She wanted to bring home any number of souvenirs but had to settle for a fat coffee pot in silver gilt. The best souvenir, it turned out, was the one she received after she returned. It was a caricature; in it Stalin, in dark green, a red star emblazoned on his jacket, floats down to earth in a parachute—the Russians were mad about parachutes just then—and puffing on a pipe. Schiaparelli (who never actually met him), in a fetching red jumpsuit, floats down beside him with an alluring smile. Stalin is saying she should go away and leave Russian women alone. She replies that perhaps they don’t want to be left alone; they want to look fashionable. Stalin: “Perhaps I had better cut your parachute down.” Schiaparelli: “A hundred other couturiers would replace me.”
That was too much. “In that case,” Stalin said, “cut my ropes!”
CHAPTER 9
* * *
SCANDALOUS SCHIAP
Tanto è amara, che poco è più morte!
— DANTE, INFERNO
Death could scarce be more bitter than that place!
— DANTE, INFERNO, TRANS. JOHN CIARDI
A great many aspects of Elsa Schiaparelli’s life will probably never be known. She was not much of a letter writer, confining herself, as all captains of industry must do, to a few taut commands scrawled across a page. If she had a diary, it has not survived. Her memoir is an example of an evasiveness that was almost automatic; pages of superfluous description of minor events and irrelevant anecdotes. Apart from a few cryptic references, one would hardly know she had been married, and the daughter she dearly loved is largely absent from her narrative. Her circle of friends is no longer alive, and the granddaughter who did know her well did not respond to repeated requests for an interview. Marisa Berenson has, however, left a kind of record in two volumes of reminiscence, as yet not translated from the French.
On the other hand, the most revealing aspects of Schiaparelli’s writings are the early chapters, so we know something of her neglected and emotionally starved childhood, her conviction of ugliness, and her single-minded determination to escape. There is her resourcefulness in freeing herself from a self-destructive husband and finding a way to support herself and Gogo. Her sense of daring, not to say her gambler’s instinct. Her belated discovery of her artistic gifts, which made use of a sculptural sense, her rebellious instincts, and her intuitive understanding of the way women of her generation felt about themselves. There was her sense of whimsy and the unexpected, even impudence, that enlivened her work and gave it immediacy and verve. Her conjuror’s sleight-of-hand. She could have been, probably was, a fine actress.
We know that she was surprisingly modest, disciplined, even shy, abstemious in her habits, moderate in her diet, kept regular hours, and liked vigorous exercise—she was an excellent skier. As far as can be determined, her one indulgence was smoking. She told an interviewer, “I smoke a private blend of Turkish and American tobacco cigarettes made for me with Shocking Pink tips.” Another recurrent practice had to do with being photographed. This was customary for designers, who liked showing themselves off in their own clothes, but seems to have become a compulsion, as if she were looking for a way to see herself anew through others’ eyes. It is clear that her need to stick out her tongue at conformity and the bourgeoisie was in curious conflict with an undertone of her personality, a sense of what was right and fitting that was itself conventional. Her lifelong indignation at oppression and exploitation, her genuine solicitude for her staff, her generous wages and benefits, her loyalty and her penchant for giving expensive presents, were all well known.
There was the voracious appetite for books, from Shakespeare to detective novels, for the theatre, cinema, and constant travel. Her hatred of telephones is perhaps less known, along with her need for a quiet environment and her dislike of shopping. That dislike did not extend to antiques or looking for shoes; she had an enormous collection and was proud of her small, perfect feet. There were her superstitious side, her extravagance, her flair for publicity, and her reclusiveness. Her fluency in French and English. Her constant creative dissatisfactions. Janet Flanner perceptively saw “the tacit secrecy of a talented child, too gifted and disabused to attempt an explanation to adults.” She once said she disliked being touched.
Everyone knew she was famously difficult, giving rise to the suspicion that frustrations experienced elsewhere were likely to fall like an avalanche on the person unlucky enough to swim into focus at that moment. In a postwar interview Bettina Bergery said, “Her habits were those of a woman used to independence who often went to bed late. Since she was obliged to get up early, she said to me once, ‘Don’t bother me in the morning; I am always in a very bad mood.’ But by lunchtime she was always glad to see me.” Another longtime friend, Nadia Georges-Picot, interjected, “She was terribly angry sometimes …” Bettina responded that at such moments the trick was to change the subject, and one could usually coax her back into a good humor.
Since Schiaparelli was a perfectionist, she was often frustrated. The jeweler Roger Jean-Pierre recalled working for Schiaparelli in the 1930s. One of Schiaparelli’s collections had a maritime theme, and so he designed a delicious confection of buttons shaped like seashells. Two days before the collection was due to be shown, Schiaparelli discovered that a rival designer, Vera Borea, had also used shells on some of her principal models. He said, “We had to change every button in the collection in forty-eight hours.” He added, “She was like an orchestral conductor; she knew how to get each person to deliver the very best they were capable of.” On the other hand she could be surprisingly tolerant. One of her models, Barbara Raponet, was once invited for drinks in the Rue de Berri. She found Madame in the salon along with a small dog named Gouru-Gouru. She was offered a whiskey and, to her horror, spilled it on a priceless carpet. Schiaparelli just laughed. “Don’t worry about it,” she said. “We’ll say it was the dog.”
Schiaparelli had certain characteristics in common with Frank Lloyd Wright. There was the same resourcefulness, expansiveness, and calm self-confidence. As with Wright, the fact that she made so few superfluous moves, and accomplished so much in a short period, argues for an ability to seize an opportunity and also make her own chances, which is rarer. If it is possible to have too many ideas, some of them awful, she and he shared that characteristic. Wright, who launched a vision of American architecture that has shaped a national identity, was famously impractical about materials, capable of designing offices in the shapes of triangles that were almost unlivable and a mile-high skyscraper for the Chicago waterfront that, fortunately, was never built. As for Schiaparelli, whatever value the shoe hat and the lamb chop hat had as publicity stunts, they were impossible to wear. Then there was a collection based on Eskimo clothing that was a dud almost before it hit the runways.
A more serious issue for them both was the choices they made in close relationships. Wright was mesmerized by Miriam Noel, a sculptor and self-professed aesthete who turned out to be a drug addict and made his life hellish before he managed to divorce her. As can be seen in the De Kerlor relationship, where her emotions were concerned Schiaparelli famously jumped first and regretted it later, a lack of judgment that got her into trouble repeatedly. She was too easily swayed, too charmed by attention, too attracted to reckless, even destructive behavior where some people were concerned. Jumping out of windows and down stairs—it was all too close to the Dalinean model, which was probably why they liked each other. Once she was betrayed, she would withdraw into her shell, confused and bitter.
One can also see in her characteristics that seem a part of the Italian national inheritance, if one can believe Luigi Barzini, who described them at length in his masterpiece The Italians. Her work habits reveal her Italian love of system, as reflected in the national impulse to lay out streets, piazze, avenues, and landscapes with mathematical precision. For instance, there was Schiaparelli’s system of giving each of her creations its own space in a long wall fitted out with dozens of tiny drawers, each item identified by
color, fabric, embroidery, fastenings, and sketches, in perfect assembly. In common with her countrymen she also showed the evidence of garbo, an Italian word that defies easy translation but that is evident in “the grace with which the tailor cuts a coat to flatter the lines of the body,” Barzini wrote. It has to do with careful circumspection, as when one wishes to switch political parties, or the delicacy shown at the necessary end of a love affair. Without garbo a patriotic speech would become hollow, a building buried in decoration, or a piece of music unbearably flamboyant. A sense of rightness, of what was fitting: Schiaparelli’s creations showed how well she had mastered the lessons of “credibility and good taste.”
Schiaparelli, neatly clad in white, is at work in her study cataloguing the myriad of details required: an undated photograph, probably mid-1930s. (illustration credit 9.1)
There was also what has been considered a fault but has been a necessity for a country that existed only as a group of warring city-states less than a century earlier: the gift for the polite lie, the evasive response, and the half-truth. Barzini writes, “An Italian learns from childhood that he must keep his mouth shut and think twice before doing anything at all. Everything he touches may be a booby-trap; the next step … may lead him over a mine-field; every word he pronounces or writes may be used against him some day.” That was a lesson Schiaparelli had also learned, as her memoir demonstrates. And if there was a certain melancholic conviction that nothing ever lasted for long, that was Italian too, based on centuries of bitter historical experience that one might have to flee for one’s life at a moment’s notice. Schiaparelli’s triumph, to have her name coupled with one of the world’s most powerful men in the Stalin caricature, would have brought her superstitious nature little joy. She would have echoed Napoleon’s mother at a moment when her son ruled all of Europe: “Pourvu que ça dure”—For as long as it lasts. She would have been right. Schiaparelli was about to confront the biggest crisis of her life.
In 1939 Schiaparelli was at the pinnacle of her power and influence as the preeminent dress designer (the word “dressmaker” was still being used) in Paris, and that meant the world. Publicly, “the violent sniping within the ranks of the left, and between the left and right, was taking place in seeming oblivion to Germany’s massive military build-up and blatant territorial ambition,” Alan Riding wrote in And the Show Went On. It was so much background noise. As Bettina Bergery wrote of Léon Blum, the popular socialist leader, head of the Front Populaire, who was a Jew, nobody in France wanted war, and certainly not over the question of Poland. That was somebody else’s quarrel. Neither was there much public sympathy for Jews. The argument went that they had been told to leave Germany, so why did they stay on where they weren’t wanted? “When the Communists were on the side of Moscow, which was on the side of Germany until Hitler invaded Russia, ‘Death to Jews’ began to be written on the walls all over France …” Bettina Bergery was being tactful. The actual words were “Blum au poteau” or, Blum to the stake. Her aristocratic friends were antiwar, and with some justification, given the still visible and invisible scars of World War I. Elsa was certainly anti-Mussolini: “The fantastic rise of Mussolini filled me with fear,” she wrote in her memoir. It also spurred her into being politically active. Postwar French intelligence established that, during 1939 at least, she was a member of the Solidarité Internationale Antifasciste, with offices at 26 Rue Crussol in the 11th arrondissement. This organization was a loose gathering of libertarians, anarchists, socialists, Trotskyists, and revolutionaries (though not communists), rather putting paid to her disingenuous comment, in her memoir, that she had never taken part in politics.
In the U.S., the isolationist movement kept America out of the war until Pearl Harbor. In Britain, a vocal and well-placed group of upper-class English was equally successful in those years. The country estate of their titular head, Nancy (Viscountess) Astor, was named Cliveden, so they became the Cliveden set. An echo of their well-meaning objectives and muddled thinking can be discerned from the 1993 film Remains of the Day. Noel Annan, an astute observer of a whole generation caught up in World War II, described Nancy Astor as convinced there would be no war and ruthlessly effective in silencing the opposition. He wrote, “Unique as she was, our generation thought her typical of the ruling class: numbed by fear of communism and hypnotized like rabbits by the fascist stoat.” Then there was Oswald Mosley, head of the pro-German British Union of Fascists, whose wife, Diana, was a close friend of Bettina’s and Elsa’s. There were other friends, such as the Duke and Duchess of Windsor, who visited Germany in 1936 as Hitler’s guests and were much photographed shaking his hand. After the war began, as Kenneth Clark writes in The Other Half, one still had to deal with people like Harold Nicolson, who often voiced the opinion that “all we can do is lie on our backs with our paws in the air and hope that no one will stamp on our tummies.”
On the Place Vendôme, life’s heady pleasures continued undisturbed. How wonderful it was, Hortense MacDonald wrote years later, when they were all young and gay and what Schiaparelli was going to do next was all that mattered to the ultra-rich, not to mention Fifth Avenue buyers. All of Paris migrated to the country on weekends to lunch at roadside inns and walk afterwards in the verdant forests on the outskirts of Paris. And so everyone was still wearing smart tweeds that Sunday evening when le tout-Paris gathered to see Ram Gopal, Hindu dancer and choreographer, “the Indian Nijinsky,” perform at the Musée Guimet. It was standing room only for Serge Lifar, Gertrude Stein, and Schiaparelli. As for the night Marian Anderson appeared at the Opéra, Baroness Baracco of Naples, Mrs. Marjorie Wilson of New York, and other prominent New York socialites attended a dinner party at Schiaparelli’s wearing velvet and taffeta, and the subtle aroma of Shocking permeated the opera boxes in which they sat for the performance.
The young Comtesse René de Chambrun danced in Schiaparelli’s white organza dress embroidered with mimosa for the black-tie evening at Aux Ambassadeurs in June 1937. In the fall of 1938, Schiaparelli’s black moiré dress no. 648, with a satin stripe and matching black jacket, was so popular for street wear that it was glimpsed on no less than six prominent ladies, including a princess, a countess, and a baroness. But then, the days when a client could demand the exclusive use of a single creation were long gone. When Schiaparelli designed a particularly fetching “Venetian” cape of crumpled silk taffeta with a becoming hood, three prominent ladies wore it to the same soirée. They were Elsie de Wolfe, who chose green, Daisy Fellowes, in a vivid rose version, and Gab di Robilant, the same. Kathleen Cannell observed, “Schiaparelli … inaugurated the reign of what might be called democratic fashion. Hitherto, if two women met wearing identical costumes, hysterics, husbandly duels, and changes of couturiers ensued.” Instead, guests at the same party wearing the same outfit were likely to “good-humoredly decide on which wearer displayed the greatest chic.”
Do you remember, Bettina asked Elsa after the war, the boarding school atmosphere (of the Place Vendôme) with the Boss as principal and the directrice as head mistress? The shop as something between a girls’ school and a smart women’s club? Then there was the time when her director, Gladys de Segonzac, went with a vendeuse to old Colette in the Palais-Royal about Schiaparelli’s costumes for Colette’s latest play. And what about the time when a vendeuse, bringing a dress to be fitted to the Marchesa Casati in her hotel room one morning, found her in bed breakfasting on straight Pernod and fried fish? How her bed was covered in black feathers and how she was trying to read the articles printed on one of her newspaper scarves? She asked the vendeuse to join her, and the poor girl, horrified but polite, quickly answered, “Thank you Madame, but I’ve already had lunch.”
Bettina had not forgotten the time when Aldous Huxley arrived and was fascinated by her zippers, an invention he used to effect in his famous novel Brave New World. Then there was Marion Davies, the much-indulged mistress of the fabulously wealthy William Randolph Hearst, who wanted him to buy the tree that the S
chiaparelli dresses grew on. There was the time that Elsa decided to have a fountain in the window, so a stone basin was built and pipes were installed. The hat department made some beautiful green satin fronds and the effect was quite arresting. But when the water was turned on, the fountain rose up “like a feather, but only for a moment,” because the water pressure was inadequate. But after adjustment, the water “sprang up like the fountain in the middle of Lake Geneva to the ceiling, and flooded the place, drenching everyone for five minutes, only to fall again and disappear to less than a bubble.” That was the end of that idea.
When Elsa decided on a tropical theme, she put live parrots in the windows. The birds on their perches were peaceful enough, until people arrived for the first day of a new collection. “The parrots became terribly excited and turned into wild wicked birds flying about, screeching and biting everybody.” Animals were always a part of the scenery. Bérard never appeared without his little terrier, Jasmine, usually dirty. Bettina used to take the canteen cats out for walks. Marie-Louise Bousquet’s dog, Bobine, wept tears of boredom as he sat watching the interminable parade of dresses. As for Lord Berners, Diana Mosley told Bettina that his final days were much cheered when he learned that Elsa had put a horse in the window.
Schiaparelli launches a new craze in 1935: a metal mesh handbag. (illustration credit 9.2)
Schiaparelli’s ingenuity, Dominique Veillon wrote in Fashion Under the Occupation, was the subject of continual astonishment and surprise, from handbags that lit up or played a tune when you opened them to the risqué shape of the Shocking perfume bottle, to the suede-and-copper telephone bag that Dalí designed for her exclusively. The author might have mentioned one of the designer’s madder inventions. That was a “smoking glove” of rust suede, with a ribbed cuff for storing matches and a striking board on the wrist, so that the wearer could light her cigarette without rummaging around in her handbag for a lighter. This incendiary invention seems to have disappeared without much comment. But her Jubilee hat, designed to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of the Eiffel Tower, was a different matter. This confection of black feathers in a towering arrangement was declared a masterpiece.
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