EN VOGUE: SCHIAPARELLI IN BAZAAR -VICKY TWEET 1.8.12-9.54

She couldn't sew and she didn't sketch, yet Elsa Schiaparelli stormed Paris fashion in the 1920s and 1930s. The lofty legacy she created continues to resonate today, as evidenced by both the number of designers who flooded the runways for spring with looks indebted to the great couturier and the upcoming exhibition at New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art "Elsa Schiaparelli and Miuccia Prada: On Fashion."
A veritable fashion maverick, Schiaparelli caught the eye of Carmel Snow, Harper's Bazaar's editor in chief from 1933 to 1957, who ultimately became one of the designer's greatest advocates. She continually showcased Schiaparelli's fashions in the magazine, hiring the likes of Man Ray and George Hoyningen-Huene to photograph them, as well as leading artists of the time like Leonor Fini and Kees Van Dongen to illustrate them.
Snow even commissioned Hungarian artist Marcel Vertès to do sketches for Bazaar because she admired what he was doing with Schiaparelli's advertising. "She and Carmel Snow were quite close," says journalist and Snow biographer Penelope Rowlands. "Carmel really understood what she was trying to do and–as with so many designers, photographers, et cetera–worked to bring her work to the attention of the public."
Both women were also heavily influenced by Surrealism–Schiaparelli in her fashions and Snow in the magazine's design–and both collaborated with Salvador Dalí. In the annals of fashion, Schiaparelli is most associated with those extravagant surrealistic creations. The memorable upside-down shoe hat, the gown with a skeleton built into it, and the lobster dress famously worn by Wallis Simpson before she married the Duke of Windsor–all are examples. Jean Cocteau and Christian Bérard worked closely with her.
To match her scintillating style, there even was a color–a pink so bright it was called "shocking." But beyond Schiaparelli's avant-garde proclivities, the designer's legacy rests squarely in her refusal to operate and think like anyone else. She went so far as to pen a story for Bazaar in 1939 called "Cannibals Are Kind," a cheeky dissertation on how Fascist dictators like Hitler and Mussolini were vegetarians, while meat-eating world leaders were a more laid-back lot. "Her way of working was singular," says Hubert de Givenchy, the retired couturier who worked for Schiaparelli in his early 20s before launching his own fashion house. "For someone like myself, who was trained classically, sketching and designing, it was disconcerting to work with her. She would flip through a book and find, say, a picture of an Egyptian princess. The atelier then interpreted that. Her instructions were always very vague. Once the atelier had done their interpretation, Schiap would redo it, pulling things off and putting things on. It became her own."
Born in Rome to an aristocratic mother and an intellectual father, Schiaparelli had a free spirit that defied easy classification. She modeled for Man Ray and ran with Marcel Duchamp and Gaby Picabia, the first wife of artist Francis Picabia. After her husband abandoned her along with their infant daughter, Gogo, she staked her fortunes on fashion. In 1927, she created a sensation with knitwear decorated with trompe l'oeil images that catapulted her to fame.
Luminaries Anita Loos and Daisy Fellowes gravitated to Schiaparelli's clothes. Indeed, Fellowes, the Paris editor of Harper's Bazaar in the 1930s and known as one of the most fashionable women of her time, was among Schiaparelli's best clients. Diana Vreeland dedicated one of her "Why Don't You...?" columns for Bazaar to Schiaparelli in 1937, citing the designer's signature styling tips like "Why don't you...?wear coarse beige net stockings with all your black day suits?"
It was inevitable, then, that a staunch rivalry would sprout between her and Gabrielle Chanel, whom Schiaparelli shook from her perch atop the fashion jungle.
"Schiap outmoded Chanel, who herself had created a fashion revolution," contends Givenchy. "Suddenly, people had had enough of dressing like a gypsy or in soft little Chanel suits. Schiap modernized fashion with an architectural line."
"One of the most modern aspects of her work is that she was conceptual," says Pamela Golbin, a chief curator at the Musée des Arts Décoratifs in Paris. Schiaparelli "was one of the first artistic directors. She had a quite advanced and contemporary way of conceiving fashion. She broke ground with collaborations. She was very open to the collaborative spirit because she herself was not hands on in a technical sense."
Schiaparelli was equally a marketing pioneer. "She understood the importance of marketing very early," explains Dilys Blum, senior curator of costume and textiles at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, who organized an exhibition of Schiaparelli in 2003. "She knew how to sell herself. She sponsored events. She lent her dresses to the right women to be seen in the right environment."
"She was the first to launch themes in a collection," adds Golbin. "She did a collection based on the circus, for example. She had an entire vision. In the late 1920s to have that vision is so incredible. She opened up so many possibilities."
Schiaparelli's influence exerted itself on some of the last century's most accomplished designers, including Yves Saint Laurent, Christian Lacroix, and Jean Paul Gaultier. But this season her impact was particularly strong. Collections from Raf Simons at Jil Sander, who decorated knits with faces and eyes based on Picasso ceramics, to Alber Elbaz at Lanvin, who featured a dress similar to Schiap's iconic "Apollo of Versailles" cape, showed a direct line to her vision.
The surfeit of exuberance, decoration, and surrealistic flourishes begs the question, Are we having a Schiaparelli moment? "I think people want to make light of fashion right now," Blum says. "They are uncomfortable with fashion's role of excess. Schiaparelli's surrealist touch brought humor and made light of fashion."
"We went through minimalism with everyone dressed in the same old dreary styles," offers Marisa Berenson, the actress and model who is Schiaparelli's granddaughter. "People are returning to a more personal style. Surrealism is something that transports one into another world. And that is what we need these days."
That Schiaparelli continues to intrigue is evident. Diego Della Valle was so piqued by the label that he purchased the rights in 2007. Many of her creations appear as modern now as when tastemakers of the time donned her fashions. Yet many aspects of Schiaparelli's style and point of view continue to be misunderstood or overshadowed by her strong association with Surrealism. Her work, in fact, was deeper, according to those who knew her.
"She was a very secretive person," recalls Berenson. "An incredibly free spirit but also very private. She was a deep, spiritual, and mystical person. She believed in other dimensions, for sure. And she was truly an artist, with the complexities of a very passionate person. She wrote erotic poetry, for example. Her family considered her quite shocking. But she wanted to be totally liberated from her background."
Givenchy remembers Schiaparelli's hat on their first meeting. "It was an Etruscan hat, in black. She wasn't beautiful but she had incredible chic. On her cheek were beauty marks that made the outline, she said, of the Big Dipper. Jean Schlumberger made a bijoux like the Big Dipper for her, with all of the stars linked by a gold chain. Behind closed doors she used to say, 'You see the beauty marks on my face, they are represented here in this jewel.'?"
Schiaparelli, who had dominated Paris fashion before the war, moved to New York during the Nazi occupation. Upon her return, the landscape of fashion had shifted radically. Just as she had created an explosion with her styles in the 1920s, a new name, Christian Dior, was on the cusp of launching a new atomic bomb–the New Look–instantly outmoding his rivals.
"Surrealism was finished by then," says Givenchy. "When I arrived at the house and saw her wearing two different color shoes, I said to myself, 'How can a woman with so much talent not understand that that is all over?' But she persisted in her ideas. And in the end, she was right. Her fashion was very modern. It wasn't unwearable. It was daring. And never vulgar."

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Pictured above: Elsa Schiaparelli in an evening dress of her own design, with painted details by Jean Dunand, photography by Man Ray, 1934

Photograph by George Hoyningen-Huene, 1935