elsa schiaparelli

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Elsa Schiaparelli

Elsa Schiaparelli (1890, Rome – 1973) was, besides Coco Chanel, the dominant fashion designer in Paris of the period between 1920s-1930s. Her origins are that of Italy-Egyptian.

In 1927 she opened her first parlor under the name " stupidir le Sport" , which implies its specialization in “leisure activity“ wear. In 1931 there was a big controversy in the tennis world when Lili de Alvarez, a noted tenis player at that time, wore a “split“ tennis skirt (designed by Schiaparelli)during a match at the Wimbledon championship in London. This skirt could be labelled as the prototype of what we nowadays call shorts.

She begun to be noted not due to the success of her uncle Giovanni Schiaparelli( who came upon the canals of Mars), but made her own way through the world of the famous, mainly by creating what later became a symbol of her style – the black-weaved sweaters with a white bowtie motif.

Her aptitude for anything innovative, unique and “surrealistic“(maybe that is a reason why she collaborated with Salvador Dali) was admirable – she blazed the trail for using the shoulder pads, hot or “shocking“pink color, lobster-printed and animal-printed attires, zippers of the identical color as that of the fabric,etc.

During the 1930s she designed a vast amount of surrealist items, the most remarkable of which are the hats in the shape of either a colossal shoe or a gigantic lamb chop( these are the result of her collaboration with Salvador Dali; during the spell from 1936 to 1939 Elsa made a close bounds with the other surrealists, too, such as Alberto Giacometti or Jean Cocteau). These hats were popularized via their wearing by Daisy Fellowers, who was the heiress of the Singer sewing machine. Daisy was also among Schiaparelli's most favourite customers, possessing the pink gemstone which became the inspiration of the shocking pink.

In addition to her clothing collections, she released her perfume lines, one(the first and the most notable) of which is the perfume sold under the appropriate name Shocking. Its name reflected the color of its flacon, which was realized entirely in the famous shocking pink and, moreover, its silhouette was that of a woman's torso. During the designinf of the flacon, Schiaparelli was inspired by the “body curves“ of one of her stable clients, Mae West, a well-acclaimed movie star. Elsa also created costumes for movies like Every Day's a Holiday (1938), appearing West, or the Moulin Rouge(1952, costumes for Zsa Zsa Gabor).

In the mid 1930s she moved to a Paris salon with the view of the Place Vendome, but was held up not only by the World War II, but also by the growing dominancy of the younger designers like Christian Dior. Finally, in mid 1950s she went bankrupt and moved to the U.S.

Being in the U.S., she exchanged wedding vows with Count William de Wendt de Kerlor, who was a spiritualist, once titled as "a persuasive but inconstant Theosophist".With her spouse she moved again, this time to New York (Greenwich Village). In NY she was selling items created by a French fashion designer Paul Poiret, with whom she had a child called Gogo (Maria Luisa Yvonne Radha, born in 1919)