Schiaparelli, Elsa (1890–1973)

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Schiaparelli, Elsa (1890–1973)

Influential French couturiere whose designs changed the face of fashion in the two decades prior to World War II. Pronunciation: Skya-pa-RELL-ee. Name variations: Comtesse de Kerlor or Countess de Kerlor. Born Elsa Luisa Maria Schiaparelli on September 10, 1890, in Rome, Italy, to an aristocratic Italian family; died in Paris, France, on November 13, 1973, of complications from a series of strokes; daughter of Celestino Schiaparelli (of ancient Piedmontese lineage) and Maria Luisa Domenitis Schiaparelli (a Neapolitan); educated in private schools in Italy and Switzerland; married Comte William de Wendt de Kerlor (a French theosophist), in 1919 (divorced 1922); children: one daughter, Yvonne "Gogo" de Kerlor (b. 1920).

Defied parents by marrying a French theosophist and moving with him to New York (1919); divorced and moved to Paris (1922); began designing sweaters and casual wear for women; introduced two full collections of casual and formal wear (mid-1930s); was running her own company of several hundred employees and was the most famous purveyor of French haute couture in the world; spent most of World War II in U.S., lecturing and doing volunteer work to raise money for French war victims, though her company continued to operate in France under the supervision of trusted assistants; never regained her prewar popularity but her influence on contemporary fashion is still much in evidence; introduced her last collection (1954).

It was as a mere tourist, a single mother with little money and few prospects, that Elsa Schiaparelli first came to the city with which she would become synonymous. She was on her way from Italy to England that summer of 1913 when train schedules left her in Paris for a ten-day lay-over. Though she would not return there for nearly ten years, the vibrant artistic energy of the French capital exerted an immediate and powerful effect. She would say years later that "poverty and Paris" were the two greatest influences on her career as the world's most famous haute couturiere. "Poverty forced me to work," she said, "and Paris gave me a liking for it, and courage."

Her upbringing had ill prepared her for the task of earning a daily living. Indeed, Elsa Luisa Maria Schiaparelli had been born on September 10, 1890, in an elegant Italian palazzo where Michelangelo and Erasmus had once stayed, and where Queen Christina of Sweden had lived after abdicating her throne. The Palazzo Corsini housed the Italian Academy of Science's Lincei Library, overseen by Elsa's father, Celestino Schiaparelli, of ancient Piedmontese lineage. The Schiaparellis had been known for centuries for their erudition and intelligence (Elsa's astronomer uncle Giovanni had discovered the "canals" of Mars), so Celestino's choice of the emotionally volatile Neapolitan Maria Luisa Domenitis for his wife was one of the few things that managed to ruffle the reserve of his northern relations. The couple's first child, Beatrice Schiaparelli , was so strikingly beautiful that Elsa, with her large brown eyes and dark hair, always considered herself a rather plain girl.

With one of the world's most beautiful cities spread around her, and St. Peter's just around the corner, Elsa's childhood did not lack for color or style. All her life, she would remember the swirling scarlet moiré of cardinals' robes, the somber mauve of official church mourning, and the spring explosion of color at Rome's flower market, the Campi dei Fiori. Then, too, there were the costumes and passion of the Italian theater, to which Celestino began taking his younger daughter at an early age to see the great classics of the stage, although he quickly disabused Elsa of her desire to become an actress. Schiaparellis from time immemorial had abhorred public displays of emotion and firmly believed in the traditional woman's role as homemaker, hostess and child bearer.

But Maria's southern Italian passions ran strong in her younger daughter. When Celestino accepted the chair for Oriental Studies at the University of Rome and moved his family across the Tiber to the via Nazionale, 19-year-old Elsa took over a linen closet in the family's new apartment and spent months pouring out her creative turmoil in a collection of poetry which she published, without her family's knowledge, under the title Arethusa in 1911. "I was possessed," Schiaparelli later said of her brief career as an author. "Never since have I experienced such complete pleasure." Her meditations on the nature of love and the human spirit were well-enough received for the volume to be translated into English and German and for one reviewer to note that "Elsa Schiaparelli's poetry is profoundly human and essentially emotional." It was, in fact, the frank passion and emotionalism of the poems that dismayed Elsa's father and led to the quick decision to send her off to a convent in Switzerland while a suitable husband was found for her. Schiaparelli cared for none of the prospects her family presented and instead accepted an offer from an Englishwoman she had met in Florence to take a job in Britain at a progressive school for children. Thus it was that Schiaparelli first saw Paris that summer of 1913.

It's when you can't be extravagant that you become ingenious.
—Elsa Schiaparelli

She arrived during Europe's last burst of creativity before the outbreak of World War I, with Paris the epicenter of the storm of innovation. Elsa's first impression of the city was the relative freedom which allowed French women the same economic opportunities as men, even to own their own businesses, in sharp contrast to her tradition-bound upbringing. Then, too, there was the artistic ferment then seizing Paris—of the Fauvists, with their startling new palettes of scarlets and greens and purples, and the challenging perspectives of the Cubists, shattering the placid landscapes and still-lifes of the previous century. Of even more interest to Schiaparelli during her ten days in the French capital was the activity along the rue de la Paix, the center of a fashion industry that even then laid down the rules for well-dressed women around the world. Fashion was one of the few areas in which the circumscribed lives of aristocratic young ladies could find modest expression, and Schiaparelli herself had been spending much of the allowance which had been assigned to her since the age of 18 on clothing. She was delighted to not only tour the great fashion houses along the rue de la Paix but to accept an invitation to attend a costume ball on her last night in Paris. Elsa managed to throw together a costume consisting of yards of dark blue crepe de chine arranged like a voluminous pair of pajamas (a harbinger of her famous "lounging pajamas" of the 1930s), accented by a brilliant sash of orange silk and a matching turban, all held together by scores of pins which made their presence known as soon as Schiaparelli's first dance partner attempted to put his hands on her.

England could hardly match the excitements of Paris, but Schiaparelli took advantage of the many cultural opportunities London had to offer, the city being only a short train ride from the Kent countryside where her school was located. One evening in late 1913, she attended a lecture on theosophy delivered by a handsome Frenchman of mixed Breton and Polish descent grandly named Comte William de Wendt de Kerlor. In his remarks on spirituality and the underlying unity of spiritual belief, Elsa found many of the same themes she had explored in her own poetry. She gladly accepted an invitation to meet the speaker after his talk, and the very next day, Elsa and de Kerlor were engaged. Ignoring her parents' frantic attempts to block the impending marriage and threats to disinherit their troublesome daughter, the couple wed in a civil ceremony early in 1914. The new Comtesse de Kerlor, blissfully in love if now financially bereft, settled down to a married life interrupted just a few months later, in August 1914, by World War I.

De Kerlor, a pacifist who had long been predicting a spiritual renewal that would save Europe from war, sank into disillusionment and depression. In later life, Schiaparelli rarely spoke of the events of the next four years, although she acknowledged that de Kerlor sought comfort for his distress with other women and that the early glow of the marriage soon dulled. Among de Kerlor's lovers was actress Isadora Duncan , for whom he developed an especially strong passion, which may account for the decision to move with Elsa in 1919 to New York, where Duncan had taken up residence. Schiaparelli was pregnant by the time she and de Kerlor settled into the Hotel Brevoort in Greenwich Village. A daughter the couple named Yvonne was born in 1920, but even the presence of a child failed to save the marriage.

With help from her mother, Schiaparelli found a small apartment off Sixth Avenue. She earned a living producing translations from Italian for several publishing houses and took whatever other odd jobs she could find. Yvonne, meanwhile, had been diagnosed with infantile paralysis, a disease which would take years and expensive therapy to cure. Despite Schiaparelli's frequent references to the poverty of these years, her daughter cast a different light in her own recollections. "She loved to be dramatic about her financial situation, but … her mother sent us money. Mummy got all dressed up every night for her umpteen dinner parties, leaving me with a nanny," Yvonne remembered from a distance of nearly 70 years, still recalling her mother's usual evening farewell of "Well, I must go now!" as she rushed out the door. (Her baby-talk response of "Go, go!" gave Yvonne the nickname, Gogo, for which she would be known for the rest of her life.) Nevertheless, Schiaparelli would always consider these American years to be as crucial to her future as Paris would be. "America has always been more than hospitable and friendly to me," she said many years later, citing the vitality and modernism she found in New York. "[America] made it possible for me to obtain a unique place in the world." During her time in the city, Schiaparelli made friends with other expatriate Europeans who had fled the war, among them Surrealist artists Marcel Duchamp and Salvador Dali, both of whose work would help lend a striking avant-garde air to "the Schiaparelli look."

But Paris beckoned. In June 1922, with her divorce from de Kerlor final, Schiaparelli set sail for France in the company of a wealthy American woman she had befriended who asked for her help in arranging a divorce from her French husband. Not long after arriving in Paris, Schiaparelli designed and constructed a simple evening dress for a cash-strapped friend who had been invited to a formal dinner. It attracted enough attention that the evening's host wondered admiringly who had designed it. The host was Paul Poiret, the leading designer in prewar France, and his interest in her creation inspired Elsa to further experiments. Although she had no experience in the physical process of dressmaking, she covered her ignorance well as she produced a few small items for curious friends, often cutting material without a pattern using a pair of kitchen shears. Mistakes were frequently hidden underneath oversized, shawl-like collars she would later formalize as the bolero, or cleverly hidden by a sash. Schiaparelli finally met Poiret, whom she admiringly called the "Leonardo of fashion," at one of the great man's fashion shows and was pleased when he complimented her on her self-designed dress. Encouraged to begin showing some of her sketches to the leading fashion houses of the day, Schiaparelli adapted her mentor's use of color and line to such good effect that she was soon being referred to as "the female Poiret."

But it was with a simple sweater, rather than elegant evening wear, that Schiaparelli launched her assault on the industry. Although sweaters had not been considered a fashion item before the war, their potential became apparent in the early 1920s on the tennis court, where more liberal attitudes had led women to abandon the old, ankle-length cotton skirts and constricting blouses for pleated, knee-length skirts worn with short-sleeved, knitted vests. Elsa's future rival, Coco Chanel , was among the first to adapt the look into a line for which she coined the phrase "sports wear"; while Jean Patou, who was challenging Poiret's supremacy in male-designed fashion, took Chanel's idea a step further by introducing matched twin-sets of pleated skirt and sweater, creating almost overnight the machine-made sweater industry. Schiaparelli entered the fray during the winter of 1923–24 by producing a simple, hand-knit black-and-white sweater that became immensely popular for its clean lines and Cubist-inspired pattern, so much so that yet another of the wealthy American women who seemed to seek out Elsa offered to provide backing for a modest business. With the money, Schiaparelli purchased a small dress house called Maison Lambal in the Place Vendôme and, in January 1926, introduced her first collection. "The collection, although not large, is carefully conceived and executed," reported Women's Wear Daily. "They are all simple and direct with very fine detail work and pleasing color combinations."

Although Elsa's ambitions for her new company soon outstripped the resources of her first patron, other backers were found for a larger and more elaborate collection introduced in January 1927, which was again cited for its innovative use of color and combinations of fabrics. "Display Number One," as Elsa grandly called the collection, included sweaters made from a newly developed elastic wool blend called kasha, to which she had added crepe de chine skirts with matching scarves and stockings. The designs were drawn from the Futurist art of her Italian adolescence and from the new Art Deco movement. The collection's innovations, revealed to a much wider public when French Vogue published a page of Schiaparelli's designs in its February issue, brought so many new customers to her door that Elsa was obliged to move her showrooms to larger quarters in St. Germain de Prés.

A year later, she convinced her backers to let her rent space on the street which had held such fascination for her more than a decade earlier. She took four small rooms on the attic floor at number 4 rue de la Paix, a space so cramped that clients had to stand on chairs or tables for their fittings after struggling up six flights of creaky wooden stairs. But business was brisk enough for Schiaparelli to proudly mount a plaque at her door, bearing her name in her trademark black-and-white with the slogan "pour le sport," and to take a full-page ad in French Vogue for February 1928. There was even press attention in America, where The New Yorker's Paris correspondent Janet Flanner noted: "She is hardly established and is a good bet as a growing influence on the Paris world of sport."

Further innovations followed. There was the line of sweaters in what Schiaparelli called an "Armenian stitch," which had been brought to her attention by an Armenian refugee from Turkey who became Elsa's head seamstress. This new line of sweaters was woven from three yarns of different colors, rather than the usual two. One color was woven in an understitch that formed a kind of lining, shimmering underneath the two top colors and giving the sweater more body. Elsa received her biggest order to date, for 40 copies of the sweater, from Lord & Taylor in New York. She managed to fill the order in two weeks after scouring Paris for six more seamstresses who knew the special stitching technique. By late spring of 1928, the sweaters were selling in New York for $95 each, or nearly $1,000 in modern currency. After the "Armenian Sweater" came a line of "Trompe l'oeil" sweaters, with clever designs of bowties or butterfly wings; and the "Skeleton Sweater," a black sweater with white lines mimicking the bone structure of the chest and giving the alarming appearance of an X-ray. All were hand-knit by Schiaparelli's growing corps of seamstresses and could be accessorized with a collection of carved, tiled or lacquered jewelry Elsa had designed. The "House of Schiap," as her business was now labeled, became so identified with sweaters that Elsa once joked: "My professional life hung on a thread."

Schiaparelli's "Display Number Two" appeared during the summer of 1928, a year and a half after her first collection, and was much more ambitious in scope. It included beach and cruise wear in addition to her new sweater creations; bathing suits were made from the new synthetics, with daring, low backlines and transparent straps to allow for maximum exposure to the sun. There were more traditional knitted tunics for wear with matching jersey shorts, as well as a line of more formal wear, such as a white smock with a pair of appliqued black gloves playfully sewn on the bust and the derriere. Elsa also presented the first in a long line of fragrances, which she simply called "S." It was the world's first unisex fragrance, packaged in an elegant black-and-white box, and was soon followed by her most famous scent, "Shocking." To round out the collection, Schiaparelli included a line of beauty-care products, like patterned sponges and wash-cloths with sponge linings. Her playfulness with such everyday objects was much remarked upon and brought to mind the Futurists' glorification of the mundane and the skewed humor of the Dadaists. Such observations were not far afield, for Schiaparelli often sought the help of the likes of Dali, Cocteau, or Giacommetti in developing her ideas.

By the time Elsa put her first major collection of formal wear on the Parisian ramps in January 1929, The Paris Times was calling her "one of the rare creators," while American Vogue thought her triple-length "necklace scarves" in vibrant, Fauvist-inspired colors were "a brilliant invention." Even more popular was the simple knitted tube cap that could be twisted or bunched into whatever shape the wearer wanted. The "Mad Cap" became such a common accessory, especially after film star Ina Claire took to wearing one on screen, that Schiaparelli grew to hate them and threatened to order them off store shelves. But it was her uncanny ability to sense what contemporary women wanted, what Schiaparelli called a "throwaway elegance," that brought such success. "Perhaps more than any other person," Vogue said in 1935, "she is responsible for the feeling of spontaneous youth that has crept into everything." Even the economic disasters that followed the stock-market crash of 1929 failed to stop Schiaparelli, whose business was kept afloat by clients in Europe and America so wealthy that the Depression had little effect on them.

Indeed, the 1930s were the golden years for the House of Schiaparelli. Elsa began the decade by buying out her backers and becoming the sole owner of a business that was employing 400 workers by 1932 and which had taken over the entire building on the rue de la Paix. Each year of the decade brought fresh surprises to the ground floor showrooms staffed by well-groomed saleswomen. In 1931 came an elaboration of the culottes Elsa had introduced three years earlier, which she now called the "trouser skirt," quite scandalous among the more conservative elements. ("It should be a penal offence to wear them," sniffed one proper English gentleman.) Then there was Elsa's first formal evening gown, a tight, black crepe de chine sheath with a low back and two sashes which could be tied in the back as a bow or crossed to the front. In a later version, famously worn by Marlene Dietrich , white cocks' feathers sprouted from the shoulders. Later in the 1930s, with rumblings of war coursing through Europe and the grip of the Depression deep and bitter, Schiaparelli produced more severely cut designs bearing such names as "The Skyscraper Silhouette," marked by straight, sharp lines and stiffened and padded shoulders that were so prominent even Elsa referred to them as "trays" or "shelves." There followed the hoop-skirted "Cone Silhouette," then square-cut box capes and box suits, sometimes with a bolero added, along with designs derived from Cossack military uniforms and from men's golfing suits. Schiaparelli proclaimed that her adaptations of men's fashions were her way of solving the inequality of the sexes; she herself never established another long-term relationship with a man after her divorce from de Kerlor. "Some women have achieved a combination of strength and tenderness," she said near the end of her life, "but most of those who have wanted to walk alone have, in the course of the game, lost their happiness." There may not have been tenderness, but Schiaparelli's strength was of formidable proportions. Her employees referred to her reverently, sometimes fearfully, simply as "Madame," and took pains to remain in her good graces. "She wasn't easy, and she always spoke her mind," Gogo said of her mother. "She could be quite scary, even to me. Mummy was a real Italian, fiery and willful."

By mid-decade, there was no doubt that Schiaparelli did, indeed, walk alone. No one could match her brilliant color schemes, developed by spraying the same kind of varnish used for automobile finishes onto white paper until an interesting shade emerged, or her almost architectural styling that viewed the body merely as a framework for line and form. Few others embraced with such enthusiasm the new synthetic materials, including a bizarre glass-like substance called Rhodophane which Schiaparelli fashioned into swim wear and casual attire; and no one else thought to replace the traditional hook-and-eye fastenings of women's clothes with another borrowing from menswear, the zipper, so that even women without maids or patient husbands could slip in and out of their clothes as easily as men. "Why don't you realize that this wonderfully creative woman is expressing our life and times in her little suits and dresses and her unique materials?," Harper's challenged its readers in 1937.

By then, Elsa's staff of loyal employees had grown to 600 and was housed in a new, 98-room headquarters at 21 rue de la Paix, while Schiaparelli herself had moved her private quarters to an imposing mansion on the rue de Berri, just off the Champs-Élysée, where the guest lists at her entertainments included such names as Cunard, Astor, and Vanderbilt. Unlike Coco Chanel, whom Schiaparelli called "that dreary little bourgeoisie," Elsa's upbringing and education brought her acceptance as a social equal from her clients, all of whom regarded her as an artist, not a dressmaker. (Chanel, for her part, often called Schiaparelli "that Italian who's making clothes.") Hollywood's aristocracy adopted her, too, as Greta Garbo, Katharine Hepburn and, most notably, Joan Crawford graced their screen roles with Schiaparelli fashions. Even Elsa's fashion shows became a form of entertainment, known as much for their artistic flair as for their fashions, set against a background of dramatic lighting, specially composed music and fully realized sets. The 1938 show at which she presented her "Circus Collection" sent performers skipping down the aisles, leaping on and off the stage and ramps or climbing in and out of windows; while later that same year, the music chosen for the show introducing her "Commedia dell'arte Collection" included Vivaldi and Scarlatti, as Harlequins and Pulcinellas posed and pirouetted. "Has she not the air of a young demon who tempts women, who leads the mad carnival in a burst of laughter?," Schiaparelli's friend Jean Cocteau wrote of her. "Her establishment … 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."

Even war failed to stop her momentum, at least at first. The House of Schiaparelli set a five-day sales record in August 1939, just weeks before Hitler invaded Poland. Although the threatened invasion of France emptied Paris and reduced her staff to a mere 150, Schiaparelli managed to introduce on schedule her new collection for 1940. She ironically called it "The Cash and Carry Collection," for its wide, deep pockets were suitable for stuffing with household valuables by women fleeing to the safety of England or America. When the invasion of France finally came in the spring of 1940, Elsa turned her home over to the Quakers for use as a homeless shelter, put her business in the hands of trusted assistants, and left her beloved Paris. She settled first in Biarritz, on the Côte d'Azur, but soon signed a contract for an American lecture tour designed to raise awareness of France's plight in a country which had yet to enter the fighting. The tour began at Lord & Taylor's in New York in September 1940 and lasted until the end of that year. "I am not pessimistic about our future," she told her audiences. "There may be ashes on the fire, but the flames are still there." The response was generous enough that Schiaparelli was able to return to Paris early in 1941 bearing desperately needed medical supplies as well as money for destitute friends sewn into the lining of her hat. Living in the single room that had been set aside for her in the rue de Berri house, she managed to get another collection designed and introduced for the winter of 1942 before leaving once again for America at the urging of close friends, who feared that Schiaparelli's outspoken criticism of both Hitler and Mussolini before the war would come back to haunt her.

This second sojourn in America lasted until the end of the war. Elsa volunteered for American Relief to France, for which she organized shows of French culture and art to raise money for war victims; and for the American Red Cross, working for a time at Bellevue Hospital as a medical assistant. She had little to do with American fashion houses and, indeed, declined to attend the banquet for the first Coty Awards in 1943—a decision she hotly pointed out to a French cultural delegation to New York which accused her of consorting with the American fashion business at the expense of France. "I have defended the good name of French fashion from the beginning to the end," she protested. "I have always maintained that inspiration can only, and will only, be rooted in Paris." With the war's end and her return to Paris in 1945, she set about designing a new collection while offering the services of her business to the French government for repairing second-hand clothes for those left destitute by the war, and by organizing shows for those still confined to hospitals with war injuries. She did not much publicize the fact that the House of Schiaparelli had actually turned a profit during the war, or that her mansion in the rue de Berri and its treasures had survived intact during the worst years of the Occupation because she had given it for the use of the embassy staff of Brazil, a neutral country during wartime.

But the dominance of Schiaparelli fashions waned as the postwar world threw off whatever remained from before the conflict and made a new start. Although she softened the rigid lines of her earlier collections and brought a new simplicity to her clothes, attention now went to younger designers like Christian Dior, Yves Saint Laurent and Guy Laroche, all of whom had worked for her as stylists. For the first time since opening her business, Schiaparelli started losing money to the New Look, and a hasty attempt to open a mass-market store in New York nearly drove her into bankruptcy. In February 1954, Schiaparelli presented her last formal collection and retired.

The House of Schiaparelli, much reduced in staff but able to stave off financial collapse, remained in operation while Elsa retreated to a house she had purchased in Tunisia. She was not heard from for a month, emerging from her isolation to make promotional appearances during the late 1950s and to keep her name in the public eye by authorizing its use on lines of perfumes and accessories. (Advertisements for "Schiaparelli earrings" could be found in American Vogue as late as 1965.) Privately, she lamented the commercialization of fashion, of which she had long accused Chanel. "Young designers … can no longer do what they like because of pressures on them to produce lines that sell for a certainty," she wrote. "The daring is gone. No one dreams any more." In the early 1970s, after a series of strokes left her effectively bedridden, Schiaparelli sold the business in the rue de la Paix that had ruled haute couture for two decades. Then, on November 13, 1973, the fashion world learned of her passing. Schiaparelli had died peacefully in her sleep, at age 83.

Although she had bemoaned the state of contemporary fashion, her influence is still evident in the bright colors, arresting patterns and unusual materials that she first introduced at a time when the world teetered between two world wars and needed new ways to look at itself. "Madame Schiaparelli trampled down everything that was commonplace," Yves Saint Laurent once said of her. "She slapped Paris. She smacked it. She tortured it. She bewitched it. And it fell madly in love with her."