Fashion: Elsa Schiaparelli

Everybody has copied Mummy: Elsa Schiaparelli

Elsa Schiaparelli was the most innovative and influential dress designer of the twentieth century. Known for her shocking designs and Surrealist influences, Schiaparelli's haute couture clothes and accessories became justly famous during the late nineteen-twenties.

Born in Rome in the eighteen-nineties to strict, aristocratic parents, the young girl found her upbringing restricted and conservative. Rebellious and artistic, she left her Catholic school and began her tendency to shock by writing a book of suggestive poetry. Her parents, needless to say, were not pleased and Schiaparelli ran away to bohemian London where she met and married a handsome Polish count at eighteen. During the First World War they moved to Greenwich Village in New York where her husband was unfaithful and abandoned her with a little daughter to support.

Schiaparelli associated with the famous Surrealist artists, Jean Cocteau, Man Ray, and Salvador Dali, who she invited to contribute designs. Many of her own designs are also surrealist, for example, a black sweater with white ribs on the front, and a hat shaped like a lamb chop!

Her inventions included the color 'Shocking Pink', which she made famous, the innovative use of colorful zippers, gadget accessories such as scarves of material with a newspaper print design and the clinging and attractive bias-cut dress.

During the dark days of the Depression she emphasized the shoulders with pleats, padding, or braid and made quite severe looking dresses for the daytime. Her evening dresses remained glamorous and sophisticated, however, and her clients included the Duchess of Windsor, the heiress Daisy Fellowes, and movie stars, such as Katherine Hepburn and Marlene Dietrich. She made an enormous amount of money and was able to open a large salon on the Place Vendome, employ four hundred people in her business, and live in an eighteenth century mansion which she loved.

She remarked that: "Poverty forced me to work and Paris gave me a liking for it." Her great rival was Coco Chanel, mostly famous for her suits and little black dresses. Chanel made the very catty remark about Schiaparelli that she was 'that Italian artist who makes clothes'.

During the Second World War, the famous fashion designer escaped from the Nazi's to New York, where she worked hard to raise money for French charities. She also refused to design until the war was over. Meanwhile, her rival Chanel created a scandal in Paris by living with an aristocratic German lover. After the war Chanel was saved from arrest by friends in high places.

When Schiaparelli went back to Paris after the war her designs were not as popular because they were perhaps too extravagant but she still earned good money from her perfumes.

Schiaparelli died in 1973. She will long be remembered for her wonderful creations which still have a major influence on many fashion designers today. "Everybody has copied Mummy," her daughter Gogo Cacciapuoti, mother of actress Marisa Berenson, and the late photographer Berry Berenson Perkins, famously remarked.

By Lisa-Anne Sanderson