Elsa Schiaparelli
Elsa Schiaparelli, aside from being an outstanding fashion and jewelry designer was also very involved in the surrealist arts movement with various collaborations.
Schiaparelli's fanciful imaginative powers coupled with involvement in the Dada/Surrealist art movements directed her into new creative territory. Schiaparelli collaborated with a number of contemporary artists, most famously with Salvador Dalí, to develop a number of her most notable designs. Schiaparelli also had a good relationship with other artists including Leonor Fini, Méret Oppenheim, and Alberto Giacometti.
In 1937 Schiaparelli collaborated with the artist Jean Cocteau to produce two of her most notable art-themed designs for that year's Autumn collection. An evening jacket was embroidered with a female figure with one hand caressing the waist of the wearer, and long blonde hair cascading down one sleeve. A long evening coat featured two profiles facing each other, creating the optical illusion of a vase of roses. The embroidering of both garments was executed by the couture embroiderers Lesage.
Dalí
The designs Schiaparelli produced in collaboration with Dalí are among her best known. In addition to well-documented collaborations such as the shoe hat and the Lobster, Tears, and Skeleton dresses, Dalí's influence has been identified in designs such as the lamb-cutlet hat and a 1936-day suit with pockets simulating a chest of drawers. While Schiaparelli did not formally name her designs, the four main garments from her partnership with Dalí are popularly known as follows:
- Lobster dress
The 1937 Lobster dress was a simple white silk evening dress with a crimson waistband featuring a large lobster painted (by Dalí) onto the skirt. From 1934, Dalí had started incorporating lobsters into his work, including New York Dream-Man Finds Lobster in Place of Phone shown in the magazine American Weekly in 1935, and the mixed-media Lobster Telephone (1936). His design for Schiaparelli was interpreted into a fabric print by the leading silk designer Sache. It was famously worn by Wallis Simpson in a series of photographs by Cecil Beaton taken at the Château de Candé shortly before her marriage to Edward VIII.[64]
- Tears Dress
The Tears Dress, a slender pale-blue evening gown printed with a Dalí design of trompe-l'œil rips and tears, worn with a thigh-length veil with "real" tears carefully cut out and lined in pink and magenta, was part of the February 1938 Circus Collection.[65] The print was intended to give the illusion of torn animal flesh, the tears printed to represent fur on the reverse of the fabric and suggest that the dress was made of animal pelts turned inside out.[66] Figures in ripped, skin-tight clothing suggesting flayed flesh appeared in three of Dalí's 1936 paintings, one of which, Necrophiliac Springtime, was owned by Schiaparelli; the other two are The Dream Places a Hand on a Man's Shoulder and Three Young Surrealist Women Holding in Their Arms the Skins of an Orchestra. Richard Martin saw the Tears Dress as a memento mori produced in response to the Spanish Civil War and the spread of Fascism, declaring that to "tear the dress is to deny its customary decorum and utility, and to question the matter of concealment and revelation in the garment."[67] He noted that even if the tears in the dress were mere ornament like slashing, the real tears on the veil negated this, offering visual disagreements between reality and pretence.
- Skeleton Dress
Dalí also helped Schiaparelli design the Skeleton Dress for the Circus Collection. It was a stark black crepe dress which used trapunto quilting to create padded ribs, spine, and leg bones.
- Shoe Hat
In 1933, Dalí was photographed by his wife Gala Dalí with one of her slippers balanced on his head. In 1937 he sketched designs for a shoe hat for Schiaparelli, which she featured in her Fall-Winter 1937–38 collection. The hat, shaped like a woman's high-heeled shoe, had the heel standing straight up and the toe tilted over the wearer's forehead. This hat was worn by Gala Dalí, Schiaparelli herself, and by the Franco-American editor of the French Harper's Bazaar, heiress Daisy Fellowes, who was one of Schiaparelli's best clients.