The offbeat, distinctive looks of Helena Rubinstein were perfectly suited to her pink bolero evening jacket, completely covered in embroidery on a circus theme. Rubinstein liked it so well that she had any number of identical embroidered boleros made. Arletty, with her symmetrical, unsmiling goddess look, was ideally suited to Schiaparelli’s offbeat bandeau of a hat, wrapped around her forehead and worn with a plain dress, the elaborately pleated shoulders of which looked for all the world like corrugated iron.
When a woman is desperately and irretrievably plain, as in the case of the interior designer and socialite Elsie de Wolfe (Lady Mendl), but has an outsize personality, what is to be done? Schiaparelli rolled out perhaps the most spectacular evening cape she ever designed. It was of black velvet, splashed with an enormous sunburst of gold sequins, a design inspired by the Neptune Fountain in the Parc de Versailles. Elsie de Wolfe was a woman who would have loved to own Versailles. She did the next best thing: buying up a ruined country house on the edges of the great estate and, after extensive restoration, throwing parties nonstop in her Villa Trianon. It was a case of the costume carrying the woman, but Elsie de Wolfe, who had once been an actress, did not seem to mind.
Marie-Laure de Noailles was another matter entirely. She was the fabulously rich daughter of a Belgian banker, Maurice Bischoffsheim, who died of tuberculosis when she was still a baby. Her grandmother was the Comtesse Adhéaume de Chevigné, immortalized by Proust as the Duchesse de Guermantes, and she was descended from the Marquis de Sade. She had fallen in love with Jean Cocteau but ended up marrying Charles, Vicomte de Noailles, an aristocrat of impeccable manners to match an august pedigree, and discreetly gay. Between them they took charge of a vast, treasure-filled mansion on the Place des États-Unis that she had inherited from her father, as well as the art collection that went with it.
Vivien Leigh, one of the many British actresses dressed by Schiaparelli (illustration credit 8.7)
John Richardson wrote: “Virtually every painting was of exceptional quality and interest. Besides Goya’s incomparable portraits of his son and daughter-in-law, a Rubens sketch … and Géricault’s delectable triple row of horses’ rumps, the hexagonal downstairs library contained Picasso’s big bland portrait drawing of Marie-Laure … Tables glittered with objets de vertu and gold boxes …” “Les Charles,” as they were known, gave superb parties and were early patrons of Jean-Michel Frank, hired to add further embellishments to the decor. One of the upstairs salons seemed to need to be completely relined in squares of creamy parchment, so he did that, and it was another of his successes.
Like the De Beaumonts, the De Noailles acted as a link between the French aristocracy and the worlds of art, music, literature, film, theatre, and the decorative arts, and knew everyone. Marie-Laure was particularly important: not only was she an artist of some note, but she championed some of the more outrageous surrealist fantasies of the prewar years, including Buñuel’s film L’ge d’or, Cocteau’s Le Sang d’un poète, and another experimental film, Les Mystères du château de Dé by Man Ray (1929), which was filmed in the grounds of their modernist Villa Noailles at Hyères. People were scandalized, but Marie-Laure was much too important to be ostracized and too grand to care.
Bettina Bergery and Marie-Laure, Vicomtesse de Noailles, in a wintry scene, 1930s (illustration credit 8.8)
She was, as Richardson wrote, one of the most paradoxical women he ever met, “spoiled, generous, sly, fearless, manipulative, impetuous, bitchy, affectionate, childish, maddening and, not least, extremely cultivated.” One does not dictate style to such a being, and in fact she and Schiaparelli were not close. But natural artistic affinities and the fact that they saw each other everywhere meant they were friendly, if not friends. Marie-Laure was much closer to Bettina Bergery, and some of her letters, most of them postwar, have survived in the Bergery Archive at Yale. Besides, she was quite difficult to dress, since she developed a fibrous tumor in her stomach that she never bothered to have removed, giving her the look of a woman six months pregnant, which is very hard to disguise. In a brilliant essay on Marie-Laure, Ned Rorem, the American composer who lived with her as her protégé, wrote, “In all the years with her I never saw Marie-Laure, when in the Midi, garbed in other than a voluminous peasant skirt, a peasant blouse on which she carelessly pinned a million-dollar brooch, and espadrilles which were the only seemly footwear for the grotesquely distorted toes which she loathed.” One of the few Schiaparelli creations Marie-Laure is known to have worn is a black evening dress with a full skirt, worn with a black and red, wool and velvet jacket reminiscent of an eighteenth-century gentleman’s waistcoat, exquisitely embroidered with vegetables and fruit. There were the usual impudent buttons, in the shape of a radish, two or three carrots, and a couple of cauliflowers. Serious-minded and generous, she was a thoughtful hostess, championed young talent, and appeared regularly in news columns. To have the Vicomtesse de Noailles seen to be entering one’s doors on the Place Vendôme was enough.
In those immensely successful years before World War II everyone wanted to be dressed by Schiaparelli, including complete wedding parties of the British and French aristocracy, and the Duchess of Windsor ordered several outfits besides the famous lobster evening dress. But perhaps the most outsize personality to come under her benign scrutiny was the unlikely figure of Diamond Lil, Mae West herself. It came about in an amusing way. After Edward James gave up his expensive plan to turn one of his rooms into a dog’s insides, he kept pestering Dalí to do something else. Dalí had already painted a fanciful gouache, Mae West’s Face which May be Used as a Surrealist Apartment, in 1934–35, and James would not let the idea rest. He suggested the two slitty eyes could be nicely framed on either side as pictures, the nose could assume the function of a fireplace, and the generous mouth would make a perfect sofa. Schiaparelli was brought into the discussion. She was ready to entertain the idea of owning the sofa but it had to be in pink, not leather, as was at first suggested. In the end she did not buy it, but the whole idea of doing something about Mae West was in the air.
After dressing so many small, neat actresses with their wispy outlines, as well as her diet-conscious society clientele, it comes as something of a shock to find Schiaparelli enthusing over a silhouette as lumpy and bumpy as the one Mae West presented to the world. To abandon the slim, boyish silhouette was tantamount to turning one’s back on all the gains women had made, in terms of equality and opportunity, since the end of World War I. At the same time there was a curious kind of contrarian streak in Schiaparelli. She found the idea of a woman being supported by a man (as she never had been herself) admirable. She was against too much involvement of young women in sports; it was not womanly somehow. She privately thought American men were much too indulgent of their women. These pronouncements suggest an undercurrent, an unexpressed yearning to be cherished and cared for, that can be glimpsed from her memory of a dashing suitor on horseback. There was another, perfectly reasonable objection to the flat-fronted dress. Girls really did look better with a bustline. As it happened, she was starting to build falsies into her dresses, another interesting idea that would be picked up and exploited by everyone in years to come. In that respect Bettina Bergery had yet another anecdote to tell. She wrote, “By way of your invention of ‘falsies’—In the days when Marthe was a fitter I had a tight blue lamé dress, and she made a pair of them for me and put them in the bodice. I wore the dress out, very padded and proud. ‘What do you think of my figure tonight?’ I asked Gaston, who replied, ‘Most interesting. You look like the Wolf of Rome.’ Something had slipped and I had four poitrines! So the dress was done over and the false breasts were built in—But when I afterwards told a woman it was a marvellous dress that would give anyone a figure like Venus, Gaston added, ‘Non, Diane d’Ephèse’ (the goddess with a thousand breasts)!”
Schiaparelli’s chance to design for an hourglass silhouette came in 1937, when she was asked to dress Mae West for the film Every Day’s a Holiday, set at
the turn of the century when the shape of a woman’s body was at its most pronounced or, some would argue, deformed. Mae West did not come for fittings but sent her measurements in absentia, in the form of a plaster look-alike. Schiaparelli went to work with a will and came up with something form-fitting and flamboyant that cleverly added height and detracted from the matronly expanse of bosom and hip. The outfit was created in pale lilac and decorated with an art nouveau band of pink and mauve that went from shoulder to hip. Not that color mattered much in the days of black and white film, but cutting every dress in monotones was too awful to contemplate, and so designers continued as if they were working for color film long before they actually did. Schiaparelli was sure the great star would like the results of this and several other choice designs. By the time they reached the West Coast, however, her creations had to be redone. Mae West’s weight had shot up and she had to be shown in darker dresses with darker colors behind her so that her outlines would blend in mercifully with the background. Sitting or lounging was in, and movement out—heaven forbid she should be seen sideways—which accounts for the curious static quality of much of her later acting, as if she were a magnificent reproduction of herself fashioned by Madame Tussaud. On the other hand, Schiaparelli had a new costume period to play with, and one of the Edwardian-style full-length capes she designed for the film, of flounced tulle in delicate pastels, was a hit in Paris.
She loved Mae West. She “brought back the frills and the curves and the pride of the feminine figure.” Schiaparelli had reason to be grateful. Mae West’s example helped to launch one of the most wildly successful gambles she ever took.
The reason was bound up with her decision, in 1934, to begin a new line of perfume. Designers linking their names with perfumes went back to the end of World War I. Chanel, for instance, launched her floral bouquet, the enduring Chanel No. 5, in 1921. Patou was particularly successful in 1925 with three fragrances, followed by his well-known Joy in 1929 and Normandie in 1935, to commemorate the maiden voyage of that French ocean liner. Almost eight hundred perfumes were created between 1919 and 1930, most of them a combination of natural floral essences and synthetic substances requiring the cunning of a chemist and a nose to rival that of the most fastidious wine connoisseur. Once assembled, the perfume needed a name.
For all her drive and daring, at base Schiaparelli was as scared as anyone else about undertaking a new venture, and that made her superstitious. She would panic in a taxi, so she had to be driven everywhere by a chauffeur. Numbers were terrible omens or augured success. One of her reasons for buying her house on the Rue de Berri was that its number was 22. Two plus two equaled four, and four was her lucky number. The letter S was very big. She used S for everything she could lay her hands on—a pet dog, her new perfumes—and she even liked people based entirely on whether their surnames began with an S. So S it had to be, but when the time came to name the new fragrance every word in the dictionary seemed to be registered. Then she thought of “Shocking.”
The perfume, along with the color for which she is also best known, seem to have come together almost simultaneously. Roger Jean-Pierre recalled that he had shown Schiaparelli a collection of new button designs by Jean Clément, including a set, fabricated to her requirements, in a rose pink. One of the colors was more than rosy. It was strident, blazing. It was hot.
“Elsa Schiaparelli looked at it, a bit shocked but also thrilled. ‘Oh! Roger, I am going to take this one, and we are going to call it Shocking Pink.’ ” The vibrant pink took off almost at once and invaded every conceivable item of clothing. Women’s Wear Daily tracked it as far as hats, which were usually in neutral colors to blend in better with whatever someone was wearing. “Everywhere you go you are greeted with entire hats or hat trimmings in the daring, sometimes glaring, petunia pink shades which all started with Schiaparelli’s Shocking …” The name was, in a curious way, also appropriate for the perfume, which had a heavy, lingering, almost sultry appeal. But what was really risqué was the decision to bottle it in a torso shape, practically a nude Mae West. Where the head should have been was a bouquet of flowers, a tape measure took the place of an impromptu scarf, hiding nothing, and a little belt had a button-shaped buckle with the initial S on it. It was impudent femininity and definitely a bit of a shock.
One of Schiaparelli’s super-sized buttons on a salutary theme: the invariable letter S (illustration credit 8.9)
When Bettina Bergery wrote her reminiscences in 1940, she had just used up her last bottle of Schiaparelli and was bereft. She thought back fondly to the perfume atomizer that always stood on the table underneath a mirror, so that customers, as they wafted through the salons, could squirt the penetrating aroma on their gloves or behind their ears. That is to say, everyone except Marie-Laure de Noailles, who would “toss her skirts over her head like a can-can dancer to drench her short petticoat with a heavy spray of ‘Shocking.’ ” Then there was Christian Bérard, always called Bébé, famous for his rolling tires of unwashed flesh, who “used to stand squeaking with pleasure as he sprayed his beard until the perfume ran down on an always torn, and usually dirty, shirt.” Fifteen years later Schiaparelli could look back with satisfaction. “The success was immense and immediate. The perfume, without advertising of any sort, took a leading place, and the colour ‘Shocking’ established itself forever as a classic.”
The label turned out to have any number of uses, even as social protest. The telephone was in general use by then, but erratic and unpredictable—as for the directory, the celebrated Bottin, it listed numbers by address rather than name until well after World War II—and the instrument itself could be dangerous. One hapless caller who picked up the handset during a thunderstorm was shocked insensible. In a celebrated case, the victim sued the phone company, and Schiaparelli is said to have seized the opportunity to launch a “Shocking” handbag and Dalí designed it in the shape of a telephone. A variation on that idea in the form of a compact, well used, showed up on eBay in June 2013 and sold for $316.
Schiaparelli was always travelling, mostly with her “beau Peter,” alias Henry Horne. They were invited, for instance, with a party of guests to Sweden and Denmark on “Graham White’s yacht.” By then Parfums Schiaparelli, which started out in a modest way in Paris, had grown into three divisions, the others being in Britain and the United States. In December 1936 Elsa and Henry sailed from Hamilton, Bermuda, on the SS Monarch, bound for New York. Stemco, a subsidiary of Standard Oil, owned the American company, and Schiaparelli very much wanted to buy them out. Henry, as the great financier, now controlled something called the LeHythe Trust in London, which was going to put up the money. The deal was successful, and by 1937 Henry S. Horne had become chairman of all three branches of Parfums Schiaparelli. He was, in other words, her business partner on equal terms.
It seems reasonable to assume that their personal relationship was “on” again at that point. When she and Gogo left Britain for a trip to India in 1939, she gave Henry’s office address, 19 Buckingham Gate S.W., as her “last address in the United Kingdom.” The terms of the 1936 contract would become the source of much bitterness and resentment for Schiaparelli in years to come. In the meantime, she had all of Henry’s largesse, professionally and privately, and Allan in the background as insurance. This has to be one of the few times that a couturière—or anybody—had such a close and cozy relationship with two brothers at once.
She and Henry were also making trips to South America, presumably to open markets, and in constant search for the rare ingredients essential to the manufacture of Shocking. Travel was a way of relaxing, of relief from the pressure of work and a source of new ideas.
She wrote: “Creating fashion is terribly exhausting. It is a daily fight, a weekly battle, a monthly war. In Paris, a three-months-old fashion is stone dead.” One dared not forget that one carried, “like a steel ball chained to the ankle,” the business implications of every decision, which somehow had to be justified. “When a motor car manufact
urer brings out a new car the old models are not all thrown immediately onto the scrap heap. Some of them may last 20 years on the road. But imagine a 20-year-old dress in Paris.
Among the regulars in Schiaparelli’s circle of friends: Boris Kochno, Marie-Laure de Noailles, and an impish “Bébé” Bérard, 1930s (illustration credit 8.10)
“An out-of-date dress is absolutely worthless. You can do nothing with it. Because the dress is not merely out of fashion in a vague general way. All its component parts are out of favour—its colour, the material, even the yardage.
“I have created dresses that I have loved—and which have been failures. But we do not call these failures by the bitter appellation of ‘flops.’ A dress, several dresses, even an entire collection which does not please, often means that you are ahead of your time …”
Schiaparelli did not mention Poiret in this context, but Janet Flanner did. She noted that fashion moved on, but Poiret clung to his “bizarre, female Oriental last like a coachmaker who, after the invention of automobiles, continues to fabricate magnificent ornate six-horse barouches.” This was not going to be Schiaparelli, at least not yet. For five years, from 1935 to 1939, she was at the height of her powers with collections that, while showing the same underlying themes, kept her clients astonished and delighted with her seemingly inexhaustible inventiveness and wit. She eclipsed everyone, including Chanel, to become the most important couturier in Paris.
Elsa Schiaparelli Page 19