Avant-garde Cuts: Schiaparelli and the Construction of a Surrealist Femininity

Abstract

Elsa Schiaparelli, an Italian-born fashion designer who established herself in Paris in 1922, became one of the most successful women in the industry during the interwar period. This paper closely analyzes Schiaparelli’s most innovative designs, in conjunction with her memoires, in order to elucidate her conception of female identity, an important but often misconstrued theme in surrealist art.

Keywords:

• Schiaparelli
• surrealism
• fashion
• avant-garde
• “Shocking Life”

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. The boutique, which reopened at the same address in 2012, no longer has an opening on the street, but is located on the second floor.

2. Images of these designs can be found in Baxter-Wright and Schiaparelli (2012, 31) and Watt (2012, 95).

3. Examples of Dalí’s experimentation with drawers can be seen in his Venus de Milo with Drawers (1936), his ink drawing La Cité des tiroirs (1936). Blum points out that another drawer painting, Le Cabinet Anthropomorphique (1936), was bought by the collector Edward James, who paid in part with haute couture clothing, including some Schiaparelli designs, intended as gifts for Gala Dalí (Blum 123).

4. Evans (1999) has effectively argued that Butler’s analysis of performativity, applied to Schiaparelli, can reveal themes of fashion as masquerade and disguise, suggesting a decentered subject.

5. One example of a simplified gender binary is Marcel Duchamp’s mannequin from the alley of the 1938 International Exhibition of Surrealism, where he dresses a female mannequin as a man.

6. Others have remarked upon Schiaparelli’s ability to build clothes in a way that ignores the natural shape of the body. See Dilys Blum’s (2003) chapter entitled “Architect of Fashion, Carpenter of Clothes.” White (1986, 170–171) argues that Schiaparelli denies the body any importance at all at the 1937 haute couture exhibition at the Exposition Internationale des Arts et Techniques in Paris when she does away with the manikins and hangs her designs on a clothes line instead. Evans, quoting David Bate in his analyses of Cahun, also argues that Schiaparelli’s “cultural coding of the body” effectively deemphasizes “the female body as torso” (as cited by Evans 1999, 15).

7. For other examples, see André Breton’s Nadja for images of female hands, gloves, and eyes isolated from their context. In film, Jean Cocteau uses the same approach in Le Sang d’un Poète (1930) as do Dalí’s and Luis Buñuel’s 1929 film Un Chien Andalou. For a discussion of Schiaparelli, hand images, and surrealism, see Blum (2003, 122–123).

8. Another artist whose work exemplifies the typically male surrealist discourse on the female body is Hans Bellmer, a German who fled to Paris and became associated with Breton and the surrealists there. Poupée, a series of photographs of plastic dolls taken apart and put back together in illogical, backwards, and shocking ways, was published in the surrealist journal Minotaur in 1934. Various critics have written about the suggested violation and aggression towards the female body that images like this represent.

9. For a straightforward example, see the 1936 the glass handbag in the shape of a cage featuring three drawn birds in flying positions reminiscent of Picasso’s tableau, behind prominent black bars. French Vogue, number 8, August 1936, page 43.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Marylaura Papalas

Marylaura Papalas works on writers of the European avant-garde. She has published on both Greek and French Surrealists. Her current monograph project analyzes the creations of onetime surrealist fashion designer and memoirist Elsa Schiaparelli and in particular the construction of identity and femininity in her designs and in representations of her work in contemporaneous fashion magazines.

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