When Elsa Schiaparelli arrived in Paris in 1922, at the age of 32, after a long detour through London and New York, the future fashion priestess had no money. Her daughter suffers from poliomyelitis. The husband and father set sail. Coming from the upper middle class in Rome, she broke the ban and her only wealth was her temperament, the confidence she placed in her intuitions and her solid friendships with figures of the Parisian avant-garde, such as the musician Gabriele Buffet-Picabia.
It was through her that the future darling of women in the world and of the most extravagant Hollywood met Paul Poiret. The great couturier falls under his spell and encourages him to start. She makes her very first piece in her corner with the help of an Armenian peasant who knows how to knit, a revolutionary trompe-l’oeil sweatshirt representing “a large bow in the shape of a butterfly in the front, like a scarf wrapped around the neck”. A unique piece whose success is resounding.
“Schiap” – this is how she talks about herself in her autobiography, and in the third person – fulfills a first order, then settles in stride in an attic on rue de la Paix. We are in 1927. Her audacity pays off, she multiplies the projects, makes the “one” of the Time in 1934 and settled down in Place Vendôme the following year. Farewell lean cows, Elsa Schiaparelli embarks on two decades of audacity and celebrations. A dizzying freedom to which, among so many others, Yves Saint Laurent and John Galliano will lay claim.
An extraordinary destiny
Romanesque, his life is a melodrama, a comedy, a drama, a success stories, an adventure film, coupled with an odyssey. A screenwriter would not have allowed himself to imagine such a trajectory. A fortiori, to reserve so many good and bad surprises for a female character from the first half of the 20th century.e century, born into a world of spiked helmets, crinolines and corsets.
“Schiap soared into the rarefied regions of his most fantastical imagination and unleashed cascades of fireworks. »Elsa Schiaparelli
Published in 1954, the year she closed shop and kept only her perfumesShocking. Smemories of Elsa Schiaparelli, is now benefiting from a reissue with a preface by Sophie Fontanel, as well as an exhibition at the Museum of Decorative Arts in Paris from July 6.
On more than 300 pages, the designer tells her story, collecting the verbal flights of this vein: “Schiap soared into the rarefied regions of his most fantastical imagination and unleashed cascades of fireworks. » That being said, she is telling the truth. For example, this shoe hat that she designed in 1937 with the complicity of her friend Salvatore Dalí, a kind of cocked hat in black felt, in the shape of a shoe upside down, heel pointing skyward.
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