How Elsa Schiaparelli Turned Surrealism Into High Fashion

If today the worlds of art and fashion feel bound to overlap, this is the enduring influence of Elsa Schiaparelli. Embraced by the Surrealist set, including Salvador Dalì, Man Ray, and Jean Cocteau, her timeless designs spun glamor out of the avant-garde.

It is telling enough that, when Schiaparelli’s rival Coco Chanel described her as “artist who makes clothes,” the remark was intended to be a put-down. If Schiaparelli was an artist, she felt “defeated by the flatness of the canvas.” By instead pushing the boundaries of high fashion, she became part of a radical cultural exchange.

While collaborations with Dalì, Cocteau, Leonor Fini, and Alberto Giacometti shaped Schiaparelli’s designs, she in turn would influence a sprawling constellation of artists that included Man Ray, Picasso, Eileen Agar, Meret Oppenheim, and Cecil Beaton. Even her signature color, “shocking pink,” was apparently borrowed from the particularly fuchsia-toned Basket of Strawberries (1925) by Russian Surrealist painter Pavel Tchelitchew.

A century later, the daring modernism of Schiaparelli’s ideas still feels new enough to surprise and inspire. She is receiving her moment in the spotlight at the V&A South Kensington in London with “Schiaparelli: Fashion Becomes Art,” a dazzling, high-budget spectacle of a show that remains on view through November 8.

Inside Schiaparelli’s ‘Devil’s Laboratory’

A young Schiaparelli first befriended Duchamp and Man Ray while living in New York during World War I, and they would serve as her entry point to Surrealism after she resettled in Paris in 1922. Man Ray photographed the designer and superimposed one of her brooches of two disembodied hands over a beguiling portrait of Dora Maar. Another of his subjects, Nusch Éluard, was an artist and Schiaparelli enthusiast who later sat for Picasso in one of her hats, the eccentric angles of which the painter could hardly resist.

Cocteau once described Schiaparelli’s shop in Paris’s Place Vendôme as “a devil’s laboratory,” from which women emerge “masked, disguised, deformed, or reformed.” The space was decorated with shell lamps and an ashtray designed by Giacometti, while Dalì supplied a shocking pink version of his iconic Mae West lips sofa and a lilac-dyed, taxidermied bear.

He and Cocteau helped Schiaparelli devise some of her best-known designs. In the case of Cocteau, these included sparsely outlined figures that are mirrored in profile and a disembodied hand drifting by the waist of a dinner jacket. Meanwhile, the menacing motif of Dalì’s lobster is rendered fresh and feminine on a dress for Schiaparelli’s Summer 1937 collection. Other accessories, like a hat fashioned from an upside-down shoe or a compact powder disguised as a rotary telephone dial, are bona fide Surrealist objets.

Oppenheim, queen of the uncanny, is best known for her disturbing fur-covered teacup, an idea that originated from the fur bracelet she wore to an legendary lunch with Picasso and Maar in 1936. As the lore goes, Picasso teased Oppenheim that anything could be covered in fur, to which she apparently quipped, “Even this cup and saucer. Waiter, a little more fur!” The bracelet had been made for Schiaparelli, and it was followed by fur-covered gloves with the fingertips snipped off and a fur-covered ring.

Schiaparelli also looked to the Surrealists for her perfume range. Snuff, her only scent for men, was stored in a tobacco pipe-shaped bottle, in direct reference to Magritte’s philosophical masterpiece Treachery of Images (1929). She recruited her friend and fellow Surrealist designer Fini to create the bottle for another fragrance, Shocking, which she based on the seductive form of actor Mae West.

Bringing Surrealism ‘Into Public Existence’

When Schiaparelli set up shop in London in 1933, she had a part to play in introducing Surrealism to a new audience. The space was used to exhibit Dalì’s sketches alongside their fashion collaborations, an event that Schiaparelli advertised in her 1936 article “Surrealism Gets into Our Clothes.”

Agar, one of the leading British proponents of the movement, once remarked that Surrealist women tended to be “dressed with panache.” She continued: “The juxtaposition by us of a Schiaparelli dress with outrageous behavior or conversation was simply carrying the beliefs of Surrealism into public existence.”

Only fragments survive via the press of Agar’s own experimentations with fashion, though she was seen wearing cream gloves with scarlet tips “like fingernails” at the opening of a Magritte exhibition. These pieces were almost certainly inspired by a Schiaparelli design from 1928, and were later attached by Agar to a hat, evidence of the legendary designer’s enduring influence.

“Schiaparelli: Fashion Becomes Art” is on view at the V&A South Kensington, Cromwell Road, London, through November 8.