Elsa Schiaparelli

Couturière Elsa Schiaparelli collaborated with artists and photographers in Paris during the 1930s to create and promote a distinctive visual and material culture that synthesized modern fashion, art, and design. Her fascinations with illusionary trompe l’oeil, the subversive and erotic possibilities of clothing, and uncanny mannequins led to an affinity and association with the Surrealists. Schiaparelli dressed women of the art world, including Gala Dalí, Peggy Guggenheim, and Ileana Sonnabend, and collected art by members of her circle such as Salvador Dalí, Leonor Fini, and Man Ray.

Schiaparelli was born in the Palazzo Corsini in Rome; her childhood was steeped in art and history. In her youth she heard the founder of the Futurist movement, F. T. Marinetti, lecture in Rome, and a chance encounter with the Dadaist writer and musician Gabrielle Buffet-Picabia during a 1916 voyage to New York led to Schiaparelli meeting Man Ray. According to her autobiography, she helped him, Katherine Dreier, and Marcel Duchamp with the early administration of the Société Anonyme, founded in 1920 as an organization dedicated to the promotion of modern art through exhibitions, lectures, and other events.

After moving to Paris in 1922, Schiaparelli found her vocation as a fashion designer. She presented her first collection at her apartment on rue de l’Université in January 1927. By that time she had begun collecting paintings by artists associated with Surrealism, including Pierre Roy’s Bazar de l’Ocean (1920, location unknown). Her friendships with artists allowed her to buy works from them directly, and the overnight success of her trompe l’oeil Bowknot sweater provided her with the modest funds required to do so. Throughout the 1930s Man Ray photographed Schiaparelli usually modeling her own designs; the results formed the basis for her collection of photographs.

Schiaparelli’s artistic connections intensified from 1935, when she opened her new couture salon and boutique at 21 Place Vendôme. Jean-Michel Frank attended to the interior design, bringing in Alberto Giacometti to make shell-like lamps perched on columns; both men possibly had a hand in the enormous gold cage that housed Schiaparelli perfumes. Artist friends, including Salvador Dalí and Leonor Fini, designed the perfume bottles, while photographer Ilse Bing and illustrator Marcel Vertès created advertisements for the perfumes. Fini, who had painted a portrait of Schiaparelli’s daughter Gogo in 1936, designed the bottle for her Shocking! perfume the following year; Schiaparelli launched a hot pink of the same name, inspired by the palette of a painting by Pavel Tchelitchew, Basket of Strawberries (1925, private collection), then in the collection of Gertrude Stein.

Collaborations with Dalí and Jean Cocteau in the late 1930s produced some of Schiaparelli’s most iconic works. For her spring 1937 collection, Cocteau designed two looks, creating drawings that Maison Lesage embroidered onto the tailored garments. A drawing by Cocteau of Schiaparelli in one of her own dramatic evening capes entered her collection, probably a gift from the artist. Likewise, Dalí’s drawings for Schiaparelli collaborations such as the Skeleton dress, featuring quilted bones, and the Bureau suit—with drawer pulls on its pockets to mimic the artist’s anthropomorphized furniture—were among her prized possessions. Dalí also inspired the Torn dress, adorned with trompe l’oeil tears, with a series of three paintings of women in ripped clothing that he made in 1936. Schiaparelli acquired two of these from Dalí: Dreams Puts Her Hand on a Man's Shoulder and Necrophiliac Spring; the latter hung prominently in her home at 22 Rue de Berri, to which she moved in 1937. Dalí also contributed to her Place Vendôme interior décor a shocking pink version of his Mae West lips sofa and a taxidermied, lilac polar bear fitted with drawers, both products of his friendship with British poet, patron, and Schiaparelli client Edward James.

Schiaparelli’s presence was equally felt in the period’s Surrealist exhibitions. Dalí featured a Schiaparelli knitted ski mask on one of his mannequins in the Exposition Internationale du Surréalisme at the Galerie Beaux-Arts in Paris in 1938. This display may have been a riposte to Schiaparelli’s display of an undressed mannequin (designed by Giacometti) in the Pavillon de l’Élégance at the 1937 Paris Exposition Internationale des Arts et Techniques dans la Vie Moderne. In 1939 photographs for Harper’s Bazaar featured Schiaparelli models in front of Surrealist furniture by Fini at the Galerie René Drouin, which dealer Leo Castelli had opened next door in Place Vendôme.

While her collection remained at her home in Paris, Schiaparelli spent much of the Second World War in New York, where she mounted the exhibition First Papers of Surrealism, held in 1942 at the Coordinating Council of French Relief Societies on Madison Avenue. She recruited André Breton and Duchamp to curate it and wrote to collectors such as Walter Arensberg to arrange loans. During this period she visited the collector Albert C. Barnes in Pennsylvania and befriended Alfred Barr, the director of the Museum of Modern Art, to whom she had lent Picasso’s Birds in a Cage (1937, private collection) in 1939 for the exhibition Picasso: Forty Years of His Art.

Picasso’s painting serves as the frontispiece for Schiaparelli’s autobiography, Shocking Life (1954). She filled the book, published a year after her fashion house went bankrupt, with anecdotes about collecting and her collaborations with artists and photographers. While the book obfuscates the precise details of her collection, and some of her claims are questionable—for example that she personally donated three paintings by Amedeo Modigliani to the Museu de Arte de São Paulo Assis Chateaubriand in Brazil—her pride in her participation in the art world is readily apparent. She continued collecting to the end of her life, acquiring works by Stanislao Lepri, Hisao Domoto, and Ioannis Kardamatis. While the Dalís, Picasso, and Roy were sold at her death, many of the later purchases—the Fini portrait of Gogo, illustrations by Bebe Bérard and Marcel Vertès, and objects from Schiaparelli’s lavish interiors—were dispersed at a dedicated sale at Christie’s Paris in 2014.