One of Schiaparelli’s great assets in those years was her intuitive ability to sense the mood. She was always up to the minute, if not in front of it, and this would take every ounce of her premonitory gifts. The question what women would want before they knew what they wanted would have been posed with new urgency. Her instinctive reaction was to move away from her predominantly neutral palette of off-whites, grays, and blacks into a splash of color. These were the most seductive and irresistible colors imaginable: delicious shades of orange, apricot, peach, lemon, and grenadine. Or day dresses might even appear in two colors, bright pink with purple, and emerald green with bright red. Wonderful tweeds in broken checks made their appearance, sometimes in red and green with white. Suits might be shown in deep blue and orange checked tweeds with blouses in orange silk, or sherbet pink with brown and beige, or a ski outfit in navy blue with a red and white dotted blouse and a warm red cap. Elsa’s fabrics were a constant theme in fashion reporting. “She’s got a lot of new crinkley things,” one writer reported. They look “so much like the bark of trees you feel you’re going to sprout leaves or acorns or something …”
Harper’s Bazaar of April 1932 thought Schiaparelli’s new fabric collection was “nothing short of thrilling, for she is a law unto herself in such matters. She has an evening gown of white mourning crepe that looks as if it were made of crepe paper; she also has her own deeply crinkled crepes, one of which she calls Crepesse, and a new one which is reversible, satiny on one side, darker and crepey on the other. There is also a new wide ribbon that looks exactly like a silk seersucker, for scarfs … She has discovered a wonderful deep, mat plush in white, for evening wraps, that looks like ermine …” Schiaparelli always had a fondness for sleight-of-hand, and as the Depression deepened even more, parts of the costume became detachable, or reversible, or had multiple uses. Part of the fun of her designs was their practicality. For instance, she had designed a weekend outfit for motoring down to the country that was not only ingenious but delightfully comfortable. She began with a black kid coat, lined with black ribbed silk, that was completely reversible. It was matched with a collarless topcoat of tweed to be worn over the flat fur. Then there was a cardigan for wear under the tweed, a matching sweater and skirt, and fur ties. Only the evening dress escaped the relentless march of the match, being made of moiré. Sometimes ingenuity led to solutions no one else could ever have thought of, such as her “speakeasy dress,” her salute to Prohibition. She designed something for evening that had a kind of pocket or shelf at the waistline in the back of the dress, with perfectly harmless gathers falling from it. The pocket was cunningly designed to exactly fit a handy flask.
An air of unreality pervades the fashion magazines of the period. They describe what the well-dressed woman aviator will wear, the latest yachtswoman’s fashions, ski outfits for St. Moritz and others for afternoon tea, as if ignoring financial considerations would make them go away. What counted was Schiaparelli’s “aeroplane silhouette,” a stiff flange of fabric running down the center back of the skirt, which was a total dud and abandoned shortly afterwards. Christmas of 1932 found Vogue imagining an English country house scene, “in the depths of a timbered park, evening in the great hall with the flames of a huge log fire dancing on the ancient hearths …” All this was just so much window dressing, a woman news reporter for a Boston paper believed. Idalia de Villiers took a more realistic approach. Visiting Monte Carlo, she observed that “the exceeding, almost hysterical gayety which prevails in the casinos, smart restaurants, night clubs and cabarets of Cannes, Juan-les-Pins and Monte Carlo is very largely due to overstrung nerves. People laugh wildly, dash to and from one gay scene to another, dress extravagantly, wear gorgeous jewels … but almost everyone is (secretly) frightened. How is it going to end …?” Marjorie Howard, in Harper’s Bazaar, sympathized; but after all, a woman’s clothes had to look new or it was hardly worth spending the money. Women need not worry. Clothes were not very different; just a bit. And Schiaparelli’s bold, cabbage-red satin jerseys and scintillating evening colors, such as hyacinths going from pale, grayest blue to deep blue-black, had replaced black entirely. How could one resist?
As Dilys Blum noted in Shocking!, the stock market crash hit the fashion industry fairly hard. In 1931 exports of French luxury goods (clothes, furs, lingerie, fabrics) were down 50 percent from the year before. Yet Schiaparelli’s business went on growing. By 1934, her four hundred employees were making between seven and eight thousand garments a year. Somehow she had triumphed, despite the odds. Blum noted that while some large couture houses cut their collections and prices, and a few went out of business, the smaller houses, like Schiaparelli’s, with smaller overheads and outputs, did remarkably well. She wrote, “Schiaparelli’s growth and financial stability during the Depression were also ensured, at least in part, by her willingness to work with American manufacturers in creating models from their fabrics for advertising purposes, and also by her endorsement of other American-made products, such as shoes and hosiery, which she used in her Paris collections. In this way the manufacturers were able to add a bit of luster and prestige to the marketing of their goods at home, thereby helping their own sales, while at the same time Schiaparelli was able to widen her markets.”
What also saved Schiaparelli was the popularity of her designs abroad. Everyone wanted to sell to the American woman, but Schiaparelli seemed to have a particular understanding of these potential customers, an “unbeatable knack,” as Vogue expressed it. “Today she is recognized as the leading smart designer,” Janet Flanner wrote in The New Yorker. Woman’s World wrote, “The house has now sprung into the first rank of creative couturiers.” In the fall of 1932, Vogue placed the name of Schiaparelli in the company of the greatest designers of any age.
Schiaparelli had a special look. It was freer, less studied, more imaginative, and more flexible than that of other Parisian houses, attuned as they were to great ladies on their rounds between sixteenth-century chateaux, St. Moritz, and their eighteenth-century Parisian hôtels particuliers. Her clothes were youthful. They had a daredevil swagger. They were infinitely variable; someone called Schiaparelli’s “the House of Ideas.” And they were easily adapted for mass-market copies. In December 1933, Women’s Wear Daily wrote, “Again Schiaparelli reveals the strength of her following among American designers, for the new coat silhouette that she launched at the midseasons is not only being widely copied as is, but is selected as the important influence on which entire collections are being based …” It would only be another year before Time magazine, that eager arbiter of instant fame, would pronounce her a genius.
In February 1933, back at the Savoy-Plaza, Schiaparelli returned in triumph, surrounded by newspaper reporters and photographers and with headlines in all the dailies. She was “smothered in flowers so that [the] small suite at the Savoy Plaza looked perpetually like the day after a wedding or the day before a funeral …” She was offered diamond buckles for her shoes if she would agree to walk down Fifth Avenue with a model to advertise a jeweler. Someone wanted her to walk a lion across town on a diamond-studded leash. With her fondness for stunts, she might even have risen to the challenge, but there is no record. A record does, however, exist for an interview she gave in her Savoy-Plaza suite wearing a dark blue, heavily crinkled crepe dress topped by a saucy, bright red, hand-crocheted jacket with a drawstring tie at the neck. She chose the moment to talk about how versatile the outfit was in this time of austerity, and how by adding a different kind of top she could completely change the look. But her main interest was to discuss the effect New York, indeed the country itself, had had in stimulating her imagination.
Bettina, in 1933, wearing a cape of orange-red quilted taffeta that she chose for her wedding to Gaston Bergery a year later, in the summer of 1934 (illustration credit 6.1)
Schiaparelli’s ability to design in a variety of fabrics extended to this evening coat of full-length fur, trimmed with contrasting materials. (illustration credit 6.
2)
Looking out over the cityscape from her hotel window, she said, “There is no question about it, America … inspires me. Even the view from this window is thrilling. Architecture is the greatest thing America has given to the world artistically, and I believe that, in due time, you will evolve a couture of your own, whose styles will bear the same stamp of originality and beauty that your buildings have.
“You see, in designing, I consider both clothes and the body architecturally; structure and line are the all-important factors in the construction of fashions. And, of course, comfort too! Clothes must look as if they belong to the woman who wears them or they are not right.”
A model wearing a clown’s hat and a dress with shelflike shoulders receives the rapt attention of buyers at a 1933 Schiaparelli show. (illustration credit 6.3)
Schiaparelli returned to the scene of her inspiration annually from then on. The rest of the time buyers came to her, usually for the spring and fall collections, arriving on the SS Europa for ten days of tension and triumph. Every couturier had several showings. The press showings came first, usually in the evening. Harper’s Bazaar reported, “To them go all the writers, a smattering of society, the cream of the cream of the buyers, important French manufacturers and their wives; a most curious collection made up of hard-boiled chic and tacky little old-maid journalists, and plump old French couples … all, you may be sure, representing colossal interests.” Many of the designers were in evidence but some, including Schiaparelli, would not appear. Then it was up to those in the know to push their way backstage in order to offer their congratulations.
This event was followed by many others. First came the buyers, then the overflow, then the clannish German buyers, the Italians, and finally the “mild, refined little English voices of the buyers from all over London.” The routine of entering the establishment never varied. At the reception desk, behind mountains of white lilacs, sat a veritable dragon lady flanked by legions of cold-eyed assistants ready to throw out a recalcitrant buyer. Any buyer had to “sign her soul away on the spot, guaranteeing to pay a $100 fine if she doesn’t buy a certain number of models.” Buyers usually hunted in pairs, on the principle that “two heads are better than one … As the air grows hotter and hotter and tenser and tenser, they get down to grim business, eyes narrowed to mere slits …” The buyer had to remember everything, weighing the relative merits of every item, deciding whether the fabric would survive or languish once on a department store rack. “You also have to maintain a poker face. A big buyer’s opinions are worth millions and the lesser lights keep their eyes on her, so that she often jots down numbers that don’t really interest her to throw the others off.”
Later on, at Bricktop’s or Ciro’s, with the champagne flowing, a buyer will hope she can pick up a rumor that something or other is a hot item and can cable back to New York that “the Fords of the year are going to be Lanvin’s ‘Sauvage,’ Schiaparelli’s ‘Number Five,’ or Patou’s ‘Harmonie’…” Then the day arrives when buyers return to buy. “Screens are put up and voices sink low so that rivals will not know what is being bought. If there are no screens, you grab your dresses and sit on them. This is a moment of terrible concentration. In these days even a house like Bergdorf Goodman buys only sixty or seventy models. Each one has to be exactly … right …” Big buyers were respectful of the clothes, but “the mob is less scrupulous. After the first week all the seams inside a good dress are clipped to the bone and sometimes there are holes in the dress itself, left by swatch-snitchers. If not watched like hawks they rip off buttons. Mainbocher has his models trained to run at top speed through the salons, so that no one can look too closely.”
Before the Depression, samples were delivered to hotels to be copied overnight, resold, then traded back and forth between cheap houses. “Even now, if he can get away with it, a cheap buyer will order the sleeves of one dress, the collar of another, and the skirt of a third, getting three dresses for the price of one. German buyers are disliked by the dressmakers because many of them buy to copy and resell the designs to other buyers at a reduction.” There was a serious problem of shady dealings within the house itself. “Before Schiaparelli had her collection this year, her coats were put on sale” in a backdoor establishment for, one assumes, a hefty sum under the table. Aware of the problem, most houses would farm out one piece at a time to the petits mains, so that, in theory, no one knew how all the pieces went together. But someone clearly had to know, and somehow a finished garment might be smuggled outside. Earlier in 1933 the French police had raided one of the bootleg establishments and found it full of canvas models from all the big houses. This establishment had “two exits, like a New York speakeasy, and the chief saleswoman apparently did most of her selling to the Americans in taxis, on the run.”
The morning after the big sale, pressure was on all the houses to produce what had been ordered with impossible deadlines, using official permission from the French government to use up their quota of employee overtime in order to complete the huge numbers. “The petits mains and buttonhole workers and fitters work all night long for a week. Miraculously, they finish. No models are delivered for fear of copying but when you get to Cherbourg or Havre they are all there in their mountains of boxes, covered with that shiny black waterproof paper, sitting on the tender …” They are destined to be copied a thousand times, and “whatever is left of them is sold to a commissionaire in New York for $25 each … and sent back to Paris again—a dirty shred attached to an august label.”
Unlike many of her colleagues Schiaparelli, secure in her success, was never too concerned about her work being copied, perhaps because, in the natural progression of things, an original idea was watered down by so many simplifications and emendations that by the time it appeared at cut-price rates it was beginning to look stale. And by then, she was on to other things. She used to paraphrase the maxim that imitation was the sincerest form of flattery, and add that the time to start worrying was when the market had stopped copying your work. What was of more immediate concern was the fact that, as Cathy Horyn commented in the New York Times in the spring of 2012, fashion had always been a blood sport. Schiaparelli herself said as much. “People coming to Paris are sometimes surprised to discover what a hard business it is, the cold, calculating brains it requires underneath the banked flowers and the champagne. It is probably the most deadly serious business in the whole of France.” Schiaparelli was exaggerating, but probably not by much. What was the latest vogue today was gone tomorrow and, as Salvador Dalí, who would become a major influence on her life, liked to say, it was very hard to épater les bourgeois every twenty-four hours. No one with any sense could ever consider himself, or herself, to have arrived.
This made her decisions about her models (mannequins, as they are called in London and Paris) understandable if ruthless. In a newspaper article to publicize her autobiography, she wrote that they needed to be tall, slim, and look wonderful in photographs. It was amazing how many mannequins looked perfectly ordinary on the street. One would not look at them twice. But somehow, under a camera lens they became irresistible, and every couturier wanted the special quality they brought to the perfection of an idea or ideal.
Most of all, the mannequin had to be young. The minute a girl noticed an extra inch on her waistline and started to diet, it was already too late, because “slimming,” as it was called in Britain, “takes away some of the soft, beautiful lines of the face. What you gain in slimness you lose in beauty. And it’s not only the face that suffers.
“Slimming shows immediately on the round of the naked shoulder, or the natural curves of the perfect arm. So one has to be cruel and say: A mannequin has to be young, very young—and when that’s gone, she must go.”
Such brutal necessities did not apply, of course, to women of a certain social status, actresses, film stars, or the rich, who would advertise one’s clothes by wearing them to well-publicized functions. Schiaparelli did more than round up aristocratic young wom
en to act as her sales staff. Thanks to her contacts she was finding plenty of people only too eager to show off her latest designs. Sometimes they found her. There was, for instance, the case of a thin, plain-looking girl who was sitting in a corner of her salon one day wearing dowdy clothes. Something about her interested Schiaparelli, and she offered to help her choose a “look.” The girl had a certain quality. There was her enchantingly husky voice, expressive hands, and a way of tilting her head that drew attention to a pair of perfect cheekbones. She was going to look wonderful in a loose coat and pleated pants, with her louche slouch and fly-away hair. She was, of course, Katharine Hepburn, who would one day state that the transformation in Schiaparelli’s dressing rooms began her career.
All kinds of noble ladies were only too happy to be seen at Deauville, Biarritz, Cannes, Monte Carlo, and Venice, not to mention the Paris Opéra, wearing the latest Schiaparellis, which their author would in most cases have been happy to donate. There were Princess Thérèse de Caraman-Chimay (of a Belgian family related to the dukes of Burgundy), Princess Sonia Magoloff, Princess Cora Caetani, Princess Marina Mestchersky, and Princess Paulette Poniatowski. There was Arletty, the enigmatic beauty of Les Enfants du Paradis, a working-class girl who became a legend of the French cinema, and was at the height of her stage popularity in the 1920s and 1930s. She had the right kind of look: dark-haired, strong-featured, with broad shoulders and slim hips. Arletty had begun as a mannequin for Poiret but left him for Schiaparelli in 1929, and, in later years, became expert in jewelry design.
Elsa Schiaparelli Page 13