The collaborations that the trend clothier Elsa Schiaparelli (1890-1973) had with Surrealist artists, corresponding to Salvador Dalí, Jean Cocteau and Guy Ray, are spotlighted in a brand new exhibition in Paris.
Stunning! The Surreal International of Elsa Schiaparelli on the Musée des Arts Décoratifs explores Schiaparelli’s innovation and the way her collections have been influenced via the Parisian avant-garde of the Nineteen Twenties and 30s. By way of adopting this perspective, the museum revisits Schiaparelli’s legacy via a unique theme from its 2004 retrospective.
A whole room will center of attention on Schiaparelli’s collaboration with Dalí, tracing their shared inclination in opposition to scandal and provocation. Maximum famously, the duo labored in combination in 1937 at the Lobster Get dressed, a cream silk night robe emblazoned with a purple lobster strewn with sprigs of parsley. It was once some of the 18 items that Schiaparelli designed for Wallis Simpson at the instance of her marriage to the Duke of Windsor following his abdication.
Culinary couture: Elsa Schiaparelli created the Lobster Get dressed (1937) with Salvador Dalí © Philadelphia Museum of Artwork
Cecil Beaton photographed Simpson donning the get dressed, with its erotic implication, for Fashion mag. The muse for the design got here from Dalí’s Lobster Phone (1936), made for the British poet Edward James. Additionally on show will probably be Schiaparelli’s Shoe Hat (1937-38), a black and crimson hat within the form of high-heeled shoe, which was once impressed via a photograph taken via Gala, Dalí’s spouse, of her husband comically dressed in a lady’s shoe on his head, the opposite on his shoulder.
Born in Rome in 1890, Schiaparelli travelled widely and made her title in Paris, the place in 1935 she opened her couture salons at the venerable Position Vendôme. But even so Surrealism, she additionally drew inspiration from Ovid’s Metamorphoses, the Commedia dell’Arte (Italian theatrical comedy within the sixteenth to 18th centuries), and Louis XIV on the Château de Versailles. In addition to silhouettes and equipment via Schiaparelli, creations designed in homage to her via model luminaries corresponding to Yves Saint Laurent, Azzedine Alaïa, John Galliano and Christian Lacroix can also be on view.
• Stunning! The Surreal International of Elsa Schiaparelli, Musée des Arts Décoratifs, Paris, 6 July-22 January 2023
