ACNE
Italian born fashion designer Elsa Schiaparelli loved to shock and surprise, but perhaps it was in the blood. Her great-Uncle, the astronomer Giovanni Schiaparelli, shocked the world in 1877 by announcing he had discovered `canals' on Mars.
Born in Rome in 1890, the young Elsa grew up dancing to her own drummer, and ignoring convention. Her interest in exploring the unusual in fashion surfaced early and caused quite a stir. As a young woman, attending a ball in Paris, she created a dress by winding a strip of fabric around her body. Had it not unraveled, she might have started her first popular trend.
Her early marriage at 18 to theosophist William de Wendt de Kerlor came to a shocking end with the birth of a daughter her husband abandoned her, and Elsa found herself alone in Paris with a child to support. This was shocking enough to polite society in the 1920s, but Elsa didn't sit around feeling sorry for herself. She designed a black knitted sweater with a bow tie embellishment, and was soon selling them as fast as her troupe of Armenian knitters could produce them.
Her next shock was for the world of sport, when she opened her first salon in 1927. Called Stupidir de Sport she gave the tennis world a stunning serve with her divided skirt, worn in 1931 by tennis star Lili de Alvarez. As if that didn't shock the conservative ranks of women's' tennis enough, she later introduced shorts to Wimbledon.
But if that wasn't enough, Elsa turned her attention to high fashion and designed clothes in a new hot pink, which she naturally called `shocking' pink
Her love of color became a signature, and she called on surrealist artist Salvador Dali to design new fabrics and even hats imagine wearing a giant shoe on your head, or even a lamb chop as a team, Elsa and Dali brought fun to high fashion.
But Elsa's less outrageous designs became classics of fashion. She was the first to create a dramatic outline for women's bodies using shoulder pads, the first to give zippered clothes a more elegant finish by dyeing the zippers the same colour as the fabric, and the first to use animal print fabrics. Her style and panache may have been shocking, but it was also irresistible. Like shorts for tennis players, her `outrageous' ideas were warmly embraced by women.
Her wide range of interests and love of design soon saw her branching out into jewelry. She loved to experiment with new materials, and by the 30s, she had become one of the fashion world's great icons. She introduced cute buttons,
with shapes as diverse as bunnies and bullets, and the Egyptian Look, with huge sleeves that owed more to the Orient than Egypt. But Elsa didn't care and neither did her public her eclectic designs delighted her clients, who were drawn from among the very famous and wealthy of the time. They included movie stars like Marlene Dietrich and Mae West, and socialites like Wallis Simpson, the Duchess of Windsor.
One of her most amazing creations was the famous `lobster dress' of Salvador Dali. It looked like an elegant white organize evening gown except for the vibrant red lobster that Dali painted down the front of the skirt.
She continued to shock and delight with a dress that looked as if it had been repeatedly ripped far in
elegant white organize evening gown except for the vibrant red lobster that Dali painted down the front of the skirt.
She continued to shock and delight with a dress that looked as if it had been repeatedly ripped far in advance of today's `distressed' styles a back-to-front suit and coat printed with profiles by artist Jean Cocteau.
When she decided to create perfumes in the 30s, it was almost inevitable that she would create one called Shocking it became her most famous perfume, and her signature.
So legendary is this fragrance that Schiaparelli France recently recreated it in the original shapely bottle modeled on Mae West.
But the inescapable intervention of World War II proved more shocking than anything Elsa could have devised she was forced to close down her salon for the duration, and when it reopened in 1945, it seemed that the fire and passion had gone, swallowed the horror of six years of war. By the 50s, she was no longer designing clothes, but she took the time to write her autobiography My Shocking Life.
Elsa Schiaparelli died in 1973, and true to her great spirit, she was buried in her favorite outfit, a shocking pink Chinese robe. She was 83, and still fashion's grand dame. But her salon languished for a few years until it was reopened to keep her designs and perfumes available to the legions of women that had grown to love them.
