Elsa Schiaparelli began her career designing sporty ensembles and day wear, and continued throughout her career to design day wear that exuded an easy elegance. This example, worn by style maker Millicent Rogers, features elastic, unique in a couture garment, at the waist and sleeve ends to create the chic silhouette. The playful seed packet print is also a hallmark of her work, as she frequently employed unconventional prints in her collections. Schiaparelli inserted a plastic zipper from neck to hem at back, which functions as both decoration and closure. As Dilys Blum states in Shocking! The Art and Fashion of Elsa Schiaparelli, Schiaparelli began using plastic zippers in her 1935-36 collection, when zipper companies began experimenting with synthetic materials. Whereas other designers used zippers strictly for their function and often tried to hide them, Schiaparelli incorporated them into her designs, drawing attention to the line of the body. They soon became an iconic indication of her artistic design sensibility.
