Elsa Schiaparelli

Pour le Sport and the Divided Tennis Skirt

Elsa Schiaparelli was born in Rome on September 10, 1890, of Italian and Egyptian heritage, a great-niece of Giovanni Schiaparelli, who discovered the canals of Mars. She opened her first salon, Pour le Sport, in 1927, specialising in sportswear. Beginning with sport was a practical and provocative choice at once: sportswear had to allow movement, so it allowed a designer to question the conventions of dress. In 1931 her divided tennis skirt for star player Lili de Alvarez shocked the staid tennis world when Alvarez wore what was the forerunner of shorts at the Wimbledon tennis championships in London. A garment designed for a named athlete, worn in competition at Wimbledon, carried her ideas further than any salon showing could. She also became famous for black knit sweaters with a white bowtie pattern knitted into the fabric itself — decoration produced by the knitting, not applied afterwards.

Surrealism, Shocking Pink and the Unusual

Schiaparelli had a flair for the unusual. She hired Salvador Dali to design fabric, producing a white dress with a lobster print, and between 1936 and 1939 she collaborated with surrealist artists Dali, Jean Cocteau and Alberto Giacometti. Her surrealist designs of the 1930s are best remembered in her hats, including one resembling a giant shoe and one a giant lamb chop, both famously worn by the Franco-American Singer sewing machine heiress Daisy Fellowes, one of her best clients. Fellowes also owned the pink gemstone that inspired the colour Schiaparelli called shocking pink. The technical firsts sit alongside the spectacle: she was the first to use shoulder pads, hot pink, animal print fabrics, and zippers dyed the same colours as the fabrics they closed. Her first and most famous perfume, Shocking, created in 1936, extended the same thinking to packaging — a shocking pink box and a bottle shaped as a woman's torso, based on her client Mae West, for whom she designed costumes for the film Every Day's a Holiday. She also designed Zsa Zsa Gabor's costumes for Moulin Rouge.

Place Vendome, War and Bankruptcy

In 1935 Schiaparelli moved to a salon overlooking the Place Vendome in Paris, the address marking the height of her standing as the leading Parisian designer of the 1920s and 1930s after Coco Chanel. Her output slowed during World War II, the title of trendsetter passed to younger designers such as Christian Dior, her couture house declared bankruptcy in 1954, and she moved to the USA. Behind the Paris career sits a personal history sketched in a few lines: she was briefly married to Count William de Wendt de Kerlor, moved with him to Greenwich Village in New York City, and had one daughter, Marisa, known as Gogo, born in New York City in 1919. Her grandchildren are the actress Marisa Berenson and the late photographer Berry Berenson. Schiaparelli died on November 13, 1973.