black wool, trimmed with black patent leather motifs, along with an emphatic hat and a distinctively different handbag. (illustration credit 5.15)

  She liked combinations of black and whit
e, and in those days of necessary economies, black never showed the dirt. White is always becoming around the neck, and so Schiaparelli, ever practical in such matters, usually made the white items detachable. She continued the challenge of interchangeable pieces that could be used in various ways: sashes that turned into impromptu skirts, jackets that became headdresses, skirts that became capes. She also liked hidden pockets, skirts that looked like trousers and vice versa, whatever was versatile and unexpected. Working within certain limitations meant that in order to surprise, clothes needed an extra fillip. She achieved this by a judicious choice of unusual fabrics. As early as 1928, she persuaded a Scottish manufacturer, Meyer’s, to weave white ostrich feathers into its woolen fabrics, and used the result for a skirt-and-coat ensemble. She was the kind of person who would go rummaging around in the bin of discards at a fabric house and find exactly the color combination she was looking for. Dilys Blum, who curated the spectacular exhibition of Schiaparelli’s designs for the Philadelphia Museum of Art in 2003–4, writes, “In Schiaparelli’s hands synthetic fabrics became chic, and she was credited with making rayon fashionable by using unique weaves that took on the appearance of wools, linens, or silks but still retained the distinctive draping quality that was one of the fabric’s greatest assets.

  “She made a success of rayon crepes in bold, rough textures and relief patterns, and she was the first to use rayon woven with Lastex, which made the fabric stretchable, eliminating the need for buttons … She was also the first to use deep-pile velvets, water-repellent transparent velvets, and slit cellulose film. Some of the textured rayon fabrics she launched in May 1933, including Ciragril, a lacquered gauze or fine mesh used for evening gowns, were exclusive to her house and often carried her name in various forms: Rayesca, a dull crepe with groups of alternating ridges; Elsaloc, with a dull cloqué bead pattern; and Jeresca, a new jersey.”

  One of the great successes of her April 1933 collection, which was sold in New York, was an evening dress illustrating the uses of Rayesca, a matte crepe with a V-ridge pattern, in a new color, violet blue. Schiaparelli modeled the result for a portrait by the artist-decorator Jean Dunand; it had a puff-sleeve look very reminiscent of the Tudor era that suited her perfectly. There were ever so many ways to make shoulders look bigger. The most obvious was to pad them, and these were introduced in 1931 with what she called her “wooden soldier” silhouette. Vogue remarked, “Clothes carpenter that she is, Schiaparelli builds up the shoulders, planes them off, and carves a decisive line from under the arms to the hip-bone, gouging in the waist.” One could keep improving on shoulders with the judicious use of embroidery, pads of fur, or what she called “shoulder trays” and “angel wings.” The big shoulder became a fixture of her designs in the 1930s, and she herself routinely sported them two inches wider than quite necessary.

  Schiaparelli specialized in sometimes startling juxtapositions, as in this evening dress of white textured crepe, one of her own inventions, trimmed with a floral corsage in kingfisher blue and matching cape of looped fringes in flossy silk. (illustration credit 5.16)

  This did not mean that Schiaparelli had reached the limit of her powers. Rather, she was cautiously feeling her way—after all, an enormous amount depended upon her taste and judgment. One of the first signs she would soon show clothes that were not just elegant but inspired came about in the autumn of 1931. Jean Dunand was an expert in painting on fabric and had demonstrated his technique on gowns he created for Madame Agnès, which were exhibited at the 1925 Exposition des Arts Décoratifs in Paris. Schiaparelli wanted him to do something like that for her. She designed evening dresses in white and champagne-colored silk, sleeveless, with a simple bodice and slightly raised waistline. In the center of the skirt, back and front, were bursts of pleats, terminating in a V at the waistline. Using his technique of diluted sepia and colored lacquers applied through a stencil, Dunand edged the pleats in shades of black and gray to give the trompe l’oeil effect of black chiffon. The resulting creation, modeled by Schiaparelli (using her favorite technique of being photographed from below), was statuesque, classically Greek in feeling, and absolutely stunning.

  A long, slim evening gown in midnight-blue crepe is enhanced with small, tiered sleeves of pink satin embroidered with pearls, blue glass, and silver thread. (illustration credit 5.17)

  But perhaps the most sensational design of those early years, one that set a whole craze in motion, was also first shown in 1931. As has been noted, Schiaparelli had already used coq feathers as part of a fabric. But then, in January of that year, the celebrated ballerina Anna Pavlova died. She had been on a tour of Europe with her own company, dancing, among other ballets, “The Dying Swan,” with music by Saint-Saëns and choreography by Michel Fokine. Of all the exquisitely delicate and supple roles she performed, this was perhaps the most perfectly suited to her talents. As it happened, she was a devoted lover of birds, had a pet swan, and was photographed more than once with it clasped to her breast, its head resting on her shoulder. Her ravishing costume, appropriately, was composed of feathers and tulle. In the middle of her tour Pavlova caught pneumonia and died of pleurisy three weeks short of her fiftieth birthday. Legend has it that she was holding her costume as she died and that her last words were “Play the last measure very softly.”

  Coq feathers were plainly the inspiration of the moment. Schiaparelli designed a stunning, waist-length cape of them and wore it, along with Dunand’s painted dress, to the opening of a Paris restaurant, Les Ambassadeurs, in the former ballroom of the Hôtel de Crillon, with its marble marquetry and crystal chandeliers. While both dress and cape were admired, the latter would turn out to be the more long-lasting and successful in design terms. It led to all kinds of variations: iridescent coq feathers dyed blue on a sapphire-blue velvet evening cape, feathers on hats, gloves, scarves, sashes, stoles … Vogue noted in April 1933: “Coq feathers and Schiaparelli are practically inseparable—she can’t resist enlisting them at every turn.” They were also duly noted by Hollywood designers, who took up the idea with enthusiasm, since to Depression audiences they represented the epitome of chic and luxurious living. One example of this is the dress, composed entirely of ostrich feathers, that Ginger Rogers wore for “Cheek to Cheek” with Fred Astaire in Top Hat (1935). The idea was to look as casual as you could while wearing something completely frivolous, like sleeves made of feathers. One of the women in Eric’s drawing for Vogue is fashionably attired in feathers and an evening dress of heavy dull crepe with a train. Another has similar wings of feathers on a backless gown that ends in a saucy little bustle of feathers. Or perhaps it is a tail. The effect is very droll, anticipating the Playboy Bunny. One can understand why Schiaparelli could not resist.

  CHAPTER 6

  * * *

  COMET

  When Elsa Schiaparelli left New York in 1922, she had no money, no income, and her future was hanging in the balance. Seven years later, on November 18, 1929, she returned for the first time. Now she was a woman of consequence, an up-and-coming dress designer with her head full of ideas for the spring of 1930 and forecasts she was eager to share. Her mantra had not changed: skirts must come down or at least cover the knee, waistlines must go up and shoulders get wider. Such a new silhouette presented all kinds of thrilling possibilities, and she was ready to explore them all. The whole should, however, always be becoming, neat and trim, said she, neat and trim in a black Persian lamb coat inset with black wool at the waistline and finished with a wide suede belt and a flash of gilt buckle: Schiaparelli would always accompany black with gold. She wore one of her little fitted caps, this version in Persian lamb. Such niceties as her black patent-leather handbag, hose, and gloves were also recorded by the Women’s Wear Daily reporter, as befitted the status of this latest Parisian authority on the arts of adornment.

  Schiaparelli was accompanied by Gab de Robilant and a wardrobe full of clothes that Gab would model. Both came straight from Rome, where Elsa was visiting her widowed mother, and boa
rded the RMS Berengaria at Cherbourg. They would be staying in midtown, at the Savoy-Plaza. If not quite as celebrated as the Brevoort—it had just been built by the firm of McKim, Mead & White in 1927—it had the perfect site on Fifth Avenue at Fifty-ninth, right across from Central Park, and was a trend-setting example of art deco, from its sleek exteriors to its handsomely appointed lobby and guest rooms. Elsa and Gab would be there for three weeks.

  The omens were auspicious, but there was a caveat. Elsa Schiaparelli’s arrival coincided with the opening round in a succession of panics on the New York stock market that would culminate in the Great Depression. On “Black Thursday,” October 24, 1929, just before they arrived, the market lost 11 percent of its value at opening bell in a wave of selling. Despite efforts to stem the flow with massive infusions of cash, there was a further run on the banks on Tuesday the 29th, when another 12 percent vanished, and the volume of stocks being traded that day set a record high that would not be broken for forty years. In fact, in two days the market lost $30 billion, and it continued to fall on November 13, five days before they arrived. When fortunes are disappearing and banks closing overnight, it is hardly the moment to be talking about hemlines. There is no record of American orders on that trip, but it is a safe guess that they were disappointing.