Elsa Schiaparelli

Elsa Luisa Maria Schiaparelli was born at the Palazzo Corsini in Rome on the 10^th of September, 1890. Her mother was a Neopolitan aristocrat and her father was a renowned scholar and curator of medieval manuscripts, and he also ran a library in the Palazzo Corsini where Elsa was born. Schiaparelli’s considerably older sister Beatrice was considered a great beauty, whilst Elsa was thought to be unfashionably thin.

Elsa did not enjoy her school life, although she read non-stop, she did not take kindly to anything academic. Elsa’s uncle, Giovanni Schiaparelli, an astronomer, recognized her intellectual curiosity and invested his time in looking through his telescope at the stars with her. At the age of 19, she started a course in Philosophy at the University of Rome. Elsa had a mystic way of thinking and enjoyed the course immensely. Two years later, she published a book of poems about grief, love, sensuality and spirituality. The book took her traditional family by surprise and shocked them. As a result her father sent her to a convent, which failed miserably when Elsa went on a hunger strike and had to be removed.

A year later, at the age of 22, Elsa excitedly accepted an invitation to go and work as a nanny in England. Whilst travelling over the England, she stopped in Paris and was dazzled by its style, influential women and modern attitudes. Paris sparked the beginning of Elsa’s love of fashion. Whilst there, she was invited to a ball, a new phenomenon for Elsa as it was to be the first one she had ever attended. As she did not have any gowns, she purchased some dark blue fabric from a department store and draped and pinned it around her body.

After ten days in Paris, Schiaparelli travelled to London where she spent the majority of her spare time visiting museums, attending operas and lectures. Elsa became captivated by one particular lecturer, Wilhelm Wendt de Kerlor, as he spoke of magic, eternal life and the power of the soul over the body. She was introduced to him after the lecture and the two were married a year later. By 1921, Elsa’s husband had become very successful as a lecturer and the couple relocated to New York.

Elsa was spellbound by the modern style of New York, and especially by the women, who played sport, drove cars and did not wear corsets. Her husband, on the other hand, was not impressed, unable to handle the pressures of city life he began to spend an increasing amount of time on the road, lecturing and giving private philosophical consultations. By the time Elsa gave birth to her only child, her husband had abandoned his family and she was left to raise Maria Luisa Yvonne Radha on her own. Her daughter’s doctor took offered to help Elsa, who was residing in a cheap hotel, and put her in touch with Gaby Picabia, ex-wife of Parisian born artist, Francis Picabia. Gaby had come to New York to open a business selling clothes designed in Paris and she was finding it a struggle to build a clientele. The doctor had anticipated that Elsa, with her contacts, could assist the businesswoman. Elsa started to work for Gaby and eventually made the acquaintance of people in her circle of prestigious friends.

In the mid 1920’s, Picabia and Schiaparelli decided to leave New York for Paris. She was quickly immersed in the Parisian artistic and social scene whilst still struggling to financially support herself. Then, coincidentally, Elsa’s situation changed drastically. Needing a dress for an occasion, Gaby asked Elsa to design one for her. Paul Poiret saw the dress, and told Gaby to ‘compliment the designer’ for him. Inspired by this compliment, Elsa continued to design and create clothing for herself and her friends. In 1925, Elsa was asked to design for a small Parisian fashion house owned by an American friend. Through no fault of Elsa’s designs, however, the house was forced to close in 1926 for financial reasons. Undeterred, Schiaparelli created and presented her first collection from her attic apartment in 1927. The collection included hand knitted sweaters complete with geometric designs which were featured in French Vogue the next month. Schiaparelli’s sweaters were designed using a special knit which meant they kept their shape for longer, a feature uncommon in any other knitwear.

In the spring of 1927, she continued to showcase her collections, broadening the variety into skirts, wool cardigan jackets and accessories. In August of that year, she included a sweater with the illusion of a white bow knitted into a black background. This sweater proved immensely popular and was illustrated in Vogue in December 1927 with the caption “artistic masterpiece.” The year after she added bathing suits, beach pyjamas, tweed sport suits, two-piece linen dresses, coats, and ski costumes to her collection.

In1929 moved two floors down from her attic building in exchange for salons and workrooms. In 1930 and 1931, Elsa continued to make advancements in practical sportswear. Designs included a backless bathing suit that encompassed a patented invisible brassiere, and a tennis costume with a divided skirt, an unseen trend in women’s clothing. Lili de Alvarez shocked the fashion world by wearing Schiaparelli’s divided tennis skirt to a tournament in London. Inspired by the success of her sportswear collections, Elsa introduced evening wear to her collection in 1931: reversible black and white gowns with draping trains that hooked up at the waist for practicality when dancing.

The next year Schiaparelli opened a small shop where she sold accessories at slightly lower prices than in the main showrooms. By this point Elsa had 400 employees working in eight different workshops. In 1933, she returned to New York where her designs were already popular.

Schiaparelli developed a fascination with the use of fasteners and experimented with different buttons, clips, slides and elastic inserts in skirts which, ironically, replaced the need for any sort of fastening. In 1935, she moved to a much larger space which was transformed into 3 showrooms, offices and workrooms. The lower floor was transformed into boutiques, the first one like it, called the Schiap Shop. In celebration of the opening, Elsa designed cotton and silk fabrics printed with her own press clippings. She also introduced evening gowns made of draped fabric.

In September 1939, France and England declared war on Germany and Elsa’s Spring 1940 collection had a military theme with ‘trench’ brown and camouflage print taffetas. In July of 1940, Elsa sailed to New York to begin a lecture tour called ‘Clothes and the Woman.’  However at the beginning of 1941 she sailed back to Europe only to return to New York in May. She lived in the city until the end of the war where she volunteered at various war-relief organisations. In1945, the end of World War 2, she returned to Paris to find the mood of fashion had been altered completely by the crisis. The look recalled the petticoats, gloves, and corsets of 30 years before, a style that Schiaparelli had never favoured. Although she continued to present collections, her financial situation failed and in December 1954, she was forced to close the house. However she did not fade into the background, as up until her death, she continued to be visited by celebrities in her lavish Parisian apartment and a house she owned in Tunisia. Elsa travelled the globe, attended many social events, including major fashion shows. Although the house closed in 1954, her style never faded and she continued to be an inspiration even after her death at the age of 83, on the 13^th of November, 1973.