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At the Victoria & Albert museum’s latest exhibition dedicated to Elsa Schiaparelli (and Daniel Roseberry), Schiaparelli: Fashion Becomes Art, one is astonished by the sheer modernity and invention of Schiap. (Daniel is a talented designer, but I’m going to focus on Elsa’s remarkable things here. Daniel’s own extraordinary creations are in all of our living memories, and they each have a story that he has told, so they answer for themselves. By the way, they are extraordinary!)
One starts as I did in an entrance gallery room that shows Schiap – large as life – seated in her 21 Place Vendôme salon, with the Colonne Vendôme behind her, clearly seen through her tall, ruffled net curtains. On the walls, one has a taste of her newspaper print from 1935, with clippings of Women’s Wear Daily et al, with Schiap innovations on every page.
There is a trio of sweaters knitted by Armenian women, with a tromple l’oeil of scarves, with which Schiap first made her name. (This show has been curated by Sonnet Stanfill and what a job she has done).
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At the back of the room, there is a dress, seen through an arched opening. (The exhibition is very well designed, with reveals and amassed collectsions of jackets, hats, bottles of perfume and dresses.) The dress on the left, made for the actor Ruth Ford, is an absolute wonder to behold. She was a sister to the surrealist writer Charles Henri Ford, (who was acquainted with Elsa Schiaparelli), and her looks and allure were striking. It’s an astonishingly modern piece, a sheath of black jersey, arms and neck covered, and then padded out with bone formations. It is based on the sketches of Schiap’s friend Salvador Dalí (also to be seen in this exhibition). “Dear Elsa,” Dalí wrote, “I like this idea of ‘bones on the outside’ enormously.” It’s been cleverly placed so that when one comes around again to it (several rooms later), one then sees the back which is padded with “bones” too.
Andrew Bolton had desperately wanted it for his Schiaparelli and Prada: Impossible Conversations show, in 2012, but it was deemed too fragile to travel. (This may well be the last time it is put on show, because of its delicate condition).
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Ruth Ford acquired several more Elsa pieces (courtesy of Edward James, collectsor of Surrealist works and furnishings, whose inamorata she was) that were designed in collaboration with Dalí – the Tears dress (the design of ripped fabric in flesh pink and raw red on a ground that was originally pale blue, but has now faded to off white – the headscarf with it has three dimensional slashed open “tears”). He also conjured up the Lobster dress, from the summer of 1937, a party dress with a cooked lobster on the front (that lobster was painted by silk designer Paul Sache). Wallis Simpson wore this one too, and Cecil Beaton photographed her wearing it and posing in the spring-kissed grounds of the Château de Candé, home of Charles and Fern Bedaux, where she would soon become the Duchess of Windsor. Even with this fanciful dress, holding long stems of stiff blossom, and despite Beaton’s best attempts to romanticise her, she is nonetheless hard and brittle (ergo the perfect Schiap client!)
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Edward James bought things for Ruth’s mother, too, including a Shocking Pink fitted jacket woven with prancing circus horses with crests of ostrich plumes, worn with a plum brown dress (summer 1938) displayed in the exhibition with its skirt, but it can be worn with with the legs placed in the twin openings, to make an exotic trouser. Ruth herself acquired one of the signature embroidered jackets from this collectsion. Of fitted black crepe, it has multicoloured sequins and bits of mirror tumbling down the front, like a performer at the circus.
This jacket appears in the arc of embroidered jackets, and triumphs all, with embroidery by Lesage. There is a blue chiffon jacket with Lesage embroidery like an 18th-century waistcoat, with buttons (always an essential element of Schiap’s pieces) like so many little tambourines down the front. When one makes one’s way around this arc of treasures, there are wonders to behold. As well as Ruth Ford’s Circus jacket, there is the spring 1947 black jacket with a whoosh of jet embroidered Shocking Pink taffeta. The shoulder line is a little hard, and an unknown designer presented his soft-shouldered New Look collectsion that very same season: it was Christian Dior.
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There is a dazzling oil portrait by Pablo Picasso of Nusch Éluard (1937), wearing a Schiaparelli jacket distinguished by the broad collar (with twin figures on each lapel) and trademark buttons, and topped with a Schiap hat. The very picture of extreme elegance. I’ve been so frustrated when I’ve seen similar portraits by Picasso in museums around the world and I’ve asked if it’s Schiaparelli. Blank stares from the curators, whether it’s in Berlin, or New York. At last, the designer has her due: I think Picasso, whose work Schiap collectsed, and whose friends wore her work (Dora Maar, for instance) would approve. There is an aviary of hats that all look captivatingly extreme. And the hat that Gala Dalí, and Helena Rubinstein both clamoured for is given pride of place, sitting in solitary state: the black “shoe” hat with a Shocking Pink velvet heel.
The next room has Ruth’s Tears dress and a fresh Lobster creation. In another cabinet, the deep blue satin evening coat is turned so that we can admire its back: it is embroidered to show two heads meeting in profile, so that they seem to form an urn, and an embarrassment of roses covers the shoulders. Based on a design by Jean Cocteau, it was worn by the scandalous, divine Doris Castlerosse. There is a room of the remarkable jewellery and buttons that Schiap created. Another for her scents – Zut, Sleeping and Shocking.
We have already seen and swooned over the long, crepe de chine camouflage dress that Millicent Rogers wore. There are three hefty zippers to mould it closely to the body. Millicent also wore the daring greige trouser suit, from 1939, with four square pockets on the broad shouldered jacket, and four sturdy buttons. And opposite her, there are six neat Schiap suits, including one extraordinary one that is made of crepe, in a bold pattern to imitate tweed.
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Then there is a room of evening sensations, including one dress standing alone in the middle of the room, in fig brown crepe, with a “stole” of waffled lighter brown crepe that is bowed across the neckline, and then falls to reveal the back. It is fascinatingly cut, asymmetrically across the body. One dress here is especially remarkable to me, it was worn by Barbara “Baba” Beaton, the sister of Cecil Beaton in 1933, and it is of soft pearly grey satin with flying panels behind the skirts and sleeves folded like those in a 16th-century portrait – and I have an image of her wearing it, in a salon photograph by Paul Tanqueray in my bedroom!
“Didn’t the Romans come and conquer Britain?” so said Schiaparelli when she opened her London branch at 6 Upper Grosvenor Street, Mayfair, in 1934. Prior to that, women could buy her pieces at specialist stores like Fortnum & Mason and Kay Norton, or they could go to Paris. In 1932, however, Britain introduced a tax on luxury goods imported from abroad. Silk was one of them. So by opening her London salon, Schiap was offering her clothes at cheaper prices. A brace of evening dresses belonging to Maud Russell, art patron and society hostess (and an anti-fascist spy) are remarkable and unlike any Schiaps I have seen before, in brightly coloured floral prints, which owe nothing to the insipid florals of the ’30s, but everything to a bold, orchidaceous Pierre Roy vision. Frances Farquharson, editor of Harpers Bazaar, wore immaculate strict black suits and evening dresses (she was in mourning for her husband), and striking black hats, including one of a shock of coq feathers, with one single long plume extending from the frenzy of feathers.
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And it goes on! To the trio awaiting one at the end. The chic black wool floor-length coat which has six Lesage-spun gold thread and pink and white porcelain roses and seven “crushed” buttons to ignite it. A dress of warm brown asymmetrically draped to a train, with a bright emerald green ribbon outlining it, and wonder of wonders, an emerald coq feather short cape. The colours are extraordinary! And a floor-length coat of armorial plaited golden thread, with bulbous sleeves and a wide, wide collar. It is like an ancient ecclesiastical vestment. I mean, don’t just walk there, run…
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