As Judith Warner described her, Coco Chanel was not much of a human being: wily, grasping, opportunistic, anti-Semitic, and a terrible snob. Yet “her clean, modern, kinetic designs, which brought a high-society look to low-regarded fabrics, revolutionized women’s fashion and to this day have kept her name synonymous with the most glorious notions of French taste and élan.” Bettina Bergery detested her. She observed that Chanel lived in a great house on the Rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré between the Club Interalliée and the British Embassy, filled with Coromandel screens and bronze gilt gazelles, and was grander than anybody. Yet when she first appeared, she was very shy and hardly said a word. Now, “she talks faster than a sewing machine. She has the cruel eyes of a swan and the beak of Donald Duck.”
This was for private consumption. Publicly one had to be polite because one saw Chanel everywhere, had close friends in common (Misia Sert and her ex-husband, José-Maria Sert), and it had to be conceded that the great couturière had blazed a trail that younger women had followed: the ready-to-wear idea, the courting of socialites and film stars, and the launching of exclusive perfumes. Of course they were rivals, privately damning each other with faint praise. It is also claimed that Chanel once succeeded in setting Schiaparelli on fire. At one of the last great costume balls before the outbreak of World War II, Bettina Ballard wrote, Chanel, costumed as herself, dared Schiaparelli, who had disguised herself as a surrealist tree, to dance with her. “With purposeful innocence” Chanel steered her dance partner straight into a chandelier ablaze with candles, and Schiaparelli caught fire. “The fire was put out—and so was Schiaparelli—by delighted guests squirting her with soda water.” Just how Chanel had almost put her rival out of business was the topic of gossip for days afterward.
The little bouquets of flower heads that topped the bottles of Schiaparelli perfume were designed by the preeminent maker of exquisite embroidery, the Maison Lesage. The origins of this establishment go back to the house of Michonet, which provided embroidery for Doucet and Worth and served as embroiderer to Napoleon III. Albert Lesage bought Michonet in 1924 and continued to add further luster to its commanding reputation. By 1984, Lesage was perhaps the most prestigious and proficient embroidery house in the world, creating 50 to 90 percent of the couture embroideries for all the great French designers, including Dior, Chanel, and Yves Saint Laurent, with more than $3 million in sales. Albert’s son François, an outgoing, convivial specialist, would promise the impossible—and then deliver. Three days before leaving for Tokyo, the wife of French President François Mitterrand ordered a Dior jacket. Everything was done by hand, and this one needed three hundred hours of manual labor. Lesage delivered. Such exquisite work did not come cheap. In 2003 a basic suit with a skirt started at about $40,000, and an evening gown, resplendent in ribbons, gold leaf, and crystal, could easily cost over $100,000.
François Lesage, who succeeded his father, was known for his versatility in design. Whether motifs from Chinese porcelains, murals in medieval churches, or Aubusson rugs, artwork by Klimt, Rousseau, or Cocteau, Lesage created them all. He recalled queueing up as a boy with his father at the tradesmen’s entrance waiting for an audience with the great couturier, a remnant of nineteenth-century snobbishness that lingered on for decades. He also remembered that Schiaparelli would claim he was the only one who would laugh in her presence. He said, “If she liked something she would say, ‘Trrrrès bien,’ rolling her R’s. ‘Vous avez trrrès bien trrravaillé.’ ” She was brilliant and enthusiastic, generous as well, but hard to please. Albert Lesage began working for Schiaparelli in a small way and rapidly became her exclusive embroiderer. While she was demanding, as a judge of talent no one was happier when the results were pleasing, and no one was more versatile. François Lesage said, “When you look at couturiers, they may go back and use the same design elements every 20 or 25 years. Schiaparelli never did. For her, one good idea was the springboard to the next and she never repeated herself.” That was because she was, first and foremost, an artist, temperamental and explosive like all Italians. He also sensed a pervasive melancholia, a kind of subterranean anxiety that she kept well hidden.
Schiaparelli’s inspired collaboration with the incomparable designer Lesage is evident in this ensemble of upturned hat and black jacket studded with brilliants on patent leather. (illustration credit 8.11)
Her restless imagination demanded constant stimulus, and the Maison Lesage, with its infinite numbers of colors, threads, sequins, beads, rhinestones, shells, ribbons, and feathers, provided that, and more. Almost all the Schiaparelli designs of the next few years owed their success in large part to the exquisite embroidery from the house of Lesage, including Cocteau’s design of a girl with flowing hair. On one of her periodic trips to Paris to buy clothes, Marlene Dietrich bought several ensembles from Schiaparelli, including a short black crepe dress and black wool jacket embroidered on the lapels and down the front with sequined palm trees in gold, a jacket Schiaparelli liked so much that she wore it herself.
The Duchess of Windsor’s trousseau contained eighteen models from Schiaparelli’s 1937 summer collection, including an evening suit in black trimmed with a rococo appliqué of white leather. This striking design became one of Schiaparelli’s most widely copied models, and even makes a brief Hollywood appearance in Love Finds Andy Hardy (1938). The Duchess also bought a sky-blue jacket decorated, where a row of buttons should have been, with some enormous plastic butterflies, as well as a black evening gown printed with butterflies and worn under a black coat in heavy silk net, appropriately fastened at the waist with a butterfly clasp. Butterflies were big in 1937—another surrealist theme. One of Schiaparelli’s most enchanting summer dresses was sleeveless, in the new three-quarter length, consisting entirely of multicolored butterflies on a pink ground, a theme that is still being revived.
Perhaps Schiaparelli’s most brilliantly conceived collection of the prewar years centered around the circus idea and presented handsome opportunities for Lesage, the artist in embroidery. Its arrival in February 1938 coincided with the International Exhibition of Surrealism which had opened in Paris three weeks before, and demonstrated the extent to which she was still in the thrall of surrealist ideas. Dilys Blum wrote, “Tall peaked clown hats vied for attention with such Surrealist jokes as a hat in the shape of a giant inkwell with a quill pen thrust through the top, and a feathered toque shaped like a sitting hen. There were handbags that looked like balloons, and spats were worn as gloves. Boldly colored print fabrics with circus-inspired designs … were used for … day and evening wear.” Buttons took the shape of prancing horses, and the embroidered evening jacket, with its elephants and acrobats on flying trapezes, that Helena Rubinstein bought, made its splendid debut. “Circus performers raced through the … interior decorated by Jean-Michel Frank, up and down the staircases, and in and out of the windows, while mannequins sauntered through the rooms wearing some of Schiaparelli’s most imaginative designs …” At a charity gala at the Opéra in the summer of 1938, during intermission, some seventeen well-dressed ladies could be found wearing the identical embroidered bolero of elephants and performing horses, François Lesage remarked. New York department stores picked up, not just ideas in the forms of buttons, clips, pins, and the like, but whole window displays. Lord & Taylor invented a striped dress and called it the Ringmaster. Bonwit Teller used a merry-go-round theme for its Fifth Avenue windows. Schiaparelli was at the head of the parade, and the fashion world eagerly followed.
In the summer of 1937 Schiaparelli explored the creative possibilities of butterflies, as in this ivory organdy, waltz-length evening dress with a multicolored print. (illustration credit 8.12)
Not to be outdone, that summer Elsie de Wolfe held a Circus Ball in the grounds of her Villa Trianon, complete with acrobats (clad in pink satin), ponies, and three orchestras. The hostess herself, Schiaparelli noted, “walked between the legs of the elephants. She was draped in a long floating cape of shocking pink and brandished a whip �
��” The 1937–38 season was full of irresistible clothes, such as a militarycut jacket in purple wool smothered with thick gold metal strips and brightly colored, engraved metal buttons marching down the front to the hemline. There was a military cloak cut along severely simple lines but emblazoned at the neckline with a huge V-shaped band of strips and coils of gold plate embroidered on red taffeta. There was a burst of spectacular embroidery on a jacket of wine-colored silk velvet that Gala Dalí wore to the opening-night party at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1939, contrasting with the more muted but elegant jacket in black velvet, trimmed with gold passementerie, that Millicent Rogers wore for her photograph in Vogue. These magnificent creations were more than novelties; they became prized possessions, and some have survived to become museum exhibits.
Schiaparelli’s collections at the end of the 1930s outdid themselves in splendor and surprise. There was a pagan collection, which led Lesage to add sinuously trailing vines of blossoms in silver and pink sequins over a black crepe evening dress. There was also a plastic necklace shaped like a collar, decorated with a creepy-crawly assortment of insects: flies, beetles, moths, bees, wasps, and dragonflies in suitable silvers, greens, and shocking pinks. There was her musical collection—more opportunities for Lesage to embroider all manner of gilt metallic bells, silver tambourines, violins, cymbals, horns, even a piano keyboard—at neckline, waist, and hips. Schiap’s musical evening dress, silver notes and staves spangled across floating chiffon, was worn by Gogo to a British Embassy soiree in 1939. There was another triumphant collection inspired by the commedia dell’arte, appropriate for a designer born in Italy, in blazing theatrical shades of Pulcinella green, Tabarin red, Pierrot blue, Mezzetin pink, and Capitan yellow. The theme of the mask, an integral part of the commedia, was one Schiaparelli began using in 1935–36 and developed further for the new collection, along with felt and bicorne hats, not to mention veils of alluring black lace. But perhaps the most memorable creation from that series is an amazing harlequin coat made of felt patchwork, in triangles and squares of bright blue, red, and yellow, edged with black. (That miracle of invention is among the prized items in the Schiaparelli collection in Philadelphia.)
The theme that perhaps struck closest to Schiaparelli’s heart also depended on the genius of Lesage for its fullest realization. Called the Zodiac collection, it was prepared for the winter of 1938–39. As explained by Hortense MacDonald, then in her element as Schiaparelli’s publicity agent, the silhouette took its cue from Elements, Euclid’s treatise on geometry, being slim and square-shouldered, with a slightly raised waistline. Materials and colors suggested the Sun King of Versailles, Louis XIV, with great bursts of gold on black and pink, as illustrated by Elsie de Wolfe’s Neptune cape. Or they reflected the celestial worlds of moon and planets. Moiré silks and silver embroideries changed color in the flickering light, and gave off brilliant flashes from tiny mirrors hidden among embroidered rhinestones and glass beads. The most spectacular of all was a jacket of deep blue silk velvet, lavishly embroidered down the front with the signs of the zodiac in gold and silver. Embroidered on the bodice were shooting stars, silver moons, twirling planets, and the myriad stars of the Milky Way. Tucked away on the left shoulder was a diagram of Ursa Major, a mute reminder of the astrological symbol Elsa Schiaparelli carried as a badge of honor on her left cheek.
As Schiaparelli’s imagination shifted toward the ever more idiosyncratic and fantastical, so did her decor. The next big move of household came about in 1937. Her lease was up, which was intensely annoying as it meant that she had to go looking for a house and was far too busy. But then she had a stroke of luck. A shabby eighteenth-century hôtel particulier was languishing a few blocks away from the rond-point where her mentor, the great Poiret, once held court. Down the street, on the Champs-Elysées, there were bars, garages, gramophones, and nightclubs. But at 22 Rue de Berri one could hear cooing doves and find pigeons strutting on the lawns of a deep, secret garden. The eighteen-room mansion was close to the Belgian Embassy, and it was said that a secret passage connected the embassy to that refuge, once owned by Princess Mathilde Bonaparte, a niece of Napoleon Bonaparte’s and first cousin to Napoleon III. Schiaparelli wrote, “I learned years later to my great surprise that I was distantly, very distantly,” related to the princess. “I bought it on the spot.”
By then Schiaparelli had lost interest in the clean, spare lines of the modern movement, in favor of flamboyant and unpredictable juxtapositions that rivaled Dalí’s. The dining-room table, for instance, might be dressed with what appeared to be gold plates—actually Victorian vermeil, she noted—on gold tablecloths. But there might be the oddest assortment of glasses, and sometimes yellow and pink tablecloths embroidered in gold might appear—she had found them in Tunisia. In her travels she had a magpie’s eye for whatever was unusual or even slightly sinister, like the seventeenth-century Venetian statues that greeted guests at the entrance. They were life-size, made of wood, with cloven hoofs, and became known as Monsieur and Madame Satan. She wrote that they received the guests “with enigmatic smiles and snapping eyes.” Her bathroom was a source of constant comment, since it was half a place to get undressed and half a comfortable living room where she would often eat a solitary dinner. Downstairs in the basement she had set up a kind of bistro, with a zinc-topped bar and naughty posters, which became popular as a post-theatre hangout for her friends. She would stand behind the bar and whip up a pasta dish. She was a surprisingly good cook.
The room she loved most was her library. She had discovered the most beautiful tapestries by Boucher—well, Jean-Michel Frank detested tapestries and so did she, she said loyally, but these were in a class by themselves. They were not quite wide enough for the wall, and so Frank was coaxed to continue the pattern in the intervening space. He became quite intrigued by the challenge, and soon the room “had a completely unbroken line with smiling figures in a symphony of colours, singing, dancing and playing instruments with little bells attached to them” in stately enjoyment of a summer fête. Bookshelves were added to repeat the theme of chinoiserie and the whole was an eclectic clutter of paintings, photographs, bronzes, figurines, pretty inlaid boxes, and much else, scattered over the piano, on the mantelpiece, on chairs and the floor. Schiaparelli might appear in this exotic setting dressed in a multicolored Chinese robe and wearing fantastical jewelry. There she would sit in her special chair, her daughter recalled, looking at her silently with that grave, unyielding look. “And I was trembling in my shoes.”
One of her trips took her to Russia. In her memoir she makes the disingenuous comment that she had never been involved in politics, but this is hardly true, since she and Willie were demonstrating and lecturing on behalf of Bolshevism in Boston in 1918, and in those days she was calmly describing to a government agent how easy it was to make a bomb. If she had once been an anarchist, now that she was at the pinnacle of the luxury trade she was one no longer. But she was certainly in sympathy with the socialist goals of Gaston and Bettina, and would have approved of their wedding, with its red and white flags and Bettina’s red cape. The French were sending a trade exhibition of textiles, champagne, perfumes, and the like to Moscow, and Schiaparelli, considered “the image of a sophisticated world,” was invited to go along. Without ever quite saying that she wanted to go, she, Hortense MacDonald, and Cecil Beaton boarded the Trans-Siberian Railway in December 1936, bundled to the ears, and set off.
This undated photograph depicts Schiaparelli in the kind of at-home finery she liked to wear, and with her much-loved tapestry in the background. (illustration credit 8.13)
An imaginary conversation between Stalin and Schiaparelli is suggested by a parachutist’s flight of fancy following her trip to Moscow in November 1935. (illustration credit 8.14)
Once they arrived at the frontier and changed onto Russian trains Schiaparelli was confronted with the discomforts she would find everywhere: dirty carriages, drab hotels with torn sheets and no water, plus hordes of
women in dingy clothes, tramping about in boots, mannish overcoats, and black kerchiefs, cleaning carriages and sweeping the streets. It was a world of suspicion and privation. In her Leningrad hotel, the ashtrays and lamps were chained to the wall, and she was offered, with great ceremony, a piece of used soap. The only food not in short supply were the great barrels of caviar to be found in any grocery store. Her companions wanted to order meat and fish; she subsisted on chunks of bread and caviar washed down with vodka.
Like any tourist, she went sightseeing, to the Kremlin vaults, with their exquisite pontifical robes, their horses’ harnesses encrusted with precious stones, and their astonishing Fabergé objets of quartz, gold, and white enamel. The French exhibition was displaying European magazines, among other things, and she was fascinated to see how interested the Russian visitors were. But they seemed primarily intent on making dresses rather than buying them. Returning to her hotel room unexpectedly, she was astonished to discover four women on the floor busily making patterns of her clothes. They were mortified; she was merely amused. She sat on the bed and good-naturedly gave the would-be forgers a few tips on how to do it faster.
She was proud of the outfit she designed for Russian women: a simple and practical black dress, belted, with a white collar like the ones her own workers wore, along with a loose red coat lined in black. She added a neat little cap that could easily be copied, and which had a hidden pocket, but this was turned down as too easy for pickpockets to steal. Beaton, who took his usual huge portfolio of pictures, never published them. But one exists of Schiaparelli somewhere in a Moscow street, wearing a vast fur coat and gesturing toward a mailbox. She is wearing a massive bracelet made of bread.
Elsa Schiaparelli Page 20