From July 6, 2022 to January 22, 2023, a retrospective of Italian fashion designer Elsa Schiaparelli will be on view at the Musée des Arts Décoratifs in Paris, France. The exhibition will focus on how Elsa Schiaparelli constructed a creative "dialogue" between fashion and art through 272 costumes and accessories and nearly 250 paintings, sculptures, jewelry, perfumes, porcelain, posters, and other works.

A pillar of the fashion industry in the 1830s, Elsa Chaparelli is known as a "surrealist costume designer" and, together with Coco Chanel, is considered the most famous fashion figure of the interwar period. In a century-long dialogue between art and fashion, her unique vision has inspired and served as a classic model for others to follow. Whether it was taking a lobster from a telephone box to a luxurious dress in the work of the surrealist Salvador Dali, or turning insect silver jewelry into brooches on sweaters and openwork bell hats, she managed to think outside the box and move closer to the genre.

Breaking the barrier between art and fashion

The roaring 1920s and 1930s were the era of Dadaism, Surrealism and Futurism, and the era of creativity and free fun when "chairs looked like tables and tables looked like stools". Perhaps, Elsa Chaparelli is one of the best expressions and symbols of that era.

Born in Italy, Elsa Chaparelli was a woman of great talent, her father was well known in the Italian academic world, her mother was a prominent Italian aristocrat, and her uncles and brothers were professional scholars of European renown. Her family and academic environment gave her a high level of artistic ambition and a wild imagination.

Elsa Chaparelli was inspired and discovered by Francis Poiret, a Dadaist painter and fashion guru, when she embarked on her career in fashion design. Thus began the ideal years of Elsa Chaparelli's "talent and art go hand in hand".

In 1927, Elsa Chaparelli officially founded her own eponymous brand, which quickly attracted the attention of the aristocracy at the time with its bold and innovative designs that transcended the times themselves. She was bold enough to break with old ideas and capture the spirit of the times with precision, expressing surrealist avant-garde ideas in her clothing designs, capturing inspiration and humor in color and decoration, and injecting a fresh energy into the functionalism prevalent in the high fashion world at the time.

With her pioneering ideas, Elsa Chaparelli embarked on unprecedented crossover collaborations with a range of artists. One of the most memorable was her collaboration with Salvador Dali, with the lobster dress, the skeleton dress and the teardrop dress becoming classics in fashion history.

Whether it's a huge sculptural dress or a still gilded figure, Elsa Schaparelli's designs always exude a stunning sense of elegance and drama. She created the iconic "Shocking Pink" - a highly saturated pink color. It was the first time pink entered the mainstream aesthetic and was so subversive that it came to be known as "Schiaprelli Pink".

Elsa Schiaprelli also rode the line between art and fashion like a pink wild horse. She decorates with intricate hand embroidery, lavish patterns on pink silk jackets and delicate artwork-like buttons; she emphasizes shoulder silhouettes with high, narrow waistlines and long hemlines; she never sets limits on her choice of materials and even enjoys incorporating offbeat techniques into her designs. Her work is full of wildly interesting, such as the design of perfume bottles that imitate the body structure, unique printing patterns, exotic butterfly style, and the "sky-high" heel-shaped hat is the establishment of her unique position in the fashion industry.

Unprecedented and subversive design

A gray blazer embroidered with a woman's face, long blonde hair down the sleeves, as natural and smooth as a casual painting ...... as if any whimsical ideas can be realized in Elsa Shaparelli's work.

Under the influence of surrealist artists such as Picasso and Dali, Elsa Chaparelli has become a true "artistic fashion designer" by incorporating surrealism into each collection. The simple clothes became glamorous and full of surprises, from the silhouette to the details of the cut and the materials.

In 1938, Elsa Chaparelli launched her "Pagan" collection, in which elegant women in fancy dresses looked like they had stepped out of a painting by Florentine artist Botticelli ...... She used the birth of Venus as inspiration and chose a lot of floral decorations to create a fairy-tale atmosphere. She used the birth of Venus as her inspiration, and chose a lot of floral decorations to create a fairy-tale atmosphere, including lavender goddess dresses, and blooming flower decorations; simple halter gowns embellished with garlands, leaves, and delicate flowers.

In the 1938 "Circus" themed collection, Elsa Chaparelli had the famous clown group, the three Fattarini brothers, dancing wildly in the glamorous showroom, going up and down the stairs and in and out of the bay window ...... handbags in the shape of balloons , the gloves are shoe covers shape, the hat is the ice cream cone shape. There are also trained dogs, naughty monkeys shuttling through them.

Based on the 18th century Italian comedy works and the creation of the 1939 "A Modern Comedy" series, is full of a lot of jumping colors, there are many patchwork details, while in order to highlight the dramatic effect, Elsa Shaparelli also added a large number of exaggerated hat design; " Return to the Bustle" series tends to be more angelic imagery, inspired by the classic waist curve design of the 1780s; "Music in the Air" series with the more feminine trend at the time, the strong posture will be lowered, adding The "Music in the Air" collection was in line with the more feminine trend of the time, and was embellished with embroidered musical instruments such as the flute, piano and fiddle.

As the first fashion designer to "co-brand" with an artist, Elsa Schaparelli also holds a number of "firsts". She was one of the first designers to use mise-en-scène in clothing design, the creator of the now indispensable shoulder pads, and the creator of dress pants, built-in swimwear bras, women's blazers, folding glasses, colored stockings and wrap dresses. She was also the first woman to be featured on the cover of Time magazine, the first to use zippers on clothing, the first to use uniform packaging on her products, and the first to present fashion in a variety of themes.

These subversive "firsts" broke the barrier between fashion and art in the 1830s, leaving an intriguing memory. Elsa Chaparelli saw fashion as a canvas for her imagination and expressed postmodernism with a cynical attitude. In a sense, her design ideas and creations illuminated that particular period and left an unforgettable page in the history of fashion.

Article Source:艺术与设计

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