Schiaparelli, Prada, Louis Vuitton and Marc Jacobs

CSFB 4 (1+2) pp. 175–195 Intellect Limited 2014

Exhibition Review

New York, Paris: Schiaparelli, Prada, Louis Vuitton and Marc Jacobs

Reviewed by J. Emanuel Raymundo and Christina H. Moon

Abstract Fashion is an individual undertaking and a collaborative effort woven together across distance and time. This article reviews two fashion exhibitions: ‘Schiaparelli and Prada: Impossible Conversations’ at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art from 10 May to 19 August 2012, and ‘Louis Vuitton–Marc Jacobs’ at Paris’ Les Arts Decoratifs from 9 March to 16 September 2012. Each exhibition threaded one contemporary designer with a designer and a fashion forebear. The reviews are, in the spirit of the fashion exhibitions they discuss, individual yet collaborative undertakings.

1. Louis Vuitton–Marc Jacobs: partners through time J. Emmanuel Raymundo On the second floor of the Musée les Arts Décoratifs was a scene that would not have been out of place inside a mall in any American town rather than in one of Paris’ premier decorative arts and design museums in the first arrondisement. Young girls – all pin straight hair and thin thighs – were hovering over glass cases as maidens to altars. Rather than offerings of candles or food to this shrine,

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these devotees – arms outstretched in various angles on top of each other – were taking cellphone 1. Also see Enticknap photos of the sacred objects, like the handbags on display inside the museum, that they may never (2005). look at again much less actually cradle and hold. But perhaps things that contain an element of the fantastic and religious cannot be experienced directly with the eye but must be encountered through an intermediary. The glass of the case in which the objects were enveloped was not enough. So the glass of the cellphone in which their images were to be enshrined would ensure the safety and pres- ervation of the object’s aura. The teenage frenzy was foreshadowed by the upside-down mannequin on the stairs connecting the exhibition’s first and second floors. Entitled Topsy Turvy/Dessus Dessous from the FW 2006–07 collection, the mannequin was dressed in a red, blue and yellow print shirt and trousers from Marc Jacobs’s collaboration with the artist Stephen Sprouse in 2001. While the exhibition is entitled ‘Louis Vuitton–Marc Jacobs’, these are two different shows. The wall of television screens casting Skittle- coloured shadows at the entrance of Jacobs’s exhibition thumps with palpitating Red Bull energy that overwhelms the viewer’s senses, and stands in contrast to the genteel sobriety of the muted teal walls, soft candle lighting and tinkling music of the Vuitton exhibition through which one first enters. The rubric of screens, each different in size, randomly flickers a soundless moving or still images, many of which are culled from the movies: Bette Midler in The First Wives Club (Wilson, 1996), Barbra Streisand in Funny Girl (Wyler, 1968). Seemingly random, these images reference some of the looks that have inspired some of Jacobs’s most enduring designs for his eponymous label. The silk slip that Liz Taylor saunters around in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (Brooks, 1958) appears from Jacobs’s FW 1994 collection to his SS 2002 show. Tatum O’Neil’s slouchy Depression Era silhouette in Jacobs’s SS 2007 collection resonates with his styling and accessories for Vuitton’s FW 2008 collection. Other images are more recent such as Jacobs caricaturized and skewered in an episode of South Park or Sponge Bob Square Pants (whose image is tattooed on Jacobs’s arm). Amidst this visual phalanx, in one corner of the display is an unblinking screen declaring I DON’T WANT NO RETROSPECTIVE. If a retrospective is supposed to be a look back at one’s career, Jacobs’s wish expressed in the Louis Vuitton/Marc Jacobs exhibition is an assertion of the company’s history, vital- ity and importance among an increasingly crowded fashion market where the meaning of luxury has been broadened, enlarged and diluted. Rather than a look back, the exhibition attempts to cast Louis Vuitton and Marc Jacobs as individual designers bound together in the present, and into the future, through the global corporate brand of Louis Vuitton. History, the present and the future come together through particular objects and artefacts in the exhibition. Vuitton’s portion of the exhibition opens with a zoetrope (Wade 2004).1 Popularized during the Victorian period, zoetropes were devices that manipulated the perception of time and space. Zoetropes aided in experiencing phenomena through experimentation rather than through natural observations. A cylindrical device with vertically perforated slits, the interior houses a strip of

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film depicting a sequence of images. As the cylinder spins, the impression of movement is projected through the slits. Vuitton’s zoetrope features a woman with layers of her dress suddenly fluttering upwards to become wings revealing bare legs, her naked bust and her bare figure. The revelation and cloaking of the bodily form that is inherent in fashion is key in the zoetrope’s motion that gives the impression of movement. This scene is replayed repeatedly with predictable regularity that pre- empts the shock and the surprise of the reveal. The viewer knows that the lady will become undressed, her dress will transform into wings, her naked body will be revealed and she will, once again, be fully dressed and the process will repeat smoothly without interruption. The revelation and then cloaking of the human form is appropriate given that Vuitton, founded in 1854, was initially and primarily known as a ‘packager’. Although Vuitton was a malletier, the exhibition provides not only a view of his trunks but the kinds of items that could have been kept inside them including outerwear and the more intimate garments underneath them. The exhibition’s section entitled ‘The Perfect Wardrobe’ displayed clothing in miniature in diminutive propor- tions appropriate for a porcelain doll. A perfectly pleated robe d’été en mousseline de coton imprimé with a matching blue and black checked ceinture and petit chapeau en velour were paired with undergarments including corset à goussets along with four sets of chemises de jour. ‘A Day’s Wardrobe’ showcasing adult-sized clothing featured undergarments like the foundational corset à gousset en coutil. Subsequent mannequins were dressed in a tafetta print robe d’interieur next to another tafetta print robe d’habillée and a cotton candy pink vertical striped transformation avec corsage de bal on a spinning platform that reveals a bustle trimmed with lace. Everything a woman needed to wear to make herself presentable could be stored and protected in Vuitton’s trunks. As the exhibition guide notes, Vuitton came of age as a businessman during Napoleon III’s campaign of urban renewal to make Paris cleaner and safer. Along with paved roads, sidewalks, street lamps and a sewer system, public security and civic hygiene brought with it the rise of magasins de nouveautés or fashion shops or small boutiques which paved the way for larger department stores that increased people’s wardrobes. Subsequently, there was the need to package and store these articles of clothing for which Vuitton became its most celebrated supplier. The emerging emphasis on personal hygiene in the mid to late nineteenth century was about enveloping the body into a sanitary regime within an existing and expanding public infrastructure. The enculturation of indi- viduals into a system of bodily care included not only obvious sites such as nutrition and the disposal of personal waste, but also modes of dress. A changing world required a change in the way a person dressed, and how a person presented herself to those whom she would encounter. The movement miniaturized in the zoetrope symbolized the actual movement and travelling across various distances from countryside to city and beyond. Vuitton’s ‘explorer trunk’, that opened into a twin-sized ‘bed’, would address the needs of potential travel. Closed, the trunk looked like any other leather-bound trunk for which Vuitton was increasingly becoming famous. The rectangular box

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had sturdy wooden slats and leather strap tabs. Metal drawbolts and a lock ensured the security of the 2. Such mobile and trunk’s contents. Corner bumpers offered added protection during the trunk’s passage. Handles that transportable objects of empire must be seen folded into the trunk’s side allowed for its transport but did not add unnecessary frivolity. Unlocking the in the context of the trunk’s metal bolts and lock, and flipping half the trunk’s lid outward to rest flat on the floor, allowed movement of people, resources and goods the assembly of a bed. More like a cot featuring a thin mattress covered with cotton or linen featuring from the metropole to Vuitton’s red and white vertical stripes (see Figures 1 and 2), the explorer trunk allowed the exportation the periphery. of domestic objects into makeshift spaces. Looking at a bed erected from a portable trunk elicited feelings of the bed’s connections to the colonial experience of expansion and adventurous explorations. To bring a bed outside through a trunk was about approximating European domestic, metropolitan comfort in to a literally foreign territory. The explorer for whom this trunk was designed, however, is never named and the expeditions and campaigns that warranted mobile resting spaces are never intimated. The colonial undertones of the explorer trunk, and French colonial expansion at the time of Louis Vuitton’s founding are not a central point of the exhibition (Sessions 2012).2 The many-headed pitfalls of colonialism are avoided. Instead, a form of globalization is promoted, that brings the world together through common markets and shared goods, at the intersection of which stands Louis Vuitton. The twinkling carousel music heard at the entrance of the Vuitton portion of the exhibition becomes increasingly faint, and is eventually overtaken by an electronic soundtrack to a specially commissioned video entitled Louis Vuitton I from the Dutch graphic designer Christian Borstlap. Through animation and graphics and a singer’s falsetto set to an electronic beat, a series of geomet- ric lines form the faint outlines of the ‘LV’ initials seguing into a modified rendering of the checkerboard Damier pattern in yellow and black, then blue and green. It then gives way to boxes and spokes forming ‘Paris 1854’ or the year of the box-making and packing specialist’s founding. The steamer trunk appears, a series of which fills the screen on top of each other forming a pyramid, but not before a corset appears and is packed securely in the trunk. Emphasizing craftsmanship, a series of spinning hammers appear and are heard, then morph into a coloured variation of the LV flowered monogram. The trunks reappear against a nautical background of waves, a ship and the sound of seagulls. The nautical motif and overtures to a transatlantic journey emphasize the trunk’s travel worthiness, and underscores Louis Vuitton’s journey from a small company to a global brand. The Vuitton trunk soon transforms into a bag as the scene shifts from the sea to an urban landscape and the city as testament to Vuitton’s ability to change with the times. Mid-nineteenth-century French colonialism and territorial expansion is alluded to but never addressed. Instead, corporate agility and brand domination are emphasized. While Vuitton was the first malletier to use waxed canvas thereby ‘waterproofing’ his trunks. A more ingenious innovation that would become integral in the highly competitive consumer marketplace which the company would help usher in – came in the form of branding. One of the most ubiquitous and contentious terms in advertising, the term ‘brand’ refers to a product or service bearing a name with a distinguishing characteristic. What matters most among the competing variables constituting a Figure 1:

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Figures 1 and 2: Vuitton’s iconic red and white vertical stripes, featuring in a shop display in Milan. Photographs courtesy of Efrat Tseëlon.

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brand is ‘only that which is perceived in the consumer’s mind’ (Knapp 2000: 7). In its elusiveness, 3. A complex relationship exists between a ‘brand’ is a form of a zoetrope that projects an altered form of reality. A co-collaborative manipulation brand and the product is going on between a company and the consumer. A company projects what it wants its product to be, regarding whether con- and the consumer sees what s/he wants through a brand (Marconi 2000: xi).3 In 1877, Vuitton filed the sumers buy the brand or the product it repre- patent for the striped canvas and in 1888 filed the patent for the Damier canvas with his name on the sents. Marconi argues: material that marked the first time that his name appeared on his trunks. Since then, Vuitton’s initials ‘Certainly, people buy have become synonymous with his products. Through careful branding, carrying and owning a Vuitton products, but which products they buy and endowed the owner with an identity that was not his or her own, but was tied to what Louis Vuitton how much they make represented: from craftsmanship and quality to luxury (Torelli and Cheng 2011).4 What started with their buying decisions have a lot do with Vuitton imprinting his initials on his trunks continued under Jacobs’s stewardship 143 years after the how they feel about company’s founding. Put another way: it was through branding that Marc made his mark. the brand’ (Marconi Jacobs has continued to stamp Louis Vuitton’s initials on most anything coming out of the 2000: xi). Koll and von Wallpach also argue company including the clothes, which it did not make until he became its creative director in 1997. In that what consumers this sense, Jacobs has carved a new brand out of an existing Vuitton brand. The branding that Vuitton associate with a brand began on his trunks has continued with purposeful determination through the clothes that Jacobs has is based on feelings. created. Rather than the periodic revelation featuring in the zoetrope, a seemingly plain red trench 4. In the context of from FW 1998–99 is permanently lifted in the display to reveal the Damier canvas lining with match- globalization, the Louis Vuitton brand ing Damier boots. A cream trench from SS 2000 takes the opposite approach with the LV logo is a cultural product throughout, supported by matching LV-logo strapped heels. With the exception of an organza mini in the sense that ‘they are tangible, public from FW 2000–01, the other three looks in the same display make use of the LV logo throughout the representations of dress: there is a scoop-neck monogram dress from FW 2010–11; a see-through monogrammed slit meanings and ideas skirt from SS 2011; wool jodhpurs matched with a blue organza grosgrain monogram blouse. shared in a culture’ (Torelli and Cheng Branding becomes woven into the fabric of the clothes. The lining and label become an integral part 2011). Luxury goods of the design that, when visible (as when taking off the garment or in the casual jaunt of walking to are aspirational and are and fro) announces the clothing’s provenance to whoever comes across it. The clothing’s genealogy items that consumers associate with success is no longer private, nor is it the province of the owner – but available to the passer-by. and upward mobility. Branding is the link between Louis Vuitton’s past, present and future that Jacobs occupies. See Truong, McColl and During his tenure as the company’s creative director, Jacobs has remade the LV initials and logo Kitchen (2010). from the Damier canvas to the flowered monograms through successful and profitable collabora- 5. Raustiala and Sprigman (2006: 1687–777) tions with artists who have created exclusive designs and prints. The beige LV initials or the taupe argue that the fashion checkerboard Damier made room for Stephen Sprouse’s neon graffiti monograms in 2001, Takashi industry is unique Murakami’s candy coloured confections in 2003, Richard Prince’s double exposed and overlayed and operates through a ‘piracy paradox’. prints in 2008 and most recently, Yayoi Kusama’s polka dots in 2012. On the one hand, Jacobs’s Despite low intellectual collaborations with established artists was meant to shore up the brand’s artistic heritage and elite property protection, cache. The ensuing knock-offs, on the other hand, was a diffusion of the label to the masses that copying does not impede but actually 5 ensured its success (Raustiala and Sprigman, 2006: 1687–777). promotes innovation and investment.

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6. Jacobs’s tattoos are The exhibition emphasizes continuity through history. One section of the Jacobs portion of the interesting for the message they convey exhibition is entitled ‘Iconic Speedy 30’. It features a display on the making of the current minimalist as fashion. On the Speedy 30 bag, the inspiration for which was the Speedy 20 in a monogram canvas print. A modi- one hand, options for fied Speedy is displayed with a longer zipper down the side. A third and fourth iteration in black clothing can be mediated based on class, leather is displayed with alterations made right on the bag for adjusting the width of the handle, gender or race. These shortening the side zippers and curving the front flap. Each prototype is accompanied with a framed marginalized groups light-boxed photograph of notes between Jacobs and his unseen craftsmen who are adjusting the often only have their own bodies to self- bag based on his specifications. The making of the Speedy is reminiscent of a section in the Vuitton fashion and self-style portion of the exhibition on how a trunk is made. Yet, such directions and correspondence between including tattooing. As the head of a global Vuitton and his corps are not available to the viewer. This reveals both the nature of record keeping, fashion company, the present inclination for disclosure and, most importantly, the difference between the making of Jacobs may not be trunks and the designing of a bag. By drawing a parallel between the craftsman and the designer, easily categorized as belonging to a mar- the role of the artist as designer is established in this process. Vuitton and Jacobs are working in two ginalized group but he different industries and with two different canvases. Jacobs does not make trunks but, rather, designs has chosen to alter his bags. One whole wall opposite the manufacturing of the updated Speedy 30 is a collection of some appearance especially through tattoos. See of the most iconic bags Jacobs has proffered to consumers during his fifteen years at Vuitton. The Sanders and Vale bags are encased in individual wrappers like a box of chocolates (see Figure 3) alluding to the artistic (2008). craftsmanship of the chocolatier, so delectably coveted and regularly consumed have these bags become. The most discernible reference to Vuitton’s trunk-making origin is the FW 1999–2000 ‘Steamer Bag’, a huge oversized shoulder bag inspired by a Vuitton overnight travel bag from 1892. But the ultimate canvas that Jacobs is working with is his own body. What has become equally famous as his designs for Louis Vuitton and his eponymous label is his considerable weight loss and adoption of a strict workout regimen in 2008. Prior to his weight loss, the dominant image of Jacobs was of a bespectacled man bowing shyly at the end of his show. Now, Jacobs is featured regularly in various states of undress displaying his muscular body filled with tattoos, a peak of which the viewer gets with a 2011 photograph of Jacobs at the exhibition’s entrance hall where one of his many tattoos peeks out from his right forearm. Placed next to Jacobs’s photograph is a sepia-toned picture of Louis Vuitton, on crayon sur papier, dated from 1892. Though they may occupy equal stature in the exhibition’s advertisement and exhibition space, they embody two different worlds as they occupy two different floors of the Musée les Arts Décoratifs. If a tattoo is a form of self-branding6 to mark a person as distinct from another, then Jacobs’s inclination to self-brand is perfectly in line with Vuitton’s history of branding its products, despite the two men’s existence at two different points in time. Indeed, it is through branding that they become, as the exhibition wants us to see them, as partners through time. Viewed through the prism of product branding and as corporate brethren rather than artistic kin, Louis Vuitton/Marc Jacobs becomes the fluid expression of commercial longevity and corporate continuity through a century and a half. Instead of

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Figure 3: Marc Jacobs’ bags displayed in individual wrappers like a box of chocolates. Photograph courtesy of Emmanuel Raymundo.

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Jacobs as heir to Vuitton’s artistic legacy, Vuitton as a master brander rather than as a master craftsman is the set-up, preface and context through which Jacobs’s portion of the exhibition must be viewed. The specially commissioned music video that bridges the Louis Vuitton and Marc Jacobs portions of the exhibition that was launched on Nowness (the web platform of LVMH) as well as the frenzy of young girls clamouring to capture an image on their phone of Jacobs’s wall of ‘It’ bags – both testify to Vuitton’s corporate agility and its ability to move with the times and reach a broad physical and virtual consumer audience. They also testify to the triumph of the desire for the image that overrides the object, which itself took over the desire for the object rather than the craft that went into making it.

2. Waist Up/Waist Down Christina Moon The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s show, ‘Schiaparelli and Prada: Impossible Conversations’, brought together the fashion designers Elsa Schiaparelli and Miuccia Prada. The exhibition highlighted the relationship between these two fashion designers. Miuccia Prada’s work was familiar to my generation growing up in the 1990s. In contrast, Elsa Schiaparelli’s work has been known and respected by fashion insiders and the fashion world, yet only until quite recently obscured from the public or main- stream. The exhibition sets out to illuminate their similarities or, as Hamish Bowles put it, their ‘striking parallels’ (Bowles 2012) starting from their Italian heritage and patrician upbringing, their opinions on art and art movements, their humour and sense of play through fashion, their renegade passions, and even their link to Yves Saint Laurent. It was Schiaparelli who was a mentor to Yves Saint Laurent, who in turn highly influenced the work of Prada. And yet remarkably, as the exhibition highlights, these two fashion designers could not be more different in the time periods which mark their influential years in design, and in the archetypal women (their clients) they designed for through the years. It is the impossible conversation between them that constitutes the most successful aspects of this show. Co-curator Andrew Bolton pointed to the similarities between both designers’ collections using fashion ‘as a vehicle to provoke, to confront normative conventions of taste, beauty, glamour, and femininity’ (Bowles 2012). Yet the very same parallels also showed how different these two designing women really were. The differences between them were displayed in the following:

• Historical context and cultural climates for working women • Designs that produce a ‘politics of looking’ • Intended target audience • Creative collaborations they formed with others • Design history legacy

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Figure 4: Waist Up/Waist Down Gallery. Courtesy of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. This gallery exhibits mannequins split in half. The ‘waist up’ mannequins wear brocaded and decoratively detailed café jackets designed by Schiaparelli. This stands in comparison with ‘waist down’ mannequins in skirts emphasized by Prada throughout her career in design. In 2006, Prada held a traveling exhibition titled ‘Waist Down’ which featured 100 skirt designs that spanned her career.

Figure 5: Naif Chic Gallery. Courtesy of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Mannequins dressed with the fashions of Schiaparelli (left) and Prada (right) play on clothing’s ability to subvert expectations of age appropriate clothing. A short video or ‘imagined conversation’ between Schiaparelli, played by the actress Judy Davis and Miuccia Prada herself, and filmed by Baz Luhrman is featured on a screen behind the mannequins. This film was inspired by Miguel Covarrubia’s ‘impossible interviews’ for Vanity Fair in the 1930s, and orchestrated for exhibition by curators Harold Koda and Andrew Bolton. The film gives the impression that audience members are eavesdropping on a conversation between two of the greatest fashion minds of all time. There are a total of eight short videos within the exhibition.

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To an extent, both are products of their time and represent the transition of consumer culture from craft-based to branding-based. Thus, while Schiaparelli occupies the ‘fashion halls of obscurity’, Prada has carved herself as figurehead and company brand, and continues to expand in global name-brand recognition. Long queues of young peacock-adorned fashionistas led to the first gallery of the exhibition, which was simultaneously dark and glowing. A large projection screen hung from the ceiling. The echoes of two voices speaking were those of Judy Davis, an actress in costume who plays Elsa Schiaparelli in the projected film, and Miuccia Prada herself. The two are displayed sitting at a table, having a conversation. This feature of the exhibition, this imagined conversation made real across time periods and geographies is considered to be the creative highlight of the exhibition. The film is the result of the collaboration between film-maker Baz Luhrmann and curators at the Met, who filmed these videos as a sort of public ‘eavesdropping’ on a fictional conversation between Miuccia Prada and Elsa Schiaparelli (Thurman 2012: 25). The conversation – the lines, words and sentences – sound disjointed and awkward, mainly because the acting is carried with an unconvincing accent (Schiaparelli, although Italian, lived for most of her life and career in Paris. What does an Italian woman speaking French and then English sound like? And how does fashion translate and transform from one place to another?). It becomes apparent that the conversation is indeed an ‘impossible’ one: after all, a ‘genuine’ conversation requires a dialogue following a certain rhythm and flow with topics, questions and connections that surface organically. The disjointedness of this conversation makes it obvious that the interviews, quotes and responses of Schiaparelli and Prada were recorded separately, sound bytes based on the actual interviews and quotes of Schiaparelli along with the contemporary interviews of Prada. In the film as well as in the introductory essay for the catalogue, the curators (and reviewers) point to the uncanny similarities in views between the two designers. Take, for instance ‘Schiap: “One [has] to sense the trend of history and precede it.” Prada: “For me, it’s important to antici- pate where fashion is heading”’ (Bolton and Koda 2012: 32). Indeed, an arbitrary juxtaposition of selective generic quotes may be found between any two fashion designers then or now. Yet, while the film played, one notices the original ‘Impossible Interviews’ column, hanging in the dark corner of the room. This column was the original inspiration for the title of the show, written and illustrated by the artist Miguel Covarrubias. Covarrubias had created this column for Vanity Fair as a series of imagined, impossible interviews between unlikely pairs – Sigmund Freud and Jean Harlow, Greta Garbo and Calvin Coolidge, and Clark Gable and the Prince of Wales. Covarrubias also depicted an imagined meeting between Stalin and Schiaparelli (not highlighted in the show) following the designer’s controversial 1935 trip to the Soviet Union for a trade fair. This imagined exchange is curious, because it highlights the particular historical moment in which Schiaparelli was designing.

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Figure 6: Surreal Body Gallery. Courtesy of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. This gallery features mannequins in the designs of Prada alongside light box images of old world Hollywood glamour in the gowns of Schiaparelli. The juxtaposition of the mannequins versus the Hollywood images highlight the different time periods, silhouettes, and kinds of women that Prada and Schiaparelli were designing for. A major theme of the exhibition is how the past enlivens the present and how the present enlivens the past.

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Stalin: Can’t you leave our women alone? Schiaparelli: They don’t want to be left alone. They want to look like the other women of the world. Stalin: What! Like those hip-less, bust-less scarecrows of your dying civilizations? Schiaparelli: Already they admire our mannequins and models. Sooner or later they’ll come to our ideals. Stalin: Not while Soviet ideology persists. Schiaparelli: Look below you, Man of Steel. Look at the beauty parlours and permanent-wave machines springing up. The next step is fashion. In a few years, you won’t see kerchiefs on heads any more.

If a conversation is an interaction where two people exchange thoughts and ideas, then Stalin and Schiaparelli sit uncomfortably on opposite ends of the table. Men and women, utilitarian and decorative, communist and capitalist, traditional and modern: even down to folk peasant headscarves versus fashion short, finger-wave curls – one can hear their viewpoints spout as righteous overtones, without any real attempt to understand one other. In one small, imagined exchange, the impossible interview is in fact an impossible argument, a comment on the social and cultural upheavals of the 1930s, the role of women as workers in utilitarian dress and in line with party aesthetics, the poverty of an agrarian society and the rapid transformation of the USSR to an industrial power. The argument also speaks of the rise of consumption and a capitalist society of leisure, along with changing notions of fashion and femininity. Schiaparelli was designing at a time when fashion was used as a stage for patriotism and nationalism by most states – clothing and fashion had become a powerful way for countries to articulate and classify national character as well as encourage national pride. In her book, Italian Fascism and Fashion, Eugenia Paulicelli states that fashion, at this time, had become a powerful field to express the unity of art, technology and science – what was understood then as ‘cultural progress’. ‘Fashion became a terrain on which to effect a rupture between past and present,’ and an apt site for artists, writers and thinkers to critique their present moment and the conditions of current society (Paulicelli 2004: 129). Designers such as Rosa Genoni in Italy and Elizabeth Hawes in the United States, sought to make their critique of fashion through a non-elitist approach. They often connected their designs and design work to workers’ rights and the responsi- bility of consumer choices. In contrast, a fashion designer like Elsa Schiaparelli made her critique through the playful ‘transgressions’ and experiments of Surrealism and avant-garde art. The exhibition showcases Schiaparelli’s experimental work – evidence of the close collaborations and relationships she formed with Surrealists and Dadaists of that era. Her whimsical, imaginative

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clothing, like the parody hats or her infamous ‘lobster dress’ were objects of art challenging its wear- ers to reflect on ‘wearable art’. Further, as ‘modern objects’ (as Paulicelli put it) to be worn on the head as accessories, or on the body, Schiaparelli’s designs also offered playful experiments in materials, textiles, cut and fit (Paulicelli 2004). Schiaparelli was using fashion and design to challenge ideas of gender post-World War II in this experimental context of Surrealism, Dada and Futurism. Living in Paris and being part of the artistic avant-garde, among the likes of Salvador Dali, Jean Cocteau, James Joyce, Gertrude Stein and Ernest Hemingway, she participated in a salon culture of international artists and intellectuals who were all in their own ways subverting ideas of man, woman and sex, the shifting role of families within society, alongside creativity and independence. Having distanced herself both from conventional thing- like femininity and from liberated femininity as too independent – her designs echoed her own ambivalence. For example, her introduction of the trouser skirt, which women wore for everything, including sport, negotiated the contested terrain between the modern and practical new roles for women, and between the timeless feminine (Parkins 2012). Middle- and working-class women were reorganizing the division of labour within the family and were engaging in political activity that included the feminist right to vote, or having a say in one’s workplace conditions. Curiously, these shifts occurred alongside an emergent glamour industry that accompanied the shift from an aristocracy-based order and value, to a capitalist order based on money and consumerism. The concept of glamour is strongly connected to consumer culture: it is a make belief that can be achieved by purchasing the products whose images are packaged as glamorous. The glamour of a product depends on the use of celebrity personas, and on skilful and exclusive media treatment through advertising, fashion photography and films. It is mediated through a system of seductive images (Denning 1996; Gundle 1999). Post-war women had been transformed into household budget managers who were simultaneously responsible for the cultivation and presentation of their own appearance as well as that of their families. As the 1930s progressed, she remained one of the top couturiers in Paris. Appearances meant everything for the women that Elsa Schiaparelli dressed in the 1930s, participants of café culture in Paris. While in earlier decades, women were not even to be found walking down the street alone, by the 1930s onwards, bourgeois women could be found sitting behind the tables of side- walk cafés, appropriately dressed to be seen with gloves on tables. The ‘Waist Up/Waist Down’ section of the exhibition considers the identity of this imagined woman for whom Schiaparelli was designing. Simple café jackets full of striking embroideries, brocades and sequined details bring the viewer’s eye to the upper half of the body. Schiaparelli designed feathered shoulders and all kinds of imaginatively shaped hats. Her accessories included leather gloves and small purses. She also had a penchant for large necklaces and up hair-dos, highlighting delicately

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adorned necks. As the exhibition suggests, Schiaparelli’s designs centred on the ‘waist up’ – sites 7. See Roland Barthes and symbols of bourgeois wealth and leisure on a woman’s body. This woman was out and about (1974). in public, to be seen yet situated behind a table. Her sexuality emanated from the waist up, and her face could be captured by photo or film, glamorously projected onto a screen.7 Such vision of femininity calls attention to the relationship between adornment, a politics of looking, part- embodied gender and social empowerment.

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‘Waist Down’ a travelling exhibition from 2006, which featured 100 of her skirt designs spanning all of her career, revealed that Miuccia Prada designs for a completely different woman.

…to me the waist up is more spiritual, more intellectual, while the waist down is more basic, more grounded. It’s about sex. It’s about making love. It’s about life. It’s about giving birth. Basically, below the waist is more connected to the earth. For me personally, I want to be free to express myself, to express my ideas and my thinking. Too much focus on the waist up is constraining. It makes me uncomfortable. (Bolton and Koda 2012: 174)

For Prada, to design for the waist down means design for the primal, the grounded and the basic. This is a philosophy that is rooted in sex, labour, birth and the earth – design more for an ordinary woman, more for the corporeal than the ethereal patrons and socialites Schiaparelli was designing for. If Schiaparelli’s designs confirmed what psychologist J.C. Flugel pontificated on in the 1930s – women and her dress as a symbol of property and value of men (Flugel 1971) – then Prada does for women what Flugel states clothing does for men. Flugel believed that men’s dress, in their sombre- coloured, identical-looking suits and uniforms, reflected the perception of men wielding power from within. A man’s suit suggested power that could not be seen, what was understated or anonymously masked or perhaps signalled the full potentiality of his power. Miuccia Prada started experimenting with the same sombre colours and material tweeds of men’s suits, only using them for women, throughout the 1990s and calling these ‘uniforms for the slightly disenfranchised’ (Trebay 2008). Further, curiously, Prada stepped away from the obvious exteriors, surfaces or areas of adornment which are traditionally used in design for woman, and focused instead on ‘the bottom half’. This ‘waist down’ philosophy calls attention to power from the ‘something from within’ or quite literally, ‘from underneath’. In this way, Prada’s designs flip the tables of gender power through dress, designing for a woman ‘potentiality of power’ that comes from underneath or within her skirt, alluding to the power of childbirth.

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This philosophy of design is interesting when one considers the context of Miuccia Prada living and designing through a completely different radical moment than Schiaparelli’s, which begins in the late 1960s to the mid-1970s. As Judith Thurman points out in the exhibition catalogue, Prada was, at the time of Schiaparelli’s death in 1973, a 24-year-old graduate student at the University of Milan, pursuing a degree in political science and eventually enrolling in a mime school (Thurman 2012: 29). During the strikes and demonstrations that occurred throughout northern Italy during that period, Prada joined the Communist party, and according to different reports, she wore Saint Laurent on the barricades. From here, she began an initially self-conscious journey into the fashion world. It was Mario Prada, Miuccia Prada’s grandfather, who started the family’s luxury leather goods business in 1913 and had run a little shop in the Galleria Vittorio Emanuele, a glass arcade near the Duomo in Milan. After his death in the 1950s, her mother took the helm and eventually passed on the business to Miuccia in 1978. Inheriting the company’s leather goods business, Miuccia used the company as a stand-in for her leftist feminist politics. ‘I suppose I felt guilty not to be doing something more important, more political. So in a way I am trying to use the company for these other activities’ (O’Hagan 2013). The left-wing political sympathies of Miuccia’s youth in the 1960s and 1970s were reinterpreted through her design in the 1990s, the period that Prada transformed the family business into a globally recognized brand. The May 1968 student protests and labour strikes across Europe were a call for public debates on increased wages, universal education and the end of institutionalized class discrimination. Yet, so many from this generation took this lesson of ‘individual freedom’ and ‘creativity’ and transformed it into neo-liberal ideologies. It was the notion that individual freedom and democracy could be spread through markets – a notion that is so promi- nently espoused today. Prada’s first successful design was introduced in 1985 as a series of banal, nylon backpacks and handbags for women. The fabric used to make these bags was a waterproof fabric called Pocone, the same heavyweight nylon used by Prada’s grandfather as a protective cover on his steamer trunks and by the Italian Army for the making of parachutes. Prada’s bags were a hit during the 1990s. They were immortalized in the United States by Alicia Silverstone’s teeny-bopping character in Clueless (Heckerling 1995) who toted it around at school with her schoolgirl skirt and knee-highs. The bag was minimal, understated and its small silver triangle (brandished with the Prada name) appeared in a fashion era dominated by obnoxiously large logos and labels. Since Prada’s backpack was priced at $400, it had become one of the first luxury items that was instantly knocked off, aided by an emerging manufacturing landscape in China, in all materials from cotton to leather. Falling in line with the identity politics of the 1990s, which asserted the individual girl and her body, the bag engendered a culture of confidence, the body ideals of waif-chic, the assertive and stylish party girl who had a political opinion and was part of her own subcultural tribe as she made her way through the rave party. As the little black bag that freed the hands of urban, female,

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fashionista professionals, Prada instantly became a symbol of utilitarian luxury, individual freedom and mass desire for women in global cities everywhere. Prada had, in the eyes of many in the fashion world, brought design to a broader audience with a backpack and company logo that suddenly gained brand recognition around the globe. An acces- sory was more affordable than an outfit, whether as the real luxury item or as a copy. This coincides with the ‘new era’ of free market economics, the rhetoric of Milton Friedman predicting a new economy of progress. Both the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank declared the end of third-world hunger and human suffering due to the emergence of ‘free markets’. Somehow, individual style became equated with ‘freedom’ and ‘democracy’ along with other western-branded products and suddenly, the hippies of the 1960s converted into New Age CEOs of a new corporate dawn. This new information age was all about counterculture ideals, individualism and commodifi- cation. For Prada, it was her anti-establishment politics channelled through design, which created the most successful transnational fashion company of its day. Gigantic corporations had become the producers of fashion and ideas of ‘success’ in fashion no longer just identified individual expression but also global financial mastery. If in the past, fashion and design creativity was relegated to the conventional dictation of seasonal hemlines, creativity in fashion had become the pursuit of global brand recognition. Not surprisingly, the fashion world mirrored the finance world during that period. An era of ‘mergers and acquisitions’ ensued where the complicated trails of venture capital and investments transformed national fashion-design houses which no longer employed ‘national designers’ at their helm (Kondo 1997: 58). Luxury markets emerged throughout Asia, and with her husband Patrizio Bertelli, Miuccia transformed her grandfather’s small-time company of luxury goods into a ‘contemporary design powerhouse’ with sales of over $5 billion during this decade. Unlike Schiaparelli, who designed as an artist in obscurity, Prada emerged as an icon during the 1990s, alongside many of her generation who straddled the contradictory worlds of art and commerce in a capitalist economy (Dunham-Jones 2013). In the exhibition, Prada adamantly proclaims what she is not an artist – but a designer – who must be commercially successful globally. Just the opposite of what Schiaparelli thought of herself. It is no surprise that Prada felt a certain kinship with Rem Koolhaas, an architect who was also very much straddling similar worlds of art and business, or that one New York Times reporter would appropriately name her the ‘capitalist philosopher’ (O’Hagan 2013). You could not be more anti-establishment in the fashion world and fashion system than declaring that one designs strictly for the ‘waist down’, as Prada did at the time. In her autobiographical book Shocking Life (2007), Schiaparelli writes about her disenchantment with fashion, which is revealed as a frustration with mass culture. She asks how the cultural industries might ‘find new and hitherto untried methods of progress, without losing a fraction of our creative power or our sense of beauty’ (Parkins 2012). With her increasing disenchantment with the very terms of the industrialized fashion system, she left the industry. What she rejected was

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that the industry is wedded to constant change, which fuels mass production and consumption – long associated with women. Prada’s grounded ‘waist down’ approach turned her into a global icon. Schiaparelli’s ideological ‘waist up’ approach cost her image for posterity. In this they represent two paradigms, but also change from designer fashion to a globalized fashion.

References Barthes, Roland (1974), ‘The Face of Garbo’, in Mythologies, New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, pp. 56–57. Bolton, Andrew and Koda, Harold (2012), Schiaparelli & Prada: Impossible Conversations, New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art. Bowles, Hamish (2012), ‘Elsa Sciaparelli and Miuccia Prada: Talk to her’, Vogue, 7 May, http://www. vogue.com/magazine/article/elsa-schiaparelli-and-miuccia-prada-talk-to-her/#1. Accessed 21 April 2014. Christofferson, Thomas R. (1980), ‘The French National Workshops of 1848: The View from the Provinces’, French Historical Studies, 11: 4, pp. 505–20. Denning, Michael (1996), Cultural Front: The Laboring of American Culture in the Twentieth Century, New York: Verso. Dunham-Jones, Ellen (2013), ‘The Irrational Exuberance of Rem Koolhaas’, Design Observer, April, http://places.designobserver.com/feature/rem-koolhaas-irrational-exuberance/37767/. Accessed 21 April 2014. Enticknap, Leo Douglas Graham (2005), Moving Image Technology: From Zoetrope to Digital, London/ New York: Wallflower/Columbia University Press. Flugel, J.C. (1971), The Psychology of Clothes, New York: International Universities Press. Gundle, Stephen (1999), ‘Mapping the origins of glamour: Giovanni Boldini, Paris, Belle Époque’, Journal of European Studies, 29: 3, pp. 269–95. Knapp, Duane E. (2000), The Brand Mindset, New York: McGraw Hill. Koll, Oliver and von Wallpach, Sylvia (2009), ‘One brand perception? Or many? The heterogeneity of intra-brand knowledge’, Journal of Product and Brand Management, 18: 5, pp. 338–45. Kondo, Dorinne (1997), About Face: Performing Race in Fashion and Theater, New York: Routledge. Marconi, Joe (2000), The Brand Marketing Book: Creating, Managing and Extending the Value of Your Brand, Lincolnwood, IL: NTC Books. McKay, D. Cope (1965), National Workshops: A Study in the French Revolution of 1848, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

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O’Hagan, Andrew (2013), ‘Miuccia Prada’s circle of influence’, T Magazine, 7 May, http://tmaga- zine.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/05/27/power-of-one-miuccia-pradas-circle-of-influence/?_ php=true&_type=blogs&_r=0. Accessed 21 April 2014. Parkins, Ilya (2012), Poiret, Dior and Schiaparelli: Fashion, Femininity and Modernity, London: Berg. Paulicelli, Eugenia (2004), Fashion under Fascism: Beyond the Black Shirt, New York: Bloomsbury Academic. Price, Roger (1972), The French Second Republic: A Social History, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Raustiala, K. and Sprigman, C.J. (2006), ‘The piracy paradox: Innovation and intellectual property in fashion design’, Virginia Law Review, 92, pp. 1687–777. Sanders, C. and Vail, D.A. (2008), Customizing the Body: The Art and Culture of Tattooing, Philadelphia: Temple University Press. Schiaparelli, Elsa (2007), Shocking Life: The Autobiography of Elsa Schiaparelli, London: V&A Publications. Sessions, Jennifer (2012), By Sword and Plow: France and the Conquest of Algeria, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Stevenson, N.J. (2008), ‘The Fashion Retrospective’, Fashion Theory, 12: 2, pp. 219–36. Thurman, Judith (2012), ‘Twin peaks’, in Andrew Bolton and Harold Koda (eds), Schiaparelli & Prada: Impossible Conversations, New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, pp. 24–31. Torelli, C. and Cheng, S. (2011), ‘Cultural meanings of brands and consumption: A window into the cultural psychology of globalization’, Social and Personality Psychology Compass, 5: 5, pp. 251–62. Trebay, Guy (2008), ‘Miuccia Prada’, New York Times. 27 April, http://www.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/p/miuccia_prada/. Accessed 21 April 2014. Truong, Yann, McColl, Rod and Kitchen, Phillip J. (2010), ‘Uncovering the relationships between aspirations and luxury brand preference’, Journal of Product and Brand Management, 19: 5, pp. 346–55. Wade, Nicholas J. (2004), ‘Philosophical instruments and toys: Optical devices extending the art of seeing’, Journal of the History of the Neurosciences, 13: 1, pp. 102–24.

Contributor details Emmanuel Raymundo is Assistant Professor in the Department of Communication at Tulane University. He received his Ph.D. from Yale.

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Contact: Department of Communication, Tulane University, 219 Newcomb Hall, 1229 Broadway, New Orleans, Louisiana 70118, USA. E-mail: [email protected]

Christina H. Moon is Assistant Professor of Fashion Studies in the School of Art and Design History and Theory at Parsons The New School. She is also the Director of the M.A. in Fashion Studies program at Parsons The New School. She received her Ph.D. from Yale. Contact: MA Fashion Studies Program, School of Art and Design History and Theory, Parsons The New School, 2 West 13th Street, Room 709B, New York, New York 10011, USA. E-mail: [email protected]

Emmanuel Raymundo and Christina H. Moon have asserted their right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the authors of this work in the format that was submitted to Intellect Ltd.

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