by Brenda Polan
Even now, her best work is startlingly, thrillingly modern. Choose from the crossword-puzzle sweaters and zippered dresses, the knitted hats and costume jewellery, the culottes and jumpsuits, the experimentation with new synthetic fabrics, and, above all, the bold way with colours. Her celebrated tear dress, made from a fabric designed by Salvador Dali, created the illusion of material that had been ripped: to modern eyes, it looks thoroughly Punk in spirit. Ignorance was bliss for this untrained fashion designer. Rules were there to break, and Schiaparelli enjoyed upsetting the bourgeoisie. ‘Madame Schiaparelli trampled down everything that was commonplace,’ said Yves Saint Laurent, who dressed her and adored her. She was, said her biographer Palmer White, ‘a gifted bull in a china shop.’ Meanwhile, her arch rival, Chanel, derided her as ‘that Italian who’s making clothes.’
Schiaparelli was from a conventional enough background, born in Rome in 1890, the daughter of Celestino, a Piedmontese intellectual who was in charge of Rome’s historic Lincei Library. Her mother, Maria Luisa, was from an aristocratic family in Naples. She spent her childhood in Rome’s Palazzo Corsini, surrounded by art and history, growing up with a surfeit of potential inspiration about her. A sensitive, shy young girl, she initially experimented with poetry and published her first book at the age of 20. The passionate subject matter shocked her father, who promptly dispatched his daughter to a convent. She in turn went on hunger strike and had to be withdrawn. In 1913, Schiaparelli visited Paris for the first time and was thrilled by the city’s energy, attending a ball dressed in a hastily concocted pair of Poiret-style pantaloons. From Paris, she travelled on to England, where she had been invited to assist at an orphanage in Kent. While visiting London, she met the French-Swiss theologian Comte William de Wendt de Kerlor, to whom she was quickly married in 1914. The marriage was a disaster and did not survive a move to New York in 1919. But it was in New York that she met Gabrielle Picabia, wife of the artist Francis Picabia, and became part of an artistic circle that included Marcel Duchamp and Man Ray.
An impoverished Schiaparelli returned to Europe in 1922 with her baby daughter Yvonne (known as Gogo) and an American friend, Blanche Hays. She had no money but all the right contacts in the artistic and creative milieu of Paris. For her old friend Gabrielle Picabia, she made a gown, which drew compliments from the couturier Paul Poiret. Encouraged by this and despite her lack of expertise, she made more dresses and was further urged on by Poiret, who became both a friend and supporter. ‘Display No. 1’, produced in January 1927 and backed by French businessman M. Kahn, featured hand-knitted sweaters and matching crêpe de Chine skirts. The designs included sports, stripes and geometrical patterns, all clearly borrowed from the art movements of the time, including Art Deco, Cubism and Futurism. Her breakthrough was a butterfly bow trompe l’oeil sweater, knitted by an Armenian refugee using a technique that combined a white understitch on a black base. A Lord and Taylor Fifth Avenue buyer placed an order for forty copies; it was hailed by American Vogue as an ‘artistic masterpiece’. By the following year, Schiaparelli was seriously in business and had an address to match at 4 rue de la Paix, although the premises amounted to a rambling and unprepossessing garret. The words ‘Pour le Sport’, inscribed below her name at the entrance, made clear where her initial focus was to be. ‘Display No. 2’ proved to be an inspired flow of ideas, ranging from beach costumes such as resort pyjamas (later to evolve into palazzo pyjamas) to tweed day suits. Besides the playful pieces that were already her trademark, Schiaparelli also put her energies into practical improvements, such as a swimsuit with a low back and transparent straps that allowed the shoulders to tan uniformly. The collection included beauty products and an innovative unisex perfume, named simply ‘S’. Accessories, particularly scarves, caught the eye as much as clothes, with removable astrakhan and fox collars and detachable scarf collars. Her necklace scarves of 1931 were a big hit with American Vogue, and the tubular knitted Mad Cap of 1930 became a runaway best seller, so omnipresent that even the designer grew bored with it and withdrew it from sale.
Schiaparelli’s progress was remarkably unaffected by the Great Crash of 1929 and ensuing depression. Partly, this was because she had moved away from the ultra-exclusive milieu of haute couture customers, creating clothes that were accessible to a broader market, including middle-class Americans. One by one, a series of influential women made their way to 4 rue de la Paix, including Marlene Dietrich, Greta Garbo, socialite Lady Diana Cooper, celebrated heiress Daisy Fellowes and Paris stage star Arletty. Simultaneously, the hype machine was on a roll. Although Schiaparelli described herself as shy in her autobiography, Shocking Life, she acknowledged that this did not extend to what she wore. In early 1930 she caused some consternation wearing a plain black crêpe de Chine evening dress that incorporated the low ‘sunburn’ back of 1928 and had a short jacket in contrast white crêpe de Chine with white cock’s feathers. The concept of a short jacket for evening wear evolved into the Schiaparelli bolero, a long-running highlight of her collections through the 1930s. By evening, Schiaparelli’s designs could be seductive, but by day she was on the defensive, borrowing freely from the male wardrobe to create daywear that came to be known as ‘hard chic’. The year 1933 was important for her thanks to the success of her pagoda sleeve with its big epaulette, which led to a wide-shouldered look that dominated fashion through until Dior’s New Look in 1947. At its most extreme, her Skyscraper Silhouette featured wide square shoulders and narrow hips. Toned down, the emphasis was on clean, precise lines based on rigorous cut: small wonder Balenciaga was among her greatest fans. Military uniform details ran through her collections in the immediate pre-war years.
In 1935, Schiaparelli moved to 21 place Vendôme, where she opened the pioneering Schiap Boutique and enjoyed the peak of her influence, creating fantastical collections that mixed clothing and art. Perhaps the most inspired was the Circus collection of February 1938, perversely presented at a time when Europe was lurching towards war. It was promoted with an elaborate and theatrical fashion show that set a new standard for the presentation of clothes not to be matched again until the 1960s. Her preference for creating collections around a theme also kick-started a modern trend. Her boutique was renowned for its curiosities as much as its products, including an enormous stuffed bear dyed shocking pink by Salvador Dali with drawers inserted in its stomach. By now, she had 600 employees producing 10,000 pieces a year, promoted through two major and two minor collections a year.
Her willingness to experiment with fabric is the less-appreciated story of her career. Schiaparelli worked with rayon and nylon, paper and Cellophane, even rubber and latex. In 1934, she created glass-look tunics that were fashioned from a synthetic called Rhodophane. Even more conventional fabrics were used in unconventional ways. Tweeds were introduced to evening wear, a waterproof taffeta was explored for raincoats and cotton was passed off as linen. After her retirement, she was quick to appreciate the emerging influence of denim. Every detail required rethinking by Schiaparelli, who derided the mundane. Her buttons, for instance, were legendary. ‘The most incredible things were used,’ she recalled later in life. ‘Animals and feathers, caricatures and paperweights, chains, locks, clips and lollipops. Some were of wood and others of plastic, but not one looked like what a button was supposed to look like.’
Although Schiaparelli breezed through the challenges of the Great Depression, the same could not be said of the Second World War. Deeply hostile to Nazi Germany and to Mussolini’s fascists in her Italian homeland, she hung on in Paris for a while, producing a series of underrated but inspired collections that made the best of the shortage of materials and responded to the mood of the times for functional, practical clothes. In May 1941, on the advice of the American consul, she left Paris and spent most of the war in America, where she worked as a fund-raiser and nurse. With the end of the war, Schiaparelli hoped to pick up where she had left off, but Christian Dior’s New Look swept most of the pre-war designers away. Schiaparelli’s
weaknesses—a tendency to overstate, a reliance on gimmicks—were exposed. A series of collections in the 1940s were politely but not enthusiastically received. The spirit of innovation was still there, such as her Constellation travel coat and bag for the new generation of air travelers, but her timing was off. Post-war women wanted escapism and a return to traditional femininity.
Only in America, a country that Schiaparelli had come to know well during prolonged residences in the early 1920s and early 1940s, did she appear to retain the same magical touch. In 1949 she opened a branch of her company at 530 Seventh Avenue, New York City, to mass-produce suits, dresses and coats. Her ‘shortie’ jackets, Pyramid line of coats and shocking pink lingerie were all well received. Back home in France, the business continued to bleed financially into the early 1950s. Despite this, she went on creating collections until 1954, with the continued success of her perfumes, most notably Shocking, carrying the financial burden. In retirement, she led an active peripatetic life, enjoying her home in Tunisia, until a series of strokes confined her to her home at 22 rue de Berri, Paris. Schiaparelli never married again after the disaster of her first marriage. Although she had affairs, she deliberately avoided serious attachments. Aged 83, she died in her sleep in 1973.
As an employer, Schiaparelli was demanding and sparing with compliments. That said, she paid well and inspired fierce loyalty among her staff. She also formed long-lasting professional liaisons that served her well, championing the embroidery house of Lesage and exploring new synthetic fabrics with Charles Colcombet. As for artists, there were few who did not know or collaborate with Schiaparelli, the results varying from a Salvador Dali lobster on an evening dress to a spirited Jean Cocteau sketch transformed into a Lesage embroidery. Such a symbiosis between art and fashion has never been equalled since. American curator Richard Martin called her ‘a visionary [who] touched clothing with the capacity to be art.’
Schiaparelli was often frustrated by the transience of fashion. ‘Dress designing … is to me not a profession but an art,’ she wrote in her autobiography. ‘I found it was a most difficult and unsatisfying art, because as soon as the dress is born it has already become a thing of the past.’ Schiaparelli concluded her autobiography, published in 1954, with her ‘Twelve Commandments for Women’. Commandment number five said: ‘Ninety percent [of women] are afraid of being conspicuous, and of what people will say. So they buy a gray suit. They should dare to be different.’ It was a philosophy that she followed herself with the utmost devotion.
Further reading: Palmer White produced a lively biography, Elsa Schiaparelli: Empress of Paris Fashion (1986). Schiaparelli’s autobiography is entertaining, as the title, Shocking Life (1954), suggests. Richard Martin’s Fashion and Surrealism (1987) is an authoritative overview with many Schiaparelli references.
11 MAINBOCHER (1890–1976)
The long life of American couturier Mainbocher spanned a remarkable period in the history of fashion, from the frothy confections of the belle époque to the ready-to-wear explosion of the 1960s and 1970s. In one sense, as a proud couturier who shunned the mass market companies of New York’s Seventh Avenue, he looked backward to an era that became history during his lifetime. In another sense, the purity and refined severity of his finest creations suggest a designer who looked forward to the minimalism of the 1990s. Late in his career, when he was in his seventies, Mainbocher showed he could still lead the way with a series of pared-down dresses, including a bias-cut white crepe dinner dress, lauded and photographed by Harper’s Bazaar. More broadly, as the first American couturier in Paris, he was an important symbol of the rising self-confidence of the American fashion industry.
If his achievement has been underappreciated, this may be connected to his reluctance to play the media game. He shunned interviews and was perceived as an aloof recluse in his later years—‘the great loner,’ according to Time magazine in 1963. The spectacular irony was that Mainbocher was himself a distinguished fashion journalist during the 1920s. Nostalgia for that period in his career did not extend to offering the hand of friendship to his former colleagues. Vogue editor Bettina Ballard speculated that this was all a ploy: ‘He had a way of making Vogue feel guilty about something most of the time; so he could name his own terms when he let us take anything.’ Always elegantly dressed and suave, he was a small and broad man with a serious manner and an old world sense of decorum. ‘I am,’ he said, ‘the Rolls-Royce of the fashion trade.’ The critic Dale McConathy called him ‘one of the last of the great snobs—an eighteenth-century French cardinal who somehow got himself born on the West Side of Chicago.’
Countering this was his strong emotional connection with his Midwestern roots. Writer and friend Janet Flanner noted in 1940 that ‘though Bocher takes pride in serving Lanson ‘21 champagne with dessert, he still thinks homemade banana ice cream is the ideal note on which to end a dinner party.’ Mainbocher adored the women in the paintings of John Singer Sargent, admiring their individualism and sense of style. He saw a connection between the outer and the inner selves, telling Vogue in 1964, ‘I have never known a really chic woman whose appearance was not, in large part, an outward reflection of her inner self.’ Orientalist references were never part of his repertoire—he was no fan of Paul Poiret, describing his clothes as ‘expensive expressions of clothing that is more of a costume than a dress.’
He was proud to be descended from French Huguenot pioneers who arrived in America in the 1640s. Main Rousseau Bocher (he contracted his name in 1929) was born in 1890 in Chicago, growing up on Monroe Street in a close-knit family with a sister, Lillian. Music was his great joy as a young man, particularly the opera, to which he remained addicted for the rest of his life. He was also skilled at drawing, which drew him to study art. The death of his father when he was in his first year at the University of Chicago forced Mainbocher to grow up quickly. In 1909, he attended the Art Students League in New York and took his portfolio around magazines looking for illustration work. But his real goal was to go to Europe, which had an exalted status in the mind of the young man, as it did for many young Americans.
Persuading his mother to sell their house in Chicago, Mainbocher set off in 1911 for Europe, where, he said later, he was ‘born again’. He studied art in Munich and travelled regularly to Paris, breathing in the music and culture of the Old World. The rococo period was a particular delight to him, a frothiness of style that as a couturier he chose to set against restrained shapes. The outbreak of war in 1914 sent him and his family heading back to America, where he made his first steps in the fashion industry, creating a dress for a friend for a charity fashion show and earning money from fashion drawings for a wholesale clothing manufacturer. By 1917, he was back in France, serving as a sergeant major in the American Expeditionary Force Intelligence Corps. In post-war Paris, Mainbocher determined to focus on music, studying voice and opera. But it was his sideline job as a sketcher for the Paris office of Harper’s Bazaar that came to dominate, not least when Mainbocher lost his voice shortly before going on stage to sing (it took him three years to recover). His accomplished drawings and elegant writing, founded on a precise eye for detail and an innate sense of style, were highly prized attributes in the relatively new profession of fashion journalism. After three years at Harper’s Bazaar, Mainbocher switched to Vogue, where he was both Paris editor and then editor of French Vogue over a seven-year period lasting until 1929. He was best known during these years for his discovery and encouragement of the photographer Baron Hoyningen-Huene and the illustrator Carl Erikson, known as Eric.
Many fashion journalists have attempted to make the switch to design. None has succeeded as triumphantly as Mainbocher. It was an abrupt decision, he later claimed. ‘It was nothing that crept up on me … It was an immediate and very agreeable explosion. It came from the unconscious. The whole idea was born and in 24 hours became absolutely upright.’ He bought some mannequins from the Galeries Lafayette and positioned them in the library of his Left Bank apartm
ent. Through cutting, pinning and fitting, he taught himself the principles of couture. He also swiftly showed all the skills of the natural-born marketer, contracting his name, most likely in emulation of Augustabernard, a couturier he greatly admired. His sumptuous salon at 12 Avenue George V was filled with mirrored mantelpieces, Nymphenburg china and flowers. An aura of exclusivity was established from the beginning, although Mainbocher preferred to serve his guests iced water rather than champagne. He imposed a caution—a guarantee of purchase, priced at the cost of the cheapest dress—on all those clients who attended his show. Only a handful of magazines and newspapers, including Vogue, Harper’s Bazaar and The New York Times, were allowed to cover his collections. If featured, Mainbocher dresses had to appear on facing pages, he insisted. Although he disparaged the power of the fashion magazines, their favourable coverage in the early days created a momentum that swiftly enabled him to build a successful business.
He was influenced by the refined and deceptively simple designs of Augustabernard, who was forced into retirement in 1934 by financial problems. A more celebrated influence was Madame Vionnet, whose use of the bias cut and skill with draping were closely studied by Mainbocher. Fabric, twisted and run through his hands, was the prompt for his designs, which were then sketched by an assistant. Less was more, superfluous details were ruthlessly eliminated. These frocks were so pared down they became known as ‘don’t dress frocks’ by the press. Mainbocher’s business grew rapidly on the back of four collections a year and a formidable client list including Elsie De Wolfe, Lady Mendl, considered the best-dressed woman in the world. Besides the social elite, Mainbocher was also favoured by the demi-mondaines, the mistresses who were openly flaunted in 1930s Paris. At its peak, the house employed 350 people and had sales of 100 million francs a year. His most celebrated client, the Duchess of Windsor, was, like him, an American living in Europe. For her wedding, Mainbocher designed a blue silk crepe dress with a wide inset corselet and fitted jacket—the most talked about and copied couture dress in European history, at least until the wedding of Diana, Princess of Wales. For the Duchess, he created a special blue, ‘Wallis blue’—the colour of her eyes. The wedding dress, which is now in the Metropolitan Museum collection in New York, has since faded to grey. One fashion writer, Ernestine Carter, writing in 1980, described it as ‘one of the least happy of his inspirations and, unfortunately, one of the most copied.’
