Cloche

Perhaps more than any of her contemporaries, Elsa Schiaparelli recognized the power of detail. Her keen eye manifested itself in the novelty textiles, findings, and embroideries that predominated her designs. Accessories became a particularly important outlet for some of her most fantastical ideas, resulting in a legendary torrent of audacious millinery. Her hats inventively imitated objects as disparate as shoes, clusters of grapes, airplane propellers, pincushions, and animal masks—playing often with notions of scale, as evinced in her popular miniaturized “doll” styles. This snug satin cap follows this tendency for displacement with a pinwheel of trapunto-quilted silk leaves that spiral around the head. The use of trompe l’oeil and nature motifs was a constant throughout her career, appearing perhaps most prominently in her “Pagan” collection for fall 1938. The arrangement of leaves here recalls a cropped hairstyle that Schiaparelli herself wore during the 1930s, with tiny face-framing curled tendrils.