Elsa Schiaparelli

by Meryle Secrest

  She herself had, figuratively, stood behind the hairdresser who cut and set, dictating the average woman’s hairstyle. Her tape measure had, to the centimeter, decreed the length of the skirt she would be wearing that season, the set of her shoulders, the fabric, the cut, the colors, the jewelry, the hats, the shade of her lipstick, the shoes, gloves, even the perfume she chose. To have so much control was power indeed, and as long as Schiaparelli had it, she intended to use it. One day while she was still living at 4 Rue de la Paix, Bettina and her friend Nadia Georges-Picot arrived and began looking at some dresses in a cabinet. Nadia happened to see a charming dress in pale blue with its own brooch or pin of a crayfish executed in a milky-white stone. She did not care for the ornament and wanted to see how the dress looked without it. Someone who happened to be passing just then retorted, “Absolutely not. With my dresses no one changes a thing.” It was Schiaparelli.

  CHAPTER 7

  * * *

  THE BOUTIQUE FANTASQUE

  Of all the brilliant decisions Elsa Schiaparelli made in the years before World War II, perhaps the most inspired was her decision to work with surrealist artists, and Salvador Dalí in particular. Everything she had felt and instinctively understood about the movement, now in its zenith, came to a kind of artistic fulfillment in those years, thanks to her collaborative sympathies and particular accord with Dalí. Her daring, her sense of fun, her ability to see possibilities, fused with Dalí’s rare gifts, and so it is odd that he receives very little mention in her memoir.

  When they met in the 1930s, Salvador Dalí, like many other artists during the Depression, was extremely poor, and his wife, Gala, would set out day after day with a suitcase full of his designs—for false fingernails made of tiny mirrors, streamlined cars, and baroque bathtubs—hoping someone could be cajoled into buying. In London such promising young talents as Graham Sutherland and Henry Moore were only too happy to strike deals with the world of commerce if it meant they could eat for another month. The situation became so acute that Kenneth Clark, newly appointed director of the National Gallery in London, set up his own private fund for artists.

  Bettina Bergery said that Gala “would give you meals of mysterious little things you never had before. At the time it was unusual to eat raw mushrooms in salad. You would have a wonderful dinner and then she would proudly tell you how little it cost her.” Dalí’s star was on the rise, but nevertheless he and Gala were always looking for new ways to make money. Bettina had the perfect solution.

  She wrote, “Gaston [Bergery] and I used to spend July and August with the Spanish painter José-Maria Sert whose wife Roussy Mdivani, my best friend, went to the Costa Brava and the Dalís were always there at the same time. Occasionally we went between seasons too and usually stopped at the Dalís in Cadaqués. Then in winter and spring when they were in Paris we usually saw each other every day, and telephoned to exchange news first thing in the morning if we hadn’t been to the same parties the night before.” Now that Bettina was Schiaparelli’s full-time public-relations person and window dresser, it was the work of a moment to introduce the two artists.

  There is no record of their meeting, but it is clear they felt an immediate rapport. Schiaparelli wrote, “Dress designing … is to me not a profession but an art. I found it was a most difficult and unsatisfying art, because as soon as the dress is born it has already become a thing of the past … A dress has no life of its own unless it is worn, and as soon as this happens another personality takes over from you and animates it, or tries to, glorifies it or destroys it, or makes it into a song of beauty.” The fact that Schiaparelli was describing her craft in terms of creation and the process as if she were Pygmalion and the garment a metaphoric Galatea, implies a mystical connection transcending the work’s apparent prosaic reality.

  This, then, was her medium of artistic expression. “She dared and dreamed,” Richard Martin wrote in Fashion and Surrealism, “allowing clothing created out of pure, unmitigated, almost divine inspiration to become a choice for twentieth-century dress.” He also wrote, “A visionary, she touched clothing with the capacity to be art. Neither dressmaker nor designer, Schiaparelli gave clothing the romantic and inventive emancipation to become art even more than apparel.” And if, as Martin also wrote, Schiaparelli was the “doyenne” of Paris couturiers, Dalí was her male counterpart. Before long the two of them were sitting at a table together with paper and pencils, designing dresses.

  Dalí and Gala at an American country estate after arriving in the U.S. at the outbreak of World War II. The two men at left are not identified. (illustration credit 7.1)

  As has been noted, it was sometimes difficult to determine who influenced whom. Dalí, whose teasing description of Bettina was that she looked like a “preying mantis,” might have felt the same kind of distrust for Schiaparelli, but there is no evidence of this. With his own delicate antennae constantly on the alert for new arrivals, he must have been aware of the emergence of this bright new personality, because her extremely exaggerated shoulders, in one case ending in points, along with her interest in “aerodynamic” silhouettes, had been incorporated into his own visual vocabulary from about 1934. As has been suggested, Schiaparelli’s memory of trying to grow flowers on her face might well have been the inspiration for Dalí’s female figures, in surrealistic landscapes, whose heads are completely covered in flowers.

  At the opening-night party for the Museum of Modern Art in 1939, both ladies are wearing Schiaparelli. Jane Clark, wife of Kenneth Clark (left), then director of London’s National Gallery, wears one of her striking evening coats. Gala Dalí, between Kenneth Clark and Dalí, is wearing Schiaparelli’s richly embroidered evening jacket over a crepe evening gown. (illustration credit 7.2)

  On the other hand, one of Dalí’s recurring themes was that of a woman whose body has been superimposed with drawers down her front, with button pulls in the appropriate places. Dalí was then working on a plaster cast of the Venus de Milo, one of the most renowned of ancient sculptures in the Louvre, so that it also had drawers that opened, this time with buttons made of fur. Dawn Ades thought this suggested “an icy eroticism … indebted to Sacher-Masoch’s novel, Venus in Furs.” Be that as it may, Dalí and Schiaparelli transposed the idea to a suit in navy blue velour in which descending drawers have become pockets, with drop handles of black plastic. The suit was featured in a photograph by Cecil Beaton, worn by two models on what look like an imaginary seashore; one of the models holds Minotaure, the surrealist magazine, to underscore the connection.

  Dalí was again the source for one of the most famous of all Schiaparelli’s gowns, the lobster dress. This crustacean, known for its aphrodisiac qualities, was a recurrent theme for Dalí and appears in many guises, particularly a telephone, which had its handset in the shape of a red plastic lobster. The theme was translated by Schiaparelli into a sleeveless evening gown in white organza with a gently flaring skirt on which a gigantic lobster had been screen printed, with sprigs of parsley strewn about here and there. The idea that someone would want to waltz away the evening in a dress whose main emblem was something to eat seemed preposterous. But in fact someone did. Wallis Simpson chose it in 1937, the year of her marriage to the Duke of Windsor, because she thought recent photographs made her look hard and she wanted to look more appealing. The wonder is that, backlit, in a kind of forest, and in profile, the future duchess looks positively diaphanous and the theme perfectly harmless, a kind of quaint caprice on her part. Beaton took over a hundred photographs, which would have been a trial, but the results were so successful that Vogue devoted an eight-page spread to the duchess in 1936. It is said that the exquisitely painted lobster narrowly missed being smeared with mayonnaise by Dalí. Schiaparelli put her foot down.

  Yet another, even more unpromising idea by Dalí turned out to have unexpected results. What is called the “tear dress” had its origins in necrophilia and much else, beginning in a painting called Necrophiliac Springtime of 1936, in which a corpse, i
n a ragged dress and some stage of decomposition, is being brought back to life figuratively by flowers springing from its scalp. Clothing that has disintegrated into the skin and flayed flesh would seem about as unappetizing a reference as any sane woman would want to find herself wearing. Yet the resulting dress has been almost completely divested of its original meaning. The ragged holes in the dress have become recurrent themes of an overall pattern on a white ground, and what was meant to present torn skin beneath has been transformed into harmless blocks of magenta. The flowing line and the matching headdress have taken the result far away from its original source, which is probably just as well.

  Schiaparelli personally adjusting one of her many hats in the 1930s. She used to say that an inch one way or the other could make all the difference. (illustration credit 7.3)

  Schiaparelli’s reach naturally extended to hats, an indispensable part of the total effect in the days when everyone wore one. One of their collaborations took note of the importance of the total effect: a simple, almost severe dress and jacket in black satin crepe, its pockets adorned with glistening red lips and, as a hat, an upside-down black felt high-heeled shoe. The object had a kind of visor that jutted out over the forehead (the sole) and the heel, sometimes in black, sometimes a racy pink, stuck up out of the ensemble like an exclamation point. Dalí loved shoes, and his way of unwinding was to wear one on his head, so the idea made perfect sense to him. Gala followed along loyally by wearing the outfit, and Daisy Fellowes took up the cause with her customary aplomb.

  Schiaparelli’s daring shoe hat, which looked attractive only in profile (illustration credit 7.4)

  Turning a shoe into a hat was not as outré as it seems. The concept of the “witty” or “nutty” hat has been an undercurrent of fashion down through the decades. In London of the 1990s designers were loading their straw hats with fruits and vegetables. The designer Isabel Canova started with a lily pad, worn at a rakish angle, and topped it with silk fruit. Still, a high-heeled shoe takes the conceit to another level entirely, and only a very brave person, or someone with a distinct exhibitionistic streak, would attempt it nowadays. The shoe hat is always photographed in profile, a tacit admission that it must have looked terrible from the front, which would have been a further disincentive for wearers. After being launched with much fanfare by the fashion magazines, the shoe hat died a quiet death, and survives only in a couple of museum collections. There are two other explorations, one a hat that looked like a lamb chop, complete with frill, and another that looked like an inkwell. Then Dalí and Schiaparelli quietly gave up on their hat ideas.

  Dalí and Schiaparelli in 1949, still on good terms. Schiaparelli is wearing the brooch she had made to mimic the constellation of the Big Bear. (illustration credit 7.5)

  The success of the Schiaparelli-Dalí collaborations had hinged upon Schiaparelli’s ability to transform what were bizarre, even macabre, ideas into wearable, flattering garments. The case of Jean Cocteau was quite otherwise. His name is not as often seen nowadays, but in the early part of the twentieth century he was renowned as a Renaissance figure, particularly in France. He began young as a poet and went on to become a novelist, playwright, librettist, and film director. He wrote ballets and designed for the theatre but was equally well known for his art, which encompassed everything from illustrations to fashion-magazine drawings. In person Cocteau was slight, with an angular face; perhaps unsurprisingly, he was a lover of rounded, classical beauty in men and women, as can be seen from his choice of Jean Marais and Josette Day as the leading figures for his film La Belle et la Bête. As he showered his listeners with ideas, epigrams, observations, and witticisms, one of his rueful remarks was “Les miroirs doivent réflechir avant de nous redonner nos images” (Mirrors ought to reflect—i.e., think—before giving us back our images). He was, Alan Searle, Somerset Maugham’s lover, once said, “the life and death of every party, because he couldn’t stop talking.”

  Romaine Brooks once had him sit for his portrait, but she did not like him. Bettina Bergery adored him. “He held out little perches that made your mind hop,” she told Janet Flanner, “and made you say the kind of witty thing that delighted him.” She believed that Picasso stole many of Cocteau’s ideas as well as those of everybody else. Cocteau was just as interested in clothes and designed for himself, using ideas that greatly influenced Chanel. In 1953, when Chanel reopened her salon, Cocteau gave her many helpful suggestions, including the bright idea of adding braid to the edges of her ensembles, which became one of her signature details. Bettina said “he was generous with ideas, and made presents of himself to other artists.”

  This was certainly true of his work for Schiaparelli. Besides vivid and highly idiosyncratic illustrations of Schiaparelli’s designs for the magazines, Cocteau himself designed two of her best creations. The first was a full-length evening coat in blue silk jersey with a surprising back interest. Cocteau had placed an appliquéd posy of pale pink roses under the collar and across the shoulders. The flowers were contained in an embroidered vase that went down to the waistline. Closer inspection revealed that the vase was actually composed of opposing profiles in the act of puckering up for a kiss. This was unexpected and playful, a kind of visual pun, but the second concoction was even more of a tour de force. Cocteau began with the more or less blank canvas of a gray linen evening suit cut along simple lines. On the right shoulder he then perched, in embroidered profile, the outline of a lovely girl whose torso ran down one side of the jacket. At the waistline there was a hand holding a clutch of sparkling blue ribbons. The girl’s head was thrown back to display, on the right sleeve, a mass of tresses, stitched from thousands of tiny golden beads, covering it completely. Josette Day, his enchanted Beauty, could not have been more exquisitely attired. Both designs are now in the collection of the Philadelphia Museum of Art.

  Cocteau was never accepted as a surrealist, but Schiaparelli seemed to have become one of its muses, and at an early stage. If in Freudian psychoanalytic diagnosis a woman’s hat stood for her sexual organs in the dreams of men, then reversing that thought, perhaps, in a woman’s terms her hat symbolized the male sex. That women should fantasize, unconsciously or not, about men’s sexual organs via their hats would have seemed perfectly fantastic to audiences of the 1930s, and that would have been very much to the point for Tristan Tzara, the founder of Dada, who thought it up in the first place. The treatise was expounded in “D’un certain automatisme du goût” (Toward a certain automatism of taste), a fairly dense and incomprehensible, but nevertheless influential, essay by Tzara published in Minotaure in December 1933.

  To make the case, Man Ray photographed three examples from Schiaparelli’s latest hat collection that, depending on one’s viewpoint, can appear to be strong or somewhat forced examples of the thesis. The first, called Savile Row because it was based on an Englishman’s hat, was shown from above so as to reveal the strongly marked crease in the crown. The second, also shown from above, was Schiaparelli’s detested Mad Cap, with its jaunty little points. The third also came to a triangular peak, if not a point, which may be splitting hairs. The Tzara argument was exactly the kind Schiaparelli would have taken in her stride, and she modeled the last little number herself, wearing it to one side with insouciance. But then, she liked to claim occasionally that she wished she had been a man.

  Schiaparelli appeared again in the same issue of Minotaure, seen from the left side, eyes half closed, head poised above a plaster torso. She was wearing a wig by Monsieur Antoine, who had recently invented wigs of natural hair, kept in place with lacquer so that they could be worn more than once—call it the rich client’s solution to economizing on her hairdressing bills. For the more daring, Antoine had designed wigs in shades of mauve, pale blue, and faded pink to match one’s evening gown. In this case Schiaparelli wore Antoine’s silver version, classically Greek in feeling, with lots of tiny kiss curls tastefully arranged around the face. The effect was unexpectedly flattering, and Schiaparelli liked to we
ar it in the evening because it caused comment. She had another Antoine wig in blond to wear when she went skiing, causing more comment.

  During the Depression, French artists were better placed than British in the scramble for work because of the fluid connections that already existed between the fine and decorative arts. They might, as Cocteau did, provide illustrations for fashion magazines, or advertisements for perfume, besides designing sets and costumes for the theatre. Writers were a part of the easy exchange of roles and ideas. The Russian-born author Elsa Triolet, who was living with Louis Aragon, co-founder of the surrealist review Littérature, was an accomplished jewelry designer and sold Chanel and Schiaparelli some of her best ideas. One of Triolet’s successes, sold to Schiaparelli, was a necklace of white porcelain beads cunningly cut to look like the universal remedy for a headache. The aspirin necklace, as it was called, broke the ice in conversational terms, and no one reported having mistaken, in a moment of acute boredom, the fakes for the real thing. In the early days when he was still a member of the surrealist group, Alberto Giacometti happily joined forces with Jean-Michel Frank and helped design the furnishings for Schiaparelli’s apartments. He also created a series of brooches and buttons for her. They were made of gilt metal shaped into fantastical forms: sirens, birds, angels, and gorgons.

  In the search for forms that were adaptable in infinite ways, nothing beat the fingers of a hand, and the surrealists, closely followed by Schiaparelli, constantly introduced this powerful symbol. One of them was Cocteau. As late as 1946, when La Belle et la Bête was filmed, Cocteau introduced a sequence in which his heroine, entering the castle of the beast, discovers that the torches on the wall are held by living hands. Dalí and Schiaparelli both introduced hands combined with belts, sometimes as closings or to suggest a hand clasped around the body, one of Dalí’s favorites. Schiaparelli used miniature hands as buttons and as clip-ons for lapels, and designed a brooch of a rose being held by a hand. The cross-fertilization of ideas between Schiaparelli and the surrealists was explicit in their manifestos, in particular Georges Hugnet’s essay about hands in Minotaure, “Petite Rêverie du grand veneur.” Hands cropped up everywhere. Schiaparelli’s dainty hand clips can be seen in a Man Ray photograph of Dora Maar, Picasso’s lover and muse, and her Victorian-inspired brooch was used to illustrate several surrealist publications and book designs.