All fired up

For most people, the name Schiaparelli immediately evokes witty, surreal women’s clothes: a hat like an upturned shoe, a suit with pockets that look like drawers. In 1936, Elsa Schiaparelli did indeed create those remarkable things, in collaboration with Surrealist supremo Salvador Dalí. But her extraordinary life and career held much more. A prolific creator of dazzling work, in her heyday producing biannual collections of 70 models, she was described by The New Yorker writer Janet Flanner as “a comet”. Her oeuvre was broad: smart day suits and chic summer dresses, plus, post-1934, instantly recognisable evening wear smothered in magnificent, glittering, often trompe l’oeil embroidery by world-famous company Lesage. And she constantly innovated.

For years, only Gabrielle Chanel rivalled her. The fiercely competitive Chanel tried to dismiss her as “that Italian artist who makes clothes”, and once set Schiaparelli aflame at a ball by steering her into a lit candelabra.

Elsa Luisa Maria was born into a cultivated Roman family in 1890, in Palazzo Corsini. The palazzo’s important 17th-century library, the Accademia dei Lincei, which held works on subjects ranging from orientalism to astronomy, was presided over by her father Celestino, an Islamic scholar. From her mother’s side came aristocratic Neapolitan blood. Destined for a conventional marriage, clever, imaginative Elsa had other ideas. At 23, she went to London, met a flashy 30-year-old chancer with various names and nationalities, got engaged the next day and was married on 21 July 1914, before her parents could stop her. Husband Willie – Comte William de Wendt de Kerlor – claimed to be a criminal psychologist, phrenologist and palm reader. Incredibly, after he was deported in 1916 for fortune telling – which was illegal – the new Comtesse de Kerlor went to France, then America, with this charlatan and sponger. He was soon under investigation by the precursor to the FBI. Perhaps he showed her the power of self-assurance.

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In 1920, their daughter, nicknamed Gogo, was born. Willie left soon after. No shirker, Elsa tried to find work, but in 1921 Gogo developed polio. Fortunately, Elsa had made friends with Gaby Picabia, wife of Dadaist Francis. This happy and useful friendship introduced her to like-minded artists and writers, including Man Ray. In 1922, another friend, Blanche Hays, offered Elsa passage to France. She leapt at it. But, as biographer Meryle Secrest says, “aged 32, Schiaparelli had no money, no career, no future, and a very sick daughter”. Many would have gone home. Not Elsa Schiaparelli.

Paris was thrilling, cheap and popular with foreign artists, from Picasso and Modigliani to Hemingway and Fitzgerald. It thrummed with artistic energy. Sporty, short, uncorseted clothes and cropped hair were everywhere. Former leading couturier Paul Poiret’s star was fading, but Jean Patou designed youthful clothes that allowed free movement. So did Chanel. Artists, writers and dress designers collaborated. Nascent Surrealism blurred art and fashion.

Elsa shared a large apartment with Blanche Hays, and Gaby looked after Gogo. Small (she was only five-feet tall), dark, intense Elsa was taken up. She met future artist-collaborators, including Jean Cocteau; Man Ray took her to Le Boeuf sur le Toit nightclub, favoured by heiresses Nancy Cunard and Daisy Fellowes. These two wealthy fashion leaders would abandon Chanel for Schiaparelli, becoming loyal clients, along with many film stars: Greta Garbo, Katharine Hepburn, Vivien Leigh, Lauren Bacall, Ginger Rogers, plus handfuls of princesses and rich aristocrats. Even Mamie Eisenhower.

Inspired by Poiret, Elsa (who didn’t sew) draped and pinned clothes for Gaby, beginning a fledgling career. Her break came in 1927. She admired a jumper knitted by an Armenian woman called Aroosiag Mikaelian (called ‘Mike’) using a three-needle technique. She sketched a sweater whose trompe l’oeil pussy-bow had a cartoonish drop-shadow, and asked Mike to knit it.

Worn to an important socialite luncheon, it caused a furore. A US buyer asked for 40 – with matching skirts. Elsa said yes, then got Mike to find other Armenian knitters. The December 1927 issue of Vogue called the bow sweater “an artistic masterpiece”. New York manufacturers immediately made rip-offs – but it spread Elsa’s fame; indeed, the United States would become her biggest market.

Along with Charles Khan of Galeries Lafayette, she launched the company Schiaparelli (she bought him out in 1930). She wanted an atelier – and found a tiny one in Rue de la Paix. ‘Schiaparelli’ went straight over the door.

A creative whirlwind followed. Clothing innovations came quick-fire: bras inside swimwear (patented 1930), wrap dresses, evening jackets to match dresses (1931), the 1932 ‘Mad Cap’ of tubular wool (which a US manufacturer copied, renamed the ‘Pixie Hat’, and made a fortune), zips as defiant embellishments. During the Great Depression, which Schiaparelli’s 400 workers survived, the ‘Speakeasy’ dress had a secret pocket for a flask. When war loomed, Schiaparelli offered capsule wardrobes – and huge pockets to carry vital items. Many new fabrics were pioneered with the manufacturer Colcombet, from synthetic jersey (1933) to Rhodophane (1934-35), a cellophane spinoff. Rayon was textured or crinkled, sometimes with Lastex for stretch.

Surrealism’s hyperreality and shock delighted Elsa and Dalí equally. From 1936, among a spate of designs that included the renowned black ‘Skeleton’ dress, they created that tailored suit with drawer-like pockets, and the famous shoe hat. A white organza dress, screenprinted with a giant Dalí lobster, its tail-fan at the crotch, was one of 18 Schiaparelli designs snapped up by Wallis Simpson for her 1937 trousseau, and immortalised by Cecil Beaton in Vogue.

The same year, Elsa designed costumes for Mae West in Every Day’s a Holiday. Too grand to travel, West sent a plaster model of her curvaceous torso. The costumes were shipped – but she had got fatter and everything was remade. However, the plaster torso inspired the sensual flacon that Surrealist Leonor Fini designed for the perfume Shocking!, whose sales kept Elsa afloat for decades.

Equally recognisable as Schiaparelli were the superbly embellished and beaded garments produced from 1934 onwards. To make them, Elsa rescued the famed embroidery company Lesage from closure. Producing three-dimensional effects in glittering gold, silver, jet, sequins and beads, the results were astounding, spurring ever greater flights of fantasy. Take the ‘Neptune Cape’, bought by Lady Mendl, who sparkled and shimmered in it like its namesake fountain at Versailles: it was another work of art.

From 1935, even grander showrooms in Place Vendôme presented the collections. Garments were further adorned with specially designed signature buttons, fashioned as anything from cupids to carrots, some by Jean Clément, others by naturalistic designer Jean Schlumberger, who later joined Tiffany & Co. It was logical to add jewellery, extending Schiaparelli’s unique synthesis of bizarre and beautiful. Standouts were a transparent neck collar crawling with insects, and a necklace of gold metal leaves splashed with luminous red and green enamel, with metal bees, from the 1938 ‘Pagan’ collection, offered in Paris in April’s sale: 1910-2010: One Hundred Years of Haute Couture, along with three jackets dating from 1938 to 1942.

Schiaparelli’s brilliance accelerated in the decade’s final years. Genuinely fantastic balls – the Silver, the Gold, the White – provided opportunities for lavish couture, and were widely covered by fashion magazines. As war approached, Paris designers responded with an orgy of ravishing clothes for apparently endless parties. Schiaparelli even made a dress with a bustle, harking back to the Belle Époque.

War swept everything away. Elsa went to America until 1945. She reopened, but – even assisted by a young Hubert de Givenchy – her focus seemed gone. The mood had changed: Surrealism was dead and the cavalcade had passed by. Recognising this, she closed in 1954. Elsa Schiaparelli died in 1973.

Philippa Stockley’s many books include the novel Murderous Liaisons.