11:00 p.m., July 26, 2022
The marvelous can bloom in myriad sequins on strict suits or condense into a simple flower-shaped button. The seamstress Elsa Schiaparelli (1890-1973) liked to provoke. The designer had called her favorite color, a shimmering shade of fuchsia pink, “shocking”. She also titled her autobiography with this scathing adjective (Shocking Life), published in 1954, a year following his fashion house went bankrupt. Nearly fifty years following his death, his audacity is no longer really disturbing.
The white evening dress adorned with a red lobster spreading between the thighs (a drawing with a sexual undertone by Salvador Dalí) today makes people smile, while it caused a scandal worn in 1937 by Wallis Simpson, future duchess of Windsor. But, as the exhibition at the Musée des Arts Décoratifs (MAD) in Paris currently shows, the visual shock is still there.
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The brightest yellow clashes with the fiery pink. The fantasy of “Schiap”, the diminutive given to him by his friends and his granddaughter the actress Marisa Berenson, is graduated, from the sparkling wink of intelligence to ostentatious extravagance. Also with timeless masterpieces like the Phœbus evening cape from the winter 1938-1939 collection. On the back of this terry cloth and silk crepe coat, an embroidery sparkles. This Gorgon’s head with hair transformed into rays of sunlight, a creation of the painter and costume designer Christian Bérard, petrifies visitors as soon as they enter, where the theatrical clothing reigns supreme.
Creations often overshadowed by his life
In addition to more than 200 costumes, jewelry, gloves or hats, photographs by Man Ray or Horst P. Horst and a few paintings by Pablo Picasso, Raoul Dufy or Leonor Fini, curators Marie-Sophie Carron de La Carrière and Olivier Gabet have woven a non-chronological frame. It underlines Schiap’s links with the artists of his time as well as with designers from the end of the 20th century or today, such as John Galliano, Azzedine Alaïa or his successor, Daniel Roseberry, whose baroque clothes are presented. All inspired by the eccentricity of the “Italian woman”, as her best enemy, Coco Chanel, contemptuously called her.
The course focuses on “surreal worlds” of the stylist rather than her detailed biography. It must be said that the life of Elsa Schiaparelli has often overshadowed her creations: from an old Roman family with an academic father and a mother of Medici descent, she grew up in a palace, before breaking with her environment. In London and then in New York, she lived with an aristocrat practicing clairvoyance and occultism, before leaving him because of his infidelities. Then head for Paris, their daughter nicknamed “Gogo” under her arm. Divorced, penniless, Elsa Schiaparelli had to start all over once more when she was over 30, but with the support of the great couturier Paul Poiret.
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Schiaparelli has an eye and notices, one day, a sweater knitted by an Armenian refugee. She orders him a “sweater”, a pullover on which she draws a trompe-l’oeil: an elegant white tie tied on one side, which can be seen, still just as modern, in the exhibition. This casual garment is a success, especially in the United States. Schiaparelli, 37, is launched. She then calls on artists, especially surrealists, for collaborations. Jean Cocteau gave him drawings: you can admire a coat adorned with two profiles drawing a vase surmounted by roses in rolled up ribbons. Leonor Fini carved the bottle in the shape of a female bust of the Shocking perfume, generous shapes copied from the voluptuous body of the sex symbol of the time, actress Mae West.
Drum buttons, butterfly fastener closing a jacket, clearly visible zip, black dress with padding forming a skeleton… on structured clothes, with a slightly marked waist, square shoulders, it sprinkles elements that take the costume elsewhere, into worlds imaginary.
“Shocking! – The surreal worlds of Elsa Schiaparelli »at the Museum of Decorative Arts in Paris (1st), until January 22, 2023. madparis.fr
