Elsa Schiaparelli: History of a style and avant-garde icon.
She played with optical illusions and desires, worked with surrealist and dadaist artists, and even today her brand is once again a big name in the world of haute couture.
She was the antagonist of Coco Chanel, a fashion designer who loved art and literature, a woman from the aristocracy who knew how to make herself loved by the people. Elsa Schiaparelli was a great Italian, a woman who always had to fight to assert herself in her life. Elsa Schiaparelli's is a paradigmatic story: a story of talent, brilliant insights, extraordinary inventions.
The clash between Elsa Schiaparelli and Coco Chanel animated the early pioneering stages of the fashion world, starting in the 1930s. A duel between warriors, but a classy one. A fight made up of collections, beautiful dresses, dream dresses, which did not debase, on the contrary greatly enriched the world of glamour. To Coco Chanel we owe simplicity and naturalness, to Elsa Schiaparelli ever more whimsical, flamboyant, particular dresses. Both have given so much, in short, to the world of fashion.
Elsa Schiaparelli has left an important legacy in international haute couture: original garments and accessories, which through surrealist and Dadaist influence have become true works of art. Today, the Schiaparelli brand is still a protagonist of the Haute Couture fashion scene with its new artistic director Daniel Roseberry. From the invention, but not only, of shocking pink Elsa Schiaparelli marks the history of fashion with her style that plays with optical illusions and the desire to create something new for women's clothing.
Biography of an unconventional woman
To Elsa Schiaparelli, life bestowed illustrious ancestors. Her uncle Giovanni was a famous astronomer, discoverer of the canals on Mars that bear his surname, while her father Celestino was an esteemed intellectual. His mother, on the other hand, boasted Medici ancestry. Born in Rome on 10 September 1890, little Elsa dreamed of becoming an actress, but her parents thought it more appropriate to let her study philosophy and literature.
Passionate about poetry, at the age of 21 she published a series of licentious poems that were quite successful, especially in France. Father Celestine was not pleased and sent her to a convent in Switzerland, but two years later Elsa moved to London where she met Count William de Wendt de Kerlor, whom she married in 1914. The two moved to New York where Maria Luisa Yvonne Radha, known as Gogo, was born, a little girl unfortunately destined to fall ill with polio. The marriage soon ended and Schiaparelli returned to Europe, to Paris, where he became involved with the Dadaist and Cubist avant-garde.
Emancipation:
For Elsa Schiaparelli, clothes are a symbol of emancipation, a break with society's conventions and an expression of contemporary feeling. In the 1930s, her drawer dress inspired by her colleague and friend Dali's Venus de Milo is famous. But also the re-evaluation of the jumper, for Elsa Schiaparelli meant an important avant-garde in favour of innovative fashion, and new schemes with which to think about it.
She made the costumes for the film Moulin Rouge in '52, before the Schiaparelli company declared bankruptcy in Paris. Elsa Schiaparelli returned to the market in 2010, reopening her offices on the Place Vendôme and hosting a new collection designed by Lacroix in 2013. Initially, the clothes were haute couture, but then production opened up to ready-to-wear. Now, Elsa Schiaparelli and her dresses, mindful of their history and the role they played in the collective imagination during the last century, are still the talk of the innovative Schiaparelli brand.
The jumper ennoblement
Focusing on the ennobling of the jumper, seen as a garment relegated to the world of work and lacking in elegance, she began to be known in Europe and the United States where several department stores purchased her most fashionable models from Elsa Schiaparelli. The designer also went down in history for having intuited the potential of prêt à porter and mass production of garments in the world of Parisian haute couture. She was also responsible for the conception of the fashion show, which used a mixture of art, music and fashion. She collaborated with Dali and Picasso, becoming a point of reference for haute couture.
With the Second World War she returned to America, but once she set foot in Europe again at the dawn of the 1950s, she realized that the fashion world was no longer what it had been. In '54 she was forced to close the Maison, and 19 years later she died in the city that had welcomed her career as a designer, Paris.
The Schiaparelli pink
In addition to countless ideas for exaggerated and unconventional clothes and accessories, Schiaparelli is also credited with the invention - let's call it that given her acumen - of a shade of pink that has a certain amount of red in it. Yes, this is indeed the story of Elsa Schiaparelli and the shocking pink created for the release of her perfume Shocking de Schiaparelli in 1937.
The colour is described as 'bright, impossible, brash, inappropriate, life-giving, like all the light and birds and fish in the world put together, a colour of China and Peru but not of the West'. In principle, therefore, what we now call shocking pink is also identified as Schiaparelli pink.
