![]() She responded to a culture of transience by making intricate things that would last. She was working by 8am each morning, busy with a circus-themed fabric or an upside-down shoe, tirelessly inventing to schedule. “Masked parties, Savage parties, Victorian parties, Greek parties”: Evelyn Waugh began to find it sickening, but Schiaparelli had less guilt, and less of a hangover. Jean Patou painted the trees for his Silver Party Elsie de Wolfe replied with a ball where everything was gold. It was the age of the Bright Young People, when socialites loved to be “amusing”, when extravagant stunts became an art form, and insouciance was the demeanour du jour. When she launched her perfume Shocking Pink, she made a bottle the shape of Mae West. Schiaparelli found a “plain-looking girl” in the salon, who turned out to be Katherine Hepburn. ![]() But the magnetism with which Schiaparelli lured clients was personal as well as sartorial, and so, through the 1920s and 30s, the orders came in, from Nancy Cunard (who left Chanel for her), Daisy Fellowes, Wallis Simpson and Marie-Laure de Noailles. Secrest traces the sad story of her daughter, Gogo, paralysed by polio and nicknamed for the gurgling noise she made as a toddler to a mother who was always “going”. Rarely delayed by bouts of thoughtfulness or empathy, she could be ruthless and left casualties along the way. “She never turned down a party in her life”, and every hostess wanted her at theirs. She won and retained the loyalty of a brilliant majordomo, Bettina Shaw Jones. How was it possible? People clearly adored her. Photograph: Time & Life Pictures/Getty Image Photographed with a crystal ball circa 1918, she did not look like the next haute couture sensation.Įlsa Schiaparelli in 1937. Had she paused, she might have worked out that he was a conman about to be deported for fraudulent palm-reading, but off she went to a shady life between addresses in the US, assistant to a charlatan hypnotist. In her early 20s, on the run from the Italian family she loathed, she attended a theosophy lecture in London and agreed next morning to marry the lecturer. She had a habit of doing things suddenly. Schiaparelli’s life story, engagingly told here by the American biographer Meryle Secrest (whose previous subjects include Bernard Berenson and Salvador Dalí), appears as improbable and fascinating as her clothes. They ought to look ridiculous instead they exude a superbly sinister appeal. The Schiaparelli gloves are the ones in bright green doeskin with gold fins on the fingers, bizarrely suggestive of dragons. You can tell the Schiaparelli dress at a party: it’s the one with a lobster printed on the front. They start people talking, and they speak for themselves in an assertively ingenious language of trompe l’oeil jokes, provocative pockets, shapeshifting zips, reversible layers and glitteringly embroidered allusions. Schiaparelli’s clothes are conversation pieces. Some clothes are discreetly perfect and leave you to admire in silence.
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