Schiaparelli's Dark Circus

Home , Alexander McQueen, Elsa Schiaparelli, Jean Paul Gaultier

FSPC 1 (1) pp. 29–43 Intellect Limited 2014

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

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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.

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© 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

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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.

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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

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2. Benjamin started the project in 1927, the same year as Schiaparelli’s first collection, and work ceased with his suicide in 1940.

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,

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depending on the death of old styles to create room for fresh ones. Thus, fashion 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). The year 1937 witnessed a metaphoric face-off between Germany and the Soviet Union on the Trocadero at the Paris International Exposition. Picasso’s haunting work Guernica (1937) appeared in the Spanish pavilion at the Exposition, representing the horrors occurring during the Spanish Civil War. Meanwhile, in the Pavillon d’Elégance, Schiaparelli created a furor of her own, in her typically shocking style. This event may not have had political consequences, but reflected the tenuous tenor of the times, and had a profound impact on the Surrealists. Schiaparelli despised the modernist mannequins provided to the coutu- riers in the Pavillon d’Elégance, with their strangely swollen and attenuated limbs that gave them the appearance of Surrealist hysterics. Playing up the mannequin’s uncanny quality, Schiaparelli put a ‘corpse’ in the middle of an elegant display of French couture, leaving her mannequin

naked as the factory had delivered it, on some turf and piled flowers over it to cheer it up. I then stretched a rope across an open space and,

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as after washing day, hung up all the clothes of a smart woman, even to panties, stockings, and shoes. (Schiaparelli [1954] 2007: 74)

The display caused a scandal. Visitors thought that the mannequin was a corpse; one even left a condolence card. This would have been a particularly startling image in the context of the images of death and destruction in Picasso’s Guernica hanging in the nearby Spanish pavilion (Mehring 1999: 20). A photograph of the display appeared in Harper’s Bazaar on 15 September 1937, along with an article titled ‘Within the Pavillon d’Elegance’. Schiaparelli’s stunt was provocative – so provocative that her display did not appear in any of the major French fashion magazines including Femina, L’Art et la Mode or Jardin de la Mode, which reproduced a number of the other coutu- riers’ vignettes. The displays in the pavilion were documented by the German Surrealist photographer Wols. According to Christine Mehring, the fashion pavilion itself toned down the Surrealism of the mannequins and fashion magazines in turn minimized the Surrealism in Wols’ photographs (Mehring 1999: 19). Schiaparelli’s contribution to the pavilion, however, amplified ‘the surrealist combinations of the half-alive and half-dead’ (Mehring 1999: 20). Her work was radical in the context of French couture and showed the tensions of the impending war. This macabre installation did not go unnoticed by the Surrealists, who were inspired to experiment with Mannequins at their ‘Exposition Internationale du Surréalisme’ seven months later in January 1938. Each artist was given a mannequin to dress for the exhibition. Salvador Dalí even used Schiaparelli’s Peruvian-inspired ski mask on his.

The Tear-Illusion Dress Just after the Surrealist exposition, on 4 February 1938, Schiaparelli presented her Circus Collection. She wrote that in the years just before the war ‘the Parisian women, as if feeling it was their last chance, were particularly chic’ (Schiaparelli [1954] 2007: 100). Schiaparelli, particularly in the Circus Collection, let out a burst of wild creativity. Ignoring conventional good taste and restraint she made hats shaped like hens, lamb chops and inkwells. ‘Circus tent’ veils were made in fabric to match the gowns in the collection and could be worn with a small hat shaped like a snail or a small fez. Other models wore pointed clown hats. The collection drew on a number of exuberant circus-inspired embroideries, prints, buttons and accessories featuring acrobats, elephants and merry-go-rounds. It also included garments inspired by the spirit of the circus with ‘Surrealist touches, like snail toques, mouth pockets, eye embroideries with gold eyelashes and dresses worn backwards’ Schiaparelli printed dress fabric with ‘Wet Paint’ signs (Anon. 1938a: 84). Buttons were made to look like clowns, acrobats, rock candy, licorice, gum balls and marshmallows. Amid this wild abandon were two of Schiaparelli’s most famous designs, both collaborations with Salvador Dalí: the Tear-Illusion Dress and the Skeleton Dress. These dresses were the phantoms of war amid the raucous joy of the rest of the Circus Collection. Both garments moved beyond this reference to current events, however, to offer a commentary on fashion’s own connection with death. The Tear-Illusion Dress and the Skeleton Dress were notably darker than the rest of the Circus Collection and Schiaparelli’s previous collaborations with Dalí. The Tear-Illusion Dress did not appear in any major French or US fashion magazines, which suggests just how revolutionary it was. The gown was

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made from pale blue silk crepe printed with trompe l’oeil patches of torn flesh. The print was designed by Dalí to resemble a series of his paintings including Necrophiliac Springtime (1936), owned by Schiaparelli, and Three Young Surrealist Women Holding in Their Arms the Skins of an Orchestra (1936). In Schiaparelli’s translation, the blue dress is printed with tears in Dalí’s trompe l’oeil style. The tears reveal the pink underside of the fabric, with a darker pink revealed in the holes. The dress was worn with a ‘circus tent’ veil, which, instead of the trompe l’oeil print, is covered in actual cut-away flaps of the blue material, revealing the same dark purple-pink underneath. The tears are ambiguous. Dilys Blum reads them as torn patches of fur: ‘as if the gown were made from an animal skin turned inside out’ (Blum 2007: 139). Evans writes that:

They are the colors of bruised and torn flesh; yet it is completely unclear whether the illusion is meant to suggest torn fabric or flesh. Is the cloth below the ‘tears’ textile or skin? Do the rips designate poverty (rags not riches) or some form of attack? (1999: 11)

The strange colour combination of the gown – even more difficult to imagine now that the colours have faded – confounds our expectations. Schiaparelli tears the blue fabric of the gown to reveal, not the skin of the wearer, but the viscera, as if fabric and skin are one and the same. This is the very illusion that Dalí creates in his paintings. The conflation of clothes and body was a prominent theme in the work of Schiaparelli and the Surrealists. An early collection of sweaters took their designs from the tattoos of sailors, conflating knit fabric with skin. Schiaparelli also created several gloves that conflated skin with fabric. For example, in 1936 she created gloves in black or white suede with coloured snakeskin nails to be worn with her bureau drawer suits, another collaboration with Dalí. The same year she created a series of dresses with decorative padding appliquéd over the breasts, mimicking ‘falsies’ that became popular when the hour-glass figure came back into fashion during the mid-1930s. The ‘falsies’ dress – one of which is in the collection of the Victoria and Albert Museum – was a favourite of Diana Vreeland (1985: 125). As in this design, Schiaparelli frequently called attention to the corporeal sexuality of both wearer and viewer, acknowledging the constructed nature of sexuality and gender. The garment catches the viewer off guard when his gaze is met not by a sexual object, but by padding. Through this gown the viewer’s gaze is met by a sexual subject, who returns his gaze with a playful wink. Schiaparelli also experimented with this play of concealing and revealing the body in the Tear-Illusion Dress. The dress was worn with a pair of opera- length pink gloves with two strips of ruffled material that ran the length of the gloves. The delicate dress lends the illusion of vulnerability and exposure; nevertheless, paired with its matching full-length flesh coloured gloves and veil, the ensemble envelops the wearer’s body almost completely. As is typical with Schiaparelli, the viewer thinks that the clothes reveal more of the body beneath than they actually do. Similar images appear in the work of Schiaparelli’s friend and collaborator, artist Leonor Fini. Her biographer, Peter Webb, goes as far as to suggest Fini as a possible source for Dalí’s imagery in the Tear-Illusion Dress (Webb 2010: 64). Fini’s paintings are instructive in that they also depict images of women who are exposed, and yet remain in control. As with Schiaparelli’s dress, these women are not being victimized; rather, they are in the position of power over

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the viewer. This is particularly evident in Fini’s 1938 Self-Portrait with Scorpion, in which she fashionably poses in a brown shirt with mutton chop sleeves, torn at the elbow and wrist. Her single white glove is turned up to reveal a scorpion’s tail or perhaps it is simply a brooch? Just as Fini created erotic images of women in control, Schiaparelli designed erotic gowns for women to wear that kept them in control. Some of these were worn by Fini herself (Webb 2010: 33). Schiaparelli’s gowns gave the illusion of revealing the body beneath the clothes, but actually concealed it. They seemed to present a vulnerable aesthetic, but in fact deflected the viewer’s gaze. Olivier Theyskens engaged with similar imagery in his Spring/Summer 1999 collection. An acid yellow dress is stitched together with Frankenstein scars instead of seams. A translucent black shirt gives the illusion of a scar going down the middle of the wearer’s body. As with Schiaparelli’s design, these wounds are not actually inflicted on the wearer, but on the clothes. Theyskens gives the fabrics of his garments the quality of skin, stitched and scarred. Like Schiaparelli, he experiments with transparency and the conflation of fabric and skin. The self- possessed wearer of Theyskens garments does not display her idealized body, but rather a veil of trauma. This trauma is also expressed in the Tear-Illusion Dress, which undoubtedly references the destruction wrought by the recent Spanish Civil War and the violent spread of fascism (Martin 1987: 136). The presence of this macabre gown in an otherwise joyful collection is unmistakably related to the impending war. The dress also reflects a complex Surrealist sensibility by creating an uncanny comparison between the actual tears and the trompe l’oeil ones. Schiaparelli undercuts the elegant shape of the gown with the menacing appearance of the tears and the uncanny pairing of reality and illusion. Caroline Evans writes that in the Tear-Illusion Dress, ‘Schiaparelli … plays with ideas normally antithetical to fashion, countering poise and tranquility with violence and anxiety’ (1999: 11). Since the heyday of Punk in the late 1970s, torn clothing has been part of the fashion landscape and Schiaparelli’s work should be acknowledged as an important predecessor. Her clothes do not reflect the idea of random violence, the patina of wear or the rags of poverty that are evoked by ripped styles popular in the last half decade. Instead, she combines elegance with violence. She renders the tears with exacting precision, whether in the print or the cut panels of the veil. The violence enacted on this gown is the result of careful calculation. Schiaparelli is not a designer whose work we would automatically associate with violence, but her contemporaries did. Cocteau explained that,

whereas in other times only a few mysterious and privileged women dressed themselves with great individuality and by the violence of their garb destroyed the ‘modern’ style, in 1937 a woman like Schiaparelli can invent for all women – for each woman in particular – that violence which was once the privilege of the very few. (1937: 143, 172)

Schiaparelli’s fashions are violent because they defy our expectations. Such violent shocks to the system were typical of this designer’s fashions and are apparent even in the more lighthearted designs of the Circus Collection. A smart grey suit worn backwards created an uncanny inversion of back and front. A wedding veil beaded with snaky locks called to mind the Medusa and was described as ‘A snake-charmer bride’s gown is of clouds of white cotton net with a snake-sequined veil’ (Anon. 1938c: 17). In the Tear-Illusion Dress, Schiaparelli presents torn flesh instead of an

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elegant evening gown, and the viewer is confounded by the realization that the 3. ‘Cher Elsa j’aime enormement c’idee entire garment is not torn at all, but is meant to trick the eye. des ‘os a l’exterieur’. My translation from a reproduction of The Skeleton Dress the sketch in Blum (2007: 147). Like the Tear-Illusion Dress, the Skeleton Dress also defied the viewer’s expectations. A sketch by Dalí gives some sense of the garment’s origin. Dalí’s sketch of skeletons, swathed in transparent drapery with stylized bones, even included ideas for handbags. He writes at the bottom of the page ‘Dear Elsa I like this idea of “bones on the outside” enormously’.3 Schiaparelli transformed Dalí’s sketch into a black silk crepe evening gown with a high neck and long sleeves. The silk crepe was a natural choice since it had been favoured for decades as a fabric appropriate for mourning due to its matte finish. Schiaparelli forms the bones with padded ridges following Dalí’s stylized design. A pelvic bone with padded lines emanating from it forms the leg bones; ribs hug the bust and continue onto the back of the dress, where a spine runs the length of the torso. The sleeves have a simple line running down them, with a curlicue suggesting the elbow joint. Like Dalí, Schiaparelli had long been fascinated with the idea of displacing the inside of the body onto the outside of clothes. One of her earliest sweater designs also incorporated a skeleton motif, giving the wearer the appearance of being seen through an X-ray. She also created a pair of gloves in pastel suede, embellished with veins. These were probably based on designs by Surrealist artist Meret Oppenheim (Anon. 1936: 150; Blum 2003: 123). Echoing her early X-ray sweater, Schiaparelli again experimented with ideas of transparency and of turning the body inside out. Instead of suggesting the soft skin of a woman’s hand through the use of pale-coloured kid or suede, these gloves evoke the fragility of veins, at once beautiful and grotesque. Olivier Theyskens experimented with this same mode of transparency in a body suit from 1998–1999. The suit in the ghostly pale blue, covered in veins in red and blue and a red lace heart over the left breast, mixed the delicacy of lace and veins with the grotesque image of the body turned inside out (Evans 2003: 222). Schiaparelli’s Skeleton Dress was in many ways the ultimate expression of this theme. The Skeleton Dress toys with a viewer’s expectations. As opposed to clinging to the body, the way an evening gown was expected to in the 1930s, revealing every curve, this dress revealed a woman’s bones instead. It becomes even more strangely macabre when seen with the hat Schiaparelli designed for it: a black circus tent veil topped with a snail-shaped cap. With its morose veil, the gown turns into a frightful image of mourning, an omen of the images of the emaciated victims of Hitler. The Skeleton Dress appeared in only one fashion magazine, Harper’s Bazaar, which proclaimed this dress and other garments in the Circus Collection to be ‘Designed Especially for Coo Coo the Bird Girl by Schiaparelli’, alluding to the malnourished figure the dress evoked (Anon. 1938b: 71). The strange glamour of the design is evident in the accompanying illustration by Vertés. Blum connects this design to the circus theme, citing the skeleton man in the freak show as its inspiration (2007: 147). Yet, this dress is more likely aligned with the melancholy aberration of the Tear-Illusion Dress in the collection. Evans argues that images of the inside of the body and the skeleton in fashion are always linked with death (2003: 224). This dress could be read as a humor- ous reflection of the idea of the femme fatale, a woman whose aggressive sexuality threatens the men that she ensnares. Many of Schiaparelli’s designs played off of this idea, including a pair of gloves with long metal claws designed for her Winter collection that same year. These gloves mocked the idea of a woman

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letting her talons show. Instead of covering claws with elegant gloves, this pair allowed a woman to put on claws or take them off at her will, falling right in line with Schiaparelli’s ideas about clothing as armour. The Skeleton Dress brought to life the idea of sex and death embodied in the figure of a woman. Sex and death were themes that Alexander McQueen frequently brought together in his designs as in the case of a corset made by Shaun Leane for McQueen’s Spring/Summer 1998 collection. The aluminium corset is shaped like the spinal column and ribcage cast from a human skeleton, but then shaped like an animal, with a tail coming off the back. In this corset, the wearer can be read either as a human animal hybrid – a concept that McQueen explored in his last two collections before his death in 2010 (Spring 2010 and Fall 2010) – or as a huntress wearing the remains of her prey as a memento mori, a reminder of death. Both suggest the femme fatale, ‘whose sexuality was dangerous, even deathly and for whom, therefore, male desire would always be tinged with dread’ (Evans 2003: 145). This is precisely the kind of woman McQueen was interested in evoking with these clothes, one who would provoke fear. These images are similar to those Schiaparelli conjured up with her wild gloves in the 1930s – adorned with claws, trimmed with hair-like monkey fur or made to look like animal paws – and with the Skeleton and Tear-Illusion Dresses. The image of the skeleton haunted many of McQueen’s collections, including his Fall/Winter 2001–2002 collection, What a Merry-Go-Round. This collection, like Schiaparelli’s Summer 1938 collection, was inspired by the circus and images of childhood. Yet, McQueen’s interpretation was more sinister than Schiaparelli’s. Caroline Evan’s explains that ‘although the circus is a locus of spectacle, fun and abandon, it is also a twilight world of refuge, danger and loss of self’ (Evans 2003: 99). Like fashion, the spectacle of the circus is fleeting – the big top can be filled with the excitement of the show one night, and the next, only an empty field where the tent once stood. McQueen populated his circus with women made up as melancholy clowns dressed in a bricollage of historical styles. Other models, styled after 1920s’ cabaret performers, were outfitted in military styles with a distinctly erotic edge. These ensembles reflect McQueen’s interest in the idea of childhood revolt, ‘You know, when your parent says you shouldn’t do something, but you do it anyway’ (Horyn 2001: B9). The show also commented more broadly on the fleeting spectacle of fashion and unmistakably represented the haunting of fashion by death in the figure of a clown/model dragging a gold skeleton at her feet. The fashionable woman is followed by an image of death – as soon as the dress departs the catwalk it will be obsolete, the next season’s designs already being dreamed up. Schiaparelli’s skeleton appeared most recently in Gaultier’s Fall 2010 collection. This collection is inspired by Schiaparelli’s designs with wide shoulders, cinched waists and even a bit of her signature shocking pink. A number of the designs directly quote hers. Dresses and suits included pronounced pockets, one of her signature styles. A polo neck top with Gaultier’s infamous cone breasts evokes Schiaparelli’s ‘falsies’ dresses. A deep purple dress with lavishly embroidered shoulders is reminiscent of her evening capes with embroidered and beaded shoulders. The collection also included a number of garments and accessories adorned with skeletal motifs that reference her Skeleton Dress. A black top and skirt included padded and piped lines of a stylized skeleton, with particular emphasis on the arms and hip bones. Gaultier repeated the motif of the hip bones on a number of garments in the collection. A little black dress

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featured rib-shaped padding across the torso. One purse was covered in bone shapes covered in black sequins, another had a spine curving around it with spangled rips running its width, while shoes featured bone-shaped appliqués. All of these designs built on Schiaparelli and Dalí’s idea of putting the bones on the outside of the body. In Gautier’s show these designs were linked to the idea of the femme fatale. His models sauntered down the runway smoking with long cigarettes holders, their hair upswept in exuberant turbans. Burlesque star Dita Von Teese closed the show with a striptease, revealing one of Gaultier’s designs for a new line of undergarments for La Perla (see Figure 5). Gaultier covered this nude-coloured corset in padded black sections forming the skeleton, embellished with black beading. The hip bones again are exaggerated, forming the garter belt, complete with bone-shaped suspenders for the stockings. Gautier explained that the collection ‘was all about structure, about bringing the bones, the very foundation of what makes a garment, to the surface. It’s about bones, but not in a ghost kind of way – unless we’re talking about the ghost of couture’ (Anon. 2010). The Skeleton corset is, in part, a visual pun, putting literal bones on a boned corset. The Skeleton corset, like Schiaparelli’s Skeleton Dress, also reasserts the corporeality of the female body, resisting the ways in which fashion transforms the body into a spectacle. The revelation of the skeleton corset underneath the gown also functions as a powerful reflection of Benjamin’s contention that death always lies beneath the surface of fashion: Teese literally is the ‘ghost of couture’, the femme fatale. Her ghostly white gloves with their long black nails – referencing Schiaparelli’s snakeskin nail gloves – complete the image of glittering spectre of death in fashion. In comparing Schiaparelli’s Tear-Illusion and Skeleton Dresses with the work of contemporary designers, it is evident that she was dealing with concepts that have preoccupied fashion designers for over half a century: decay, death and the corporeal body. The Skeleton Dress represents the quality of death inherent in fashion. It also reflects the mortality of its wearer as it fuses with her body. Both the Skeleton Dress and the Tear-Illusion Dress reassert the corporality and mortality of the clothed body and emphasize the vulnerability of that body. At the same time, they shield the wearer from an Other’s voyeuristic gaze, upending the conventions of the slinky evening gowns of the late 1930s. In ‘The Arcades Project’, Benjamin declared that ‘Every fashion couples the living body to the inorganic world’ (Benjamin 1999: 79). Schiaparelli took the fusion of the organic and inorganic seriously in her fashions and paved the way for many other designers to explore this fusion.

AcknowledgEments I would like to acknowledge the support of the University of Rochester Dean’s dissertation fellowship, which supported the research for this article, and the support of the University’s libraries, particularly Stephanie Frontz and the Art and Music Library staff. I would also like to thank brilliant friends and colleagues at University of Rochester, especially Janet Berlo, Rebecca Burditt, Nicola Mann, Michelle Finn and Kira Thurman. Thanks are due to Anne Cecil for unknowingly planting the seeds of this article, and to Joseph H. Hancock II and the two anonymous reviewers from Fashion, Style & Popular Culture.

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References Anon. (1936), ‘Tales of details’, Vogue, 15 September, pp. 59, 150, 52–53. —— (1937), ‘Within the Pavillon d’Elegance’, Harper’s Bazaar, 15 September, pp. 78–9. —— (1938a), ‘By wireless from Paris’, New York Times, 13 February, p. 84. —— (1938b) ‘Harper’s Folies’, Harper’s Bazaar, 15 March, pp. 70–71. —— (1938c), ‘Street scenes dot new Paris crepes’, New York Times, 7 February, p. 17. —— (2010), ‘Dita Von Teese strips at Jean Paul Gaultier Haute couture show’, Huffington Post, 8 July, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/07/08/dita- von-teese-strips-at_n_638862.html. Armstrong, Lisa (2004), ‘Clever is better than beautiful’, The Times, 31 May. Benjamin, Walter (1999), The Arcades Project (trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin), Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. Blum, Dilys E. (2003), Shocking!: The Art and Fashion of Elsa Schiaparelli, Philadelphia: Philadelphia Museum of Art. —— (2007), ‘Fashion and surrealism’, in Ghislaine Wood (ed.), Surreal Things: Surrealism and Design, London: V&A Publications, pp. 139–59. Cocteau, Jean (1937), ‘From worth to Alex’, Harper’s Bazaar, March, pp. 128–29, 43, 72. Evans, Caroline (2003), Fashion at the Edge: Spectacle, Modernity, and Deathliness, New Haven: Yale University Press. —— (1999), ‘Masks, mirrors and mannequins: Elsa Schiaparelli and the decentered subject’, Fashion Theory, 3:1, March, pp. 3–31. Horyn, Cathy (2001), ‘McQueen nods to a prince, but Genuflects toward Milan’, New York Times, 27 February, p. B9. Martin, Richard (1987), Fashion and Surrealism, New York: Rizzoli. Mehring, Christine (1999), Wols Photographs, Cambridge: Busch-Reisinger Museum. Schiaparelli, Elsa ([1954] 2007), Shocking Life: The Autobiography of Elsa Schiaparelli, London: V & A Publications. Steele, Valerie (1988), Paris Fashion: A Cultural History, New York: Oxford University Press. te Duits, Thimo (2007), ‘Shocking: Surrealism and Fashion Now’, in Ghislaine Wood (ed.), Surreal Things: Surrealism and Design, London: V&A Publications, pp. 177–89. Vreeland, Diana (1985), D.V. (eds. George Plimpton, Christopher Hemphill), New York: Vintage Books. Webb, Peter (2010), Sphinx: The Art and Life of Leonor Fini, New York: The Vendome Press. White, Palmer (1986), Elsa Schiaparelli: Empress of Paris Fashion, New York: Rizzoli.

Suggested citation Pass, V. R. (2014), ‘Schiaparelli’s dark circus’, Fashion, Style & Popular Culture 1: 1, pp. 29–43, doi: 10.1386/fspc.1.1.29_1

Contributor details Victoria R. Pass is Assistant Professor of art history at Salisbury University in Maryland. She received her Ph.D. from the University of Rochester in May 2011. Her dissertation ‘Strange Glamour’ examines fashion and art in the 1920s and

FSPC_1.1_Pass_29-43.indd 42 9/12/13 10:23:12 AM Schiaparelli’s dark circus

1930s. She is currently working on a project on African influences on modern fashion. She has also taught art history at the Maryland Institute College of Art. Contact: 1 Dorset Hill Ct., Owings Mills, MD 21117, USA. E-mail: [email protected]

Victoria R. Pass has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work in the format that was submitted to Intellect Ltd.

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