Elsa Schiaparelli: A Biography by Meryle Secrest

By Meryle Secrest

Her identify was once Elsa Schiaparelli. She was once often called the Queen of style; a headline allure within the overseas glitter-glamour convey of the overdue twenties and thirties, feted in Rome (where she was once born), Paris, manhattan, London, Moscow, Hollywood . . .

Her variety was once a social revolution via clothing—luxurious, eccentric, ironic, attractive. Her models, encouraged, from the whimsical to the main practical—from a Venetian cape of the commedia dell’arte to the Soviet parachute. She collaborated with many of the maximum artists of the 20 th century: on jewellery designs with Jean Schlumberger; on outfits with Salvador Dalí (his lobster gown for her, a lobster garnished with parsley painted at the skirt of an organdy gown, used to be immediately obtained by means of Wallis Simpson for her honeymoon with the Duke of Windsor); with Jean Cocteau, Alberto Giacometti, Christian Bérard, photographers Baron Adolph de Meyer, Horst, Cecil Beaton, and the younger Richard Avedon.

She used to be the 1st dressmaker to take advantage of rayon and latex, thick velvets, obvious and water resistant, and cellophane. Her perfume—Shocking!—was a bottle within the form of a bust sculpted by means of Léonor Fini, encouraged via the physique of Mae West. Her boutique at an eighteenth-century palace at 21 position Vendôme opened right into a cage designed through Jean-Michel Frank. American trend, in 1927, offered her complete assortment as artworks. A decade later, she used to be the 1st ecu to win the Neiman Marcus style Award.
Here is the never-before-told tale of this so much striking designer, probably the main amazing designer of the 20th century, in her day extra recognized than Chanel. Meryle Secrest, acclaimed biographer, who has captured the lives of some of the 20th century’s such a lot iconic cultural figures, between them: Frank Lloyd Wright, Bernard Berenson, and Modigliani, offers us the 1st complete lifetime of the grand couturier—surrealist and embattled figure–-whose medium was once apparel.

“Dare to be different,” Schiaparelli instructed girls, and he or she lived it to the peak; a insurgent opposed to convention—social in addition to model. She designed an otter-fur bathing go well with and a hat encouraged by way of a lamb chop. (“I wish to amuse myself,” she acknowledged. “If I didn’t, i'd die.”) Chanel, her arch rival, referred to as her, “that Italian lady who makes dresses.”

Here is the tale of Schiaparelli’s upward push to repute (as brazen and specified as any of the inventive creations that emerged from her Paris workrooms earlier than international conflict II); her emotionally starved upbringing in Rome (her mom was once half Scottish, half Neapolitan; her father, a well known medieval student focusing on Islamic manuscripts, dean of the school of Rome; her uncle, an astronomer well-known for his description in 1877 of “canals” on Mars); her years overshadowed through a prettier sister; her elopement with a Swiss-born guy who claimed to be a count number, disciple of mysticism and the occult—who controlled to get himself and his younger bride deported from Britain . . . her fight to take care of her polio-stricken daughter, Gogo, as a unmarried and financially destitute mom dwelling in Greenwich Village.

Secrest writes of Schiaparelli’s prepared instincts—an astute businesswoman, she introduced herself into hats, hose, soaps, sneakers, purses, within the house of some years. by means of 1930, her corporation used to be grossing thousands of francs a year.

Secrest chronicles her exploits in the course of global conflict II (she controlled to flee from Europe to the USA) and, utilizing FBI records, indicates that in Schiaparelli’s remain in big apple, her whereabouts have been documented virtually week by means of week; she used to be by no means explicitly charged, however the cloud of collaboration lingered lengthy after her go back to Paris.

As Secrest lines the unfolding of this remarkable occupation, she unearths the spirit that gave form to this huge and lavish existence, a woman—a force—whose creative imaginative and prescient endlessly replaced the face of style and redefined the limits of artwork.