User:Emilyjopayne3/Elsa Schiaparelli
Elsa Schiaparelli was born September 10, 1890. She was a fashion designer whose Surrealist-inspired work transformed the way women dressed in the early to mid 18th century.
Schiaparelli created the House of Schiaparelli in 1927. Located in Paris, the fashion house produced some of Schiaparelli's finest works. She famously collaborated with the Surrealist artist Salvador Dali to create nonconformist and ‘outrageous’ ensembles were a medium for a form of art that shaped the fashion industry forever.
Heavily indebted, Schiaparelli closed her fashion house in December of 1954, and passed away around twenty years later on November 13, 1973.
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Personal contributions to Feminism[edit]
Elsa Schiaparelli's nonconformist and ‘outrageous’ ensembles were a medium for a form of art that shaped the fashion industry forever. A daring triumphant in the fashion world, an analysis of her works through a feminist lens reveals how she transformed the way women dressed. Through the medium of fabric, Schiaparelli’s works emboldened and embodied women for decades to come; a true influence on feminism and fashion. She was one of the first designers to make her pieces true works of art, with metaphors and symbolisms beyond the physical measure of fabric she used. Schiaparelli created works by a woman, for women. Elsa Schiaparelli made women feel beautiful, daring and independent—by convincing them to wear insect jewelry, clown prints and shoes on their heads. She not only changed the fashion industry in her time, she changed the way women viewed the clothes they wore, and the way they perceived themselves in society. A modern example of her influence on feminism was her design for Lady Gaga to wear to Joe Bidens inauguration. Schiaparelli's legacy and origins inspired Gaga to wear the ensemble, adding on the gold dove to represent peace and unity.
Influential Designs on Feminism[edit]
The Skeleton Dress
After the Great Depression, the 1930’s became a period of escapism as World War 2 loomed. The ‘ideal’ body image for women at the time transitioned from the boyish and youthful look of the 20s, to a favor for subtle curves, high waistlines, and long, elegant postures. The skeleton dress is a floor-length, silk crepe, black dress hugs the body of the evening gown-dormer. Salvador Dali, a surrealist artist, provided the inspiration that led to the collaboration of the dress. He gave Schiaparelli a drawing of a woman in a sheer, body-hugging dress with her rib cage and hip bones exposed. The garment is full coverage, and its silhouette appears constricting, as if it's devouring the wearer. The quilting of the dress resembles the bones of the spine, rib cage, legs, and hips. This look was achieved using an exaggerated trapunto quilting technique that involved the use of cotton wadding for a three-dimensional effect.
The surrealism of the garment plays into the ‘boney’ and constricting, “ideal” body type of the period. The dress appears to be a “second skin” on the subject, a play on the restrictive body type that women strived to achieve in the 1920’s and 1930’s. Although the appearance of the dress is constrictive, the material is sports-like, allowing for freedom of movement and mobility. The dress itself is a juxtaposition of the body type of the period; seemingly mocking the body types of the 1920’s and 1930’s while providing women an invisible mobility; a play on the social mobility that Schiaparelli believed women should have.
The Tears Dress
The Tears dress was part of Schiaparelli’s Spring 1938 “Circus” Collection, and is one of her most famous designs. The garment is a floor length, sheath-style, sleeveless dress that is fitted at the waist. The dress extends out into two pointed trains at the back, as if trailing behind the wearer. It features a wide bateau neckline, and drapes gracefully across the chest to a gathered left shoulder. The pattern that repeats throughout the dress represents a “tear’ that gives the garment its name. The print was designed by Salvador Dali. With the inspiration of the dress coming from an earlier painting of Dali, titled Three Young Surrealist Women Holding in their Arms the Skins of an Orchestra, which is the painting pictured on the slide.
This dress was one of the first collaborations between a fashion designer and an artist, paving the way for later designers to take inspiration from artwork. It is theorized that this dress is a metaphor for marriage. The dress and veil appear in the form of a classic, western wedding dress. The whiteness of the dress is interrupted by the “tear” designs. In the 1930’s, when the dress was designed, marriage was both strived for and secretly resented. The lifestyle of a married woman was one of a confined housewife, a woman subservient to her husband, the household, and her children. The tears on the quote unquote wedding dress are representative of the inner turmoil a soon to be bride felt as she was about to get married, she was completing her social duties while selling herself into a kind of servitude for the rest of her life.
Lobster Dinner Dress
The Lobster Dinner Dress is considered the height of Dali and Schiaparelli collaborations, a true masterpiece that shocked the time period and is recognisable to this day. Dali drew the initial motif that was then incorporated onto the fabric. Dali’s previous work, the 1936’s Lobster Telephone which was influenced by the work of Sigmund Freud, was another inspiration behind the lobster motif. The lobster was printed onto silk organza and is an off-white, A-line evening gown with a sheer coral insert below the bust that creates a slight empire-waist silhouette.
Wallis Simpson was an American socialite who became the Duchess of Windsor when she married the former King Edward VIII (8). When Simpson wore the dress, she brought Schiaparelli significant media coverage, as the dress turned heads. Simpson was an abnormality in the English monarchy, bringing modernism into the ancient lineage. Schiaparelli’s dress was not typical of 1930s fashion, but it did fit some general aspects of contemporary style. Both Simpson and Schiaparelli used the dress to blend tradition and shock, a representation of what both women embodied and the misogynistic themes of the 1930’s that they rejected.
The lobster dress has made several famous appearances in the 21st century. Most notable was the Prada column gown with a beaded lobster that was made for Vogue editor in chief Anna Wintour. The legacy of the lobster dress and the impact it had on women in the 1930’s continues to live on in the modern age.
The Faux Bow Sweater
The bow sweater was designed in 1927 and arrived in fashion to serve the needs of sleek and dynamic modern women. It's simple, practical, and youthful knitwear that presented the women with a type of fashion they had yet to receive, an active style of clothing that was practical for daytime and constituted a way of elegance that was lost to sportswear of the time. The faux bow sweater inspired Vogue to title sportswear as a separate domain of fashion with laws of its own.
Schiaparelli designed the sweater out of a desire to have a smart sweater and skirt to play golf in. She found it humorous that the sweaters of the period clung to a women's figure so tightly. She noted that she could never find a sweater that fit her as comfortably as a blouse did. With a figure more vivacious than the boyish models that dominated the period, Schiaparelli created the sweater to fill what she saw as a void in the market, a more generously-cut sweater that would fit figures like her own. The sexualization of something as simple as a woman's sweater was baffling to Schiaparelli. She aimed to create a casual and conservative piece of clothing that made the wearer feel good about themselves without showing off the curves of their figure.
Plays on figurative motifs, which at the period were expressed in various forms of media, became a main pillar of Schiaparelli's work. What attracts the modern eye is not the fit of the sweater, but the way it flirts with the eye, tying the imagination in pretty knots.
Mad Cap
In 1930, Elsa Schiaparelli designed a head-hugging “map cap” which became widely popular well into the late 1930s. The design was a simple knitted cap with distinctive pointed ends that could easily be pulled into any shape or style. It was an extremely versatile design that was transmuted into all types of fabrics. Towards the end of its height, the cap was also dressed up by adding rhinestone pins or buttons, and was known to be the perfect complement to daytime suits and dresses.
Schiaparelli designed the hat when she decided to add a military department to her business. Worn by celebrities of the time, like Katherine Hepburn, the design quickly shifted into high fashion. The hat design was copied by so many contemporary fashion designers that Schiaparelli ordered every single madcap to be destroyed and taken off the market. Despite the copious amounts of recreation the hat endured, the design skyrocketed Schiaparelli to fame. In 1934, Time Magazine dedicated a cover to her, presenting her as one of the arbiters of ultra-modern haute couture. Her appearance on the cover of time magazine presented her with the title as the first female fashion designer to be honored on the cover of Time. This was a feat that no female fashion designer of the time has aspired too, making her a landmark feminist icon for female fashion designers in, and planning to enter, the fashion industry. Not only did Schiaparelli create clothes that empowered women, with her creation of the madcap she became a figure herself of female empowerment.
The Glass Cape
In 1930, Elsa Schiaparelli designed a head-hugging “map cap” which became widely popular well into the late 1930s. The design was a simple knitted cap with distinctive pointed ends that could easily be pulled into any shape or style. It was an extremely versatile design that was transmuted into all types of fabrics. Towards the end of its height, the cap was also dressed up by adding rhinestone pins or buttons, and was known to be the perfect complement to daytime suits and dresses.
Schiaparelli designed the hat when she decided to add a military department to her business. Worn by celebrities of the time, like Katherine Hepburn, the design quickly shifted into high fashion. The hat design was copied by so many contemporary fashion designers that Schiaparelli ordered every single madcap to be destroyed and taken off the market. Despite the copious amounts of recreation the hat endured, the design skyrocketed Schiaparelli to fame. In 1934, Time Magazine dedicated a cover to her, presenting her as one of the arbiters of ultra-modern haute couture. Her appearance on the cover of time magazine presented her with the title as the first female fashion designer to be honored on the cover of Time. This was a feat that no female fashion designer of the time has aspired too, making her a landmark feminist icon for female fashion designers in, and planning to enter, the fashion industry. Not only did Schiaparelli create clothes that empowered women, with her creation of the madcap she became a figure herself of female empowerment.
Shocking Pink
Although not a specific form of artwork on its lonesome, the color “Shocking Pink” became a staple of Schiaparelli’s work and transcended into a design of its own. Not just any pink, this was not the pallid tint of 18th-century art. “Shocking Pink” was a full-blooded, decidedly brash hue that became Schiaparelli's signature. Pink has a reputation for being somewhat sweet, a color representative of the female race. Schiaparelli and her peers transformed this image of the feminized pink. For them, pink was a color of potent power wielded by those who knew what they wanted and were not afraid to go after it. It became a color for the difficult, a color for those who knew their own minds. The color represented Schiaparelli’s desire to shock those around her with her unique and avant-garde designs.
This is represented by the suit pictured on the left side of the slide. The goal was to create a piece that possessed an artistic aesthetic. The suit represents a more conventional idea of fashion and beauty, while the “Shocking Pink” represents breaking out of this model and becoming something authentic. The textual novelty weave Schiaparelli used is an example of her propensity to use interesting fabrics to enliven a simple silhouette. For women, shocking pink was a pure, vibrant, undiluted, intense and lively pigment, a representation for what women could aspire to be in the 1930s.
The Wrap Dress
Schiaparelli was one of the first designers to create what we now know as the wrap dress. She took inspiration from aprons to develop a flattering and flexible silhouette for all body types. Early versions of her designs were tied at the waistline, were made out of tussore silk and even included buttons. The wrap dress exemplifies the transcendence of Elsa Schiaparelli’s designs throughout time and into the modern era.
The wrap dress became notorious in 1974 when designer Diane von Furstenberg used Schiaparelli’s design to create a form of dress that women who were newly entering the workforce could wear. Recognizable by its V-neck and its curved shoe to tie that emphasizes the curves, the wrap dress quickly became a strong symbol of freedom and independence of the women.
Elsa Schiaparelli’s urge to create fashion that empowered women in the 1930’s was translated into a representation of women in the workforce through a later designer. When shopping on female clothing websites, it is almost impossible to open the “Dresses” section without seeing some form of Schiaparelli’s early designs of the dress. A true ingenue, Schiaparelli continued to empower women long after her time as a revolutionary fashion designer.