This surreal fashion show around Schiparelli will amaze you!

Her name may mean nothing to you, yet Elsa Schiparelli has largely helped cheer up such sweltering 20th-century haute couture with a great dose of audacity, humor and surrealism.. Born on 10 September 1890 in Rome and died on 13 November 1973 in Paris, she had a more hectic life than any fiction, and creations that the history of fashion would be wrong to ignore. And for this the Museum of Decorative Arts in Paris dedicates a retrospective exhibition to him from 6 July 2022 to 22 January 2023. But who was this phenomenon, which today we would have almost forgotten?

Who was the great seamstress Elsa Schiparelli whose retrospective MAD is doing?

Elsa Schiaparelli (1890-1973) comes from a Roman family of intellectual aristocrats who find her “rather ugly” and send her to a convent after discovering that she writes erotic poems in her spare time. After a romantic encounter in 1914 (with Wilhelm Wendt de Kerlor, theosophist), a trip to New York in 1916 (with Gabriële Buffet-Picabia, a woman in the shadow of Dadaism whose biography is rich in artists of Anne and Claire Berest), she died in Paris, divorced from her unfaithful husband, her daughter under her arm. There she met the great couturier Paul Poiret in 1922 who urged her to enter fashion. She then founded her house in 1927. Immediately her humor overflows from her creations to the point of making her the new star of the catwalks, then obsolete Gabrielle Chanel in the 1930s.

Sweaters hand-knitted to inscribe playful trompe-l’oeil motifs into the shirt quickly became bestsellers and the first trademark ofElsa Schiparelli. She who loves to put things where you do not expect them, has fun also to put aspirin tablets as a necklace, nails painted as claws on the ends of the gloves and another hat in the shape of a shoe. Long before John Galliano made it at Dior, the designer was turning a newspaper into a dress. Long before Jean Paul Gaultier did it for her perfumes, the great seamstress sculpted women’s torsos like a perfume bottle.

Elsa Schiparelli was collaborating with artists before it became fashionable

Elsa Schiaparelli’s surrealist work touches Salvador Dalí, Jean Cocteau and Man Ray, artists who signed the first collaborations in history with her. This extraordinary designer profoundly disrupts haute couture, bringing technical innovations, but also a lot of humor and power. She is the first to use visible zip, to show off with her own licenses (a license is to have other manufacturers use your brand for lower priced products). As early as the 1930s she developed coats which she described as ” hard chic with large shoulder pads, which would become emblematic of the 80s.

In addition to putting her genius for sewing, marketing and business at the service of her artistic vision of fashion, Elsa Schiaparelli has also established herself as a busy woman. Forced into exile in the United States in 1940 (she made the journey pinning her favorite brooch, a dove, a symbol of peace, to her jacket, which has since become an important code of the house that still bears her name), she lectures there feminists that brings together up to 34,000 people and helps France at war from New York.

Elsa Schiparelli, surrealist fashion artist?

After the Second World War, Elsa Schiaparelli hires the young Hubert de Givenchy and leaves fashion herself in 1954. He signed his autobiography the same year, ShockingLife where she explains how she was taught from childhood that she was ugly and should have compensated. What she did through her intellect and creativity, always writing her surreal poetry with her, having wanted to plant seeds in her throat, ears and mouth, hoping to grow ” a face covered with flowers like a paradise garden », Recalls the New York Times. He died in his sleep at the age of 83 on November 13, 1973 in Paris.

Thus, in the exhibition that the Museum of Decorative Arts dedicates to this surrealist fashion artist, you will be able to come across many of her works. Including the famous “lobster dress” (painted by Dalí) from 1937 worn by the Duchess of Windsor (shortly before her wedding) in front of the lens of the great photographer Cecil Beaton. Or a fantastic black coat in wool and silk, embellished with 6 pockets in pink porcelain. Or a cloak in the famous shade ” shocking pink (similar to pink Barbie), embroidered with a huge golden sun on the back.