Gloves

These playful gloves by Franco Moschino conjure the work of Elsa Schiaparelli and the accessories from her winter 1936 collection. Although both designers share an Italian heritage, a wry sense of humor, and a lifelong engagement with fine art, Schiaparelli’s process of inspiration was more collaborative. She perceived herself as an inventor (but never creator, a term she deemed pretentious), freed by her lack of formal training to experiment unrestrainedly with a variety of manufacturers and artist friends. Moschino tended toward quotation. He would frequently remark: “I have never invented anything. Rather, I have remade, re-proposed, reinterpreted. I consider myself a commentator.” In both instances, the designers playfully subvert the social propriety of gloves through an unsettling use of visible cosmetics. A 1935 photograph by the artist Man Ray—a collaboration with his peer Pablo Picasso, who had clothed a pair of hands in painted imaginary gloves—inspired Schiaparelli’s early rendition, which featured appliquéd red snakeskin fingernails on a stark ground of black or white suede. In Moschino’s later interpretation, tan leather amplifies the lifelike trompe l’oeil effect of jarring (or convulsive) beauty.