Birth
September 10, 1890, Rome, Italy
Death
November 13, 1973, Paris, France
Country of Origin/Citizenship
Italy/Italian
Kind of Artist/Cultural Worker
Fashion Designer
Avant-Garde Movements Associated With
Surrealism, Dadaism
Date & Places of Overlap with Loy
1920's Paris
Born on September 10, 1890 to Maria-Luisa and Celestino Schiaparelli, Elsa Schiaparelli grew up in Rome and moved to London as a teenager. Her 1914 marriage to theosophist Count Wilhelm de Wendt de Kerlot ended in 1920 after the couple moved to New York and Schiaparelli gave birth to their daughter, Maria Luisa (nicknamed āGogoā). There, Schiaparelli began working with visual artists such as Man Ray and Jean Cocteau who she met through the French avant-garde painter Francis Picabia and his wife, Gabrielle, a writer. Upon relocating to Paris, Schiaparelli started designing sweaters featuring a trompe lāoeil pattern, premiering her first collection and opening her famous 21 Place Vendome store in 1927. Schiaparelliās designs were strikingly original and, in response to the 1930s ideal of the New Woman, rejected traditional feminine silhouettes and styles. With functionality and comfort in mind, she designed dresses that covered the knee and convertible pieces to be worn multiple ways. A New Yorker article written in 1932 describes Schiaparelli as ānot so much merely a dressmaker as a cunning carpenter of clothesā (Flanner 20). Victoria R. Pass identifies a āstrange glamourā in Schiaparelliās use of accessories meant to look like other objects, such as hats that appeared to be high-heeled shoes, gloves with claw-like embellishments, and insect-like brooches. Her collaborations with Salvador DalĆ in the 1930s resulted in some of Schiaparelliās most well-known pieces, including the Tear and Skeleton dresses as well as the Dinner dress, which featured a large lobster design and was famously modeled by Wallis Simpson, Duchess of Windsor. She also designed a number of garments for celebrities and costumes for films. Schiaparelli continued to produce designs while splitting her time between America and Europe during WWII, but had some difficulty reestablishing her business after the war. She showed her last collection in February 1954 and the company went bankrupt that December. Schiaparelli died in her sleep on November 13, 1973 in Paris after being hospitalized.
While there is no evidence that Schiaparelli and Mina Loy ever met, they moved in the same surrealist circles in 1920s Paris and shared an interest in fashion. Though known for her poetry, Loy also designed her own clothing which, like Schiaparelliās designs, prized comfort and durability. In his writings, Loyās first husband Stephen Haweis credited her with influencing the modern fashion movement in Paris (Burke 89). A decade later in a 1930 letter to her son-in-law Julien Levy, Loy mentions that her daughter Fabienne desperately wants to work as a model for Schiaparelli (Kinnahan 120). Though Loy fails to explicitly reference Schiaparelli in her work, her novel Insel includes a description of a lampshade in āshocking pink,ā Schiaparelliās signature color (Kinnahan 104). Additionally, the mannequinās āharlequinā buttons in Loyās poem āMass Production on 14th Streetā may reference Schiaparelliās popular 1938 Circus Collection (Kinnahan 103). In Schiaparelliās 1954 autobiography, Shocking Life, she often refers to herself in the third person as āSchiap,ā a twinning technique that echoes Loyās anagrams of her own name in her poetry.
Image 1: One of Schiaparelliās early 1927 designs was a sweater featuring a trompe lāoeil bow
Image 2: These embellished gloves designed in 1939 are an example of Schiaparelliās āstrange glamourā
Image 3: Schiaparelliās āDinner Dress,ā designed in collaboration with Salvador Dali in 1937, featured a large lobster and was famously modeled by the Duchess of Windsor
All images accessed via Philadelphia Museum of Art website (https://www.philamuseum.org)
Related
Works Cited
Burke, Carolyn. Becoming Modern: The Life of Mina Loy. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1996.
Flanner, Janet. āProfiles: Comet.ā The New Yorker, 18 June 1932, pp. 21-24.
Kinnahan, Linda. Mina Loy, Twentieth-Century Photography, and Contemporary Women Poets. Routledge, 2017.
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