Shelter from life – Style – Kommersant

In Paris, the famous Italian, the most eccentric designer of the 20th century, Elsa Schiaparelli is honored. The exhibition “Shocking! The Surrealistic Worlds of Elsa Schiaparelli at the Museum of Decorative Arts.

In the world of Elsa Schiaparelli, the experienced stage designer Natalie Krenier, the one who designed the Dior retrospective that thundered from Paris to Moscow, sends without warning. You do not have time to open the door, as you fall, like Alice down a rabbit hole, into a bright room, plastered from floor to ceiling with thousands of drawings. These are sheets of collections from Schiaparelli’s personal archive. It is extremely curious to look at them – they add up to a fascinating kaleidoscope of shapes and volumes, famously swirling around the body. It is the core and starting point of all her searches. Then you can break lines, enhance asymmetry, accentuate details, knit bows, add shoulder pads, embroider, pun and have fun along the way. Accessories did a great job with this role, and at the exhibition they are allowed to speak out in full. There are fly agaric combs, Jean Schlumberger’s fantasy necklaces, Elsa Triolet’s aspirin beads, bird cufflinks, Alberto Giacometti’s brooches, and the first plexiglass bracelets and earrings – an impressive rampage of fantasy. But no matter how far creativity took Schiaparelli, her innate sense of harmony did not fail her. The inclusion of the body in artistic fantasy, its rethinking is the key idea that brings Schiaparelli closer to the surrealists.

Today, everything that seems absurd or strange is called surrealism. Andre Breton defined surrealism as the space between dream life and real life and the struggle that flares up between them. In this sense, the life of Elsa Schiaparelli developed according to a surreal scenario from the cradle. At least that’s how she wrote it in her book “My Shocking Life”, followed by the curators of the exhibition.

Schiaparelli was born into an aristocratic family in Rome. Their ancestral palace stood between an insane asylum and a prison. She was brought up in a Roman monastery, then in a Protestant college. A dress with black collars had fed up with her since school. “I felt like a monkey in a zoo in it,” the designer recalled. From the dullness and dogmatism of religion, family and society, she will find refuge first in books (love poems with a touch of mysticism shocked her father so much that he exiled his daughter to a Swiss monastery), and then in fashion, where she reinvents herself and her story.

But before that, she will get married. Her parents wooed her a Russian bearded boyfriend, but she fled from him to London, where her heart was won by a lecturer who passionately read her a course in Theosophy. Family life was short-lived, and the reason for this is Isadora Duncan. The American “sandal” was famous for its ingenuous system of seduction: she undressed and danced. Stanislavsky, for example, offered to part as friends. But Schiaparelli’s husband is not. So she was left alone with her little daughter Gogo: “Schiap will never marry again. Marriage hit her in the head.”

She arrived in Paris at the height of the “roaring 1920s”. During the day she served with an antiquary (however, the versions differ here), she spent the evenings at Boeuf sur le Toit, where artists, designers and near-artistic loafers of various stripes boiled in one merry cauldron. She was a prominent, stately, beautiful, independent girl. The role of the muse was not suitable for her, although Man Ray willingly filmed her, and she willingly starred in him, but it was a union of two equal quantities. One evening, an American friend invited her to visit an old friend in the mansion on Faubourg Saint-Honoré. The friend turned out to be the great Paul Poiret. The aging master not only presented Schiaparelli with a luxurious coat, but also suggested his fashion production.

Paris was the center of the world, art, fashion, where they went from all over the world to spend money beautifully. And before my eyes was, of course, the success of Gabrielle Chanel. The sweater from the first collection in 1927 for Schiaparelli was knitted by the Armenian Mika, as she called her for short. They met quite by accident and worked together for many years. Schiaparelli drew her a large bow in the shape of a butterfly and explained in words that it should be white on a black background, the inside is white, the neckline is deep, oblique. The novice milliner approved the third option (she herself, like Chanel, in her life did not hold either knitting needles or a needle and thread in her hands), proudly put on herself and went to a dinner party, where she made a splash. Orders were not long in coming. American screenwriter Anita Luz was her first celebrity client, and, as Schiaparelli says, “it wasn’t long before the Ritz was filled with women in black and white sweaters.”

“At that time, the whole world was talking about Dadaism and Futurism, chairs looked like tables, tables looked like stools, it was considered indecent to ask what is shown in the picture and what is the meaning of the poem,” Schiaparelli recalls in his book. She began to do everything against the current. But from sporty chic, which brought her both a name and income, she did not immediately switch to evening dresses – she was cautious. The white jacket – the first evening dress – was more than modest. And the first and successful attempt to connect fashion and art was the work with the sculptor and designer Jean Dunant. In 1925, he stunned the Paris Exhibition of Decorative Arts with his lacquer panels, rekindling interest in this forgotten Chinese technique. Schiaparelli immediately ordered him silk, varnished. In subsequent years, experiments with materials were innumerable. From what she only sewed: from gilded interlaced cords, tree bark, cellophane, straw. She translated everything she saw and struck into the fabric. So, for example, the famous newspaper print, which popular rumor ascribes to John Galliano, was invented by Schiaparelli. She peeped the idea of ​​a “newspaper hat” (in our opinion, caps) from old women at a fish market in Sweden. Those, while waiting for fresh fish, covered their heads with a newspaper so as not to bake. The first “circulation” of the fabric was printed for the triumphant opening of her salon on Place Vendôme in 1935, and a year later there will be a bottle of Schoking perfume in the shape of a bust of actress Mae West, painted by the artist Leonor Fini (many years later, Jean-Paul Gaultier would steal the idea for the perfume Le Beau, only a girl’s bust will be replaced by a man’s). From the Kremlin museums, the Italian brought impressions of richly embroidered church robes – Albert Lesage’s embroiderers could not keep up with her increasingly sophisticated orders.

The closer the war got, the further away from real life the surrealist artists moved away, and with them Schiaparelli. In the pre-war collections, creativity was at its peak. The designer devoted her summer collection of 1938 to the circus, and the show, a real circus performance, was timed to coincide with the surrealist exhibition. Only a jet-black Dali-designed skeleton dress stood out alarmingly in this noisy and daring parade of embroidered elephants, clowns, acrobats, ball-shaped bags, hats with ice cream cones, and hooligan slogans like “Beware – painted!”. The autumn collection of 1939 celebrated music: golden bells and keys, tambourine buttons, music boxes hidden in hats, silhouettes slender as a musical staff for women, created for songs and flowers.

The war years are omitted from the exhibition. We won’t see what the Maginot Line, the Foreign Legion or the Airplane Gray jumpsuit from the Pay Cash and Go collection looked like. According to Schiaparelli, one of the overalls was made not metallic, but white, in the expectation that white repels poisonous gases. On kerchiefs, she no longer printed praises in her honor, but lists of products that Parisians had lost: “Monday: no meat. Tuesday: no alcohol. Wednesday: no oil. Thursday: no fish. Friday: no meat. Saturday: no alcohol. But Sunday: always love!” “We presented the collection to prove to ourselves that we were still working,” Schiaparelli wrote. A glass globe with fluttering doves appeared in a shop window in Place Vendôme. In the storytelling of the current art director of the Schiaparelli house, Daniel Rosebery (his things are cleverly sewn into the exposition so that the neophyte does not notice the difference), all this does not fit in any way. Maybe it’s for the best.

Maria Sidelnikova