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Schiaparelli's Dark Circus FSPC 1 (1) pp. 29–43 Intellect Limited 2014 Fashion, Style & Popular Culture Volume 1 Number 1 © 2014 Intellect Ltd Article. English language. doi: 10.1386/fspc.1.1.29_1 Victoria R. Pass Salisbury University Schiaparelli’s dark circus Abstract Keywords Elsa Schiaparelli is usually remembered for her whimsical and outlandish designs, Elsa Schiaparelli shocking pink, butterfly-shaped buttons, the high heel hat and trompe l’oeil sweaters. surrealism What is less remembered are Schiaparelli’s darker designs. In the late 1930s, on the eve 1930s of World War II, Schiaparelli’s designs took a distinct sinister turn. This article explores fashion two designs from her 1938 Circus Collection that were collaborations with the Surrealist Salvador Dalí artist Salvador Dalí: the Tear-Illusion Dress and the Skeleton Dress. Comparison of Jean Paul Gaultier these designs with the work of contemporary designers Jean Paul Gaultier, Alexander Alexander McQueen McQueen and Olivier Theyskens shows the darker undertones of Schiaparelli’s Circus Olivier Theyskens Collection and its significant impact on designers at the turn of the twenty-first century. These designs reassert the corporality and mortality of the clothed body and emphasize its vulnerability. Drawing on Caroline Evan’s readings of deathliness and trauma in postmodern fashion, I will examine these impulses in the work of Schiaparelli. This article will seek to show the dark side of Schiaparelli’s work and the ways in which she responded to the impending threat of totalitarianism in the late 1930s. Introduction 1. From a song composed Elsa Schiaparelli (1890–1973) is the designer best known for outrageous fash- by Drian: ‘Joke or Genius?/ In tumbling ions and collaborations with Surrealist artists in the 1930s. Particularly famous fashion/She dressed are her outrageous hats, especially those on which she collaborated with in folly/ And signs – Surrealist artist Salvador Dalí: the mutton chop hat, the high heel hat and the Schiaparelli!’. ink well hat. These absurdist designs led fashion illustrator Drian to ask of Schiaparelli ‘Blague ou Genie?’/‘Joke or Genius?’1 (Steele 1988: 248). Her Spring 1938 Circus Collection included two collaborations with Dalí, the Tear-Illusion Dress and the Skeleton Dress, which reflected fashion’s intimate connection to death (see Figures 1–4). While Schiaparelli is often seen as simply the trans- lator of Dalí’s work into fashion, I argue that she dealt with the deathly and 29 FSPC_1.1_Pass_29-43.indd 29 8/30/13 6:06:38 PM Victoria R. Pass the uncanny from early in her career, beyond her collaborations with Dalí. The Circus Collection has been seen by some as a matter of escapism in the midst of the rise of fascism (Martin 1987: 198). Caroline Evans, however, has suggested that the circus theme had more to do with psychological aliena- tion and masquerade than playful absurdism (Evans 1999: 11). Beyond this, I argue that as the world teetered on the brink of war a number of Schiaparelli’s designs reflect the designer’s preoccupation with death and the deathly. It is Schiaparelli’s dark side that has made her such a critical influence on contemporary fashion designers. Examination of her work alongside the work © Salvador Dalí, Fundació Gala-Salvador Dalí, Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York 2013/Victoria and Albert Museum, London. Figure 1: Elsa Schiaparelli, Tear-Illusion dress, evening dress of tear fabric designed by Salvador Dali, and head scarf, Summer 1938, viscose rayon and silk blend, with pink nylon gloves. 30 FSPC_1.1_Pass_29-43.indd 30 8/30/13 6:06:45 PM Schiaparelli’s dark circus © Salvador Dalí, Fundació Gala-Salvador Dalí, Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York 2013/Victoria and Albert Museum, London. Figure 2: Elsa Schiaparelli, Tear-Illusion dress, evening dress of tear fabric designed by Salvador Dali, and head scarf, Summer 1938. of Jean Paul Gaultier, Alexander McQueen and Olivier Theyskens shows the serious engagement of Schiaparelli’s work with death and the deathly. It also reveals the ways in which Schiaparelli’s work led the way to darkness for countless other designers. Schiaparelli’s exuberant and often shocking styles are a clear precursor for Gaultier, who freely uses historical and global styles to create witty and often provocative designs. He even quoted her perfume ‘Shocking’ in the torso-shaped bottles for his own scents. Comparing Schiaparelli to Theyskens and McQueen – two designers known for their distinctly dark aesthetics – may seem less obvious. Schiaparelli’s aesthetic shares much with both, particularly McQueen. Schiaparelli’s designs were often absurd and witty, but they also served as a kind of armour for their wearers. Her biographer Palmer White famously describes her ‘hard chic’ style as having a ‘militant, masculine quality’ that ‘protected the New Woman from 31 FSPC_1.1_Pass_29-43.indd 31 8/30/13 6:06:49 PM Victoria R. Pass © Victoria and Albert Museum, London. Figure 3: Elsa Schiaparelli, Skeleton Evening Dress, Summer 1938, silk crepe with plastic zips. counter-attacks by the male’ (1986: 19, 96–97). This philosophy is remarkably similar to that of McQueen, who told Vogue in 1997 ‘I want people to be afraid of the women I dress’, and often compared his clothes with armour (Evans 2003: 149). While the dark, morbid sensibility of McQueen’s aesthetic would seem to be at odds with the whimsical Surrealist tendencies of Schiaparelli, both designers thought of clothes as arming women for the penetrating gaze of viewers as they went out into the world. The Tear-Illusion Dress and Skeleton Dress reflect this idea, in addition to reflecting anxieties about the impending war in Europe. These designs also play on the idea of the femme fatale, a woman who embodies both sex and death. 32 FSPC_1.1_Pass_29-43.indd 32 8/30/13 6:06:53 PM Schiaparelli’s dark circus © Victoria and Albert Museum, London. Figure 4: Elsa Schiaparelli, Skeleton Evening Dress, Summer 1938, silk crepe with plastic zips. Deathly fashion Alexander McQueen is infamous for the sinister references in his clothes – bones, human hair, shredded fabric and sharp edges. Schiaparelli also used such images, albeit in a more subtle way. For example, Schiaparelli evoked human hair in a number of collections, including the Circus Collection, through the use of monkey fur, especially when dyed blond (Blum 2003: 143, 271; te Duits 2007: 187–88). Schiaparelli possessed a unique understanding of the deathly in fashion, writing in her autobiography, ‘as soon as a dress is born it has already become a thing of the past […]. A dress cannot just hang like a painting on the wall, or like a book remain intact and live a long and sheltered life’ (Schiaparelli [1954] 2007: 42). Theorist Walter Benjamin, writing at the time that Schiaparelli was designing, also argued that fashion had a unique relationship with death 33 FSPC_1.1_Pass_29-43.indd 33 8/30/13 6:06:57 PM Victoria R. Pass 2. Benjamin started the project in 1927, the same year as Schiaparelli’s first collection, and work ceased with his suicide in 1940. © WWD/Condé Nast/Corbis. Figure 5: Model Dita Von Teese on the runway at Jean Paul Gaultier’s fall 2010 haute couture show. because of its eternal quest for the new. Echoing Schiaparelli’s sentiments, Benjamin explained the way that fashion’s relentless quest for the new tied it firmly to our own mortality.2 He explains that ‘fashion has opened the business of dialectical exchange between woman and ware – between carnal pleasure and the corpse. The clerk, death, tall and loutish, measures the century by the yard’ (Benjamin 1999: 62–63). Fashion is a system predicated on obsolescence, 34 FSPC_1.1_Pass_29-43.indd 34 8/30/13 6:07:01 PM Schiaparelli’s dark circus depending on the death of old styles to create room for fresh ones. Thus, fash- ion always carries within it the spectre of its own death. For Benjamin, fashion’s obsolescence is precisely what makes it emblem- atic of modernity, in which everything eventually becomes outmoded. Benjamin argues that ‘fashion was never anything other than the parody of the motley cadaver, provocation of death through the woman, and bitter colloquy with decay whispered between shrill bursts of mechanical laughter. That is fashion’ (Benjamin 1999: 63). In 1937, poet and artist Jean Cocteau described Schiaparelli and her boutique in remarkably similar terms: Schiaparelli is above all the dressmaker of eccentricity. Has she not the air of a young demon who tempts women, who leads the mad carnival in a burst of laughter? Her establishment on the Place Vendôme is a devil’s laboratory. Women who go there fall into a trap, and come out masked, disguised, deformed or reformed, according to Schiaparelli’s whim. (Cocteau 1937: 172) Cocteau describes Schiaparelli as a devil, relating the metamorphoses she enacts on her customers to deals made with death. Schiaparelli in the Pavillion d’Elegance In the years leading up to the outbreak of World War II, Schiaparelli’s Surrealist winks began to turn more sombre. In 1936 German troops reoccu- pied the Rhineland and the country was remilitarizing in violation of the treaty of Versailles. The same year, Schiaparelli’s native Italy conquered Ethiopia. Schiaparelli had become a French citizen in 1931, but she felt the weight of her Italian roots in these years. She wrote in her autobiography, Personally I never experienced during that difficult period any antago- nism from friends or newspapers. The fact that I was Italian born was never referred to but I could not help thinking about it, and it hurt me as a missing limb hurts when the weather is about to change. (Schiaparelli [1954] 2007: 99) When published in 1954, she made sure to tell readers that while visiting Italy she had been invited to meet Mussolini, but refused (Schiaparelli [1954] 2007: 77).
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