Today’s post titled: SCHIAPARELLI AND DALI: MERGING ART AND FASHION, is from Kim Baker and is an excellent resource for guides at NGVI. The wonderful little object Kim tells us about is on display in the 20th C Galleries and is one of the first collaborations between Italian fashion designer Elsa Schiaparelli and the artist Salvador Dali. It also includes this week’s ‘blog motif’ – the telephone.
Elsa Schiaparelli was one of the world’s leading fashion designers in the 1920s and ’30s. She was born into a high-ranking family and seemed to delight in rebelling against her strict and formal upbringing. Schiaparelli’s initial success came in 1927 with her tromp l’oeil sweater (below) featuring a knitted-in bow at the neckline. According to the Victoria and Albert Museum: “The simple hand-knitted garment and its direct graphic image reflect the more relaxed attitude to formal wear for women in the late 1920s. The geometric, ‘stepped’ quality of the bow’s curved outlines are an unavoidable technical feature of hand knitting. The designer exploits this feature and uses the design to hint at her later involvement with the Surrealist Movement: ‘I drew a large butterfly bow in front, like a scarf round the neck – a primitive drawing of a child'”.
The garment was whimsical and attracted considerable interest which lead to Schiaparelli creating more amusing trompe-l’oeil designs – including for ties and handkerchiefs. Schiaparelli’s first salon soon followed selling modish sportswear. By 1932, she was managing 400 employees who churned out as many as 8,000 garments per year. She was an inventor of clothes and the critics labelled them “avant-garde, individualistic, eccentric”, yet they were easy to wear. She considered fashion design an art rather than a profession.
Arguably Elsa Schiaparelli was the first fashion designer to collaborate with artists and she worked with not only Salvador Dali but Jean Cocteau, Alberto Giacometti and Meret Oppenheim among others. “Working with artists…gave one a sense of exhilaration,” Schiaparelli once said. “One felt supported and understood beyond the crude and boring reality of merely making a dress to sell.” When Schiaparelli and Dali met in Paris in the early ’30s, Dalí was an on-the-rise Surrealist and Schiaparelli a well-known designer and a recently divorced single mother. They made quite a pair, he with his slicked-back hair, curled moustache, and stunts, she with a cutting wit and signature leopard-skin boots. Both were interested in Classicism—the acanthus leaf is a shared motif of theirs—and turning those Greco-Roman ideals on their heads. Each was a master technician, proven by Dali’s exquisite brushwork and Schiaparelli’s intricate couture beading and tailoring. They both valued irony and shock value.
The telephone dial powder compact in the NGV collection is thought to be the first collaboration between Schiaparelli and Dali, and it was followed by many others. In many ways they altered the course of art and fashion in the 20th century. Staying true to his surrealist style and Schiaparelli’s witty vision, Dali turned an everyday object into a wildly amusing novelty. A technical object, the rotary telephone dial is transformed into a cosmetic case to ultimately achieve the status of a work of art. It is made of gilt metal and black enamel with stencilled numerals and has a gilt metal interior, powder puff and mirror. Customers had the option of personalising the object by having it engraved with their name or any other favourite image and several versions were available: black lacquer or tortoise shell, among others.
The compact was just the beginning of Schiaparelli’s creative partnership with Dali and resulted in such radical, flamboyant designs as a high heel-shaped “shoe hat” and the now iconic “Lobster” dress. The Dalí Museum’s director, Hank Hine noted that “on the artistic side, they shared real daring and a sense of doing astonishing things that would shock and amaze.” Dali was so impressed by the designer’s work that, in his book The Secret Life of Salvador Dalí (1942), he wrote that the second half of the 1930s was defined “…. by the dressmaking establishment, which Elsa Schiaparelli was about to open on the Place Vendôme.” He continued: “Here new morphological phenomena occurred; here the essence of things was to become; transubstantiated; here the tongues of fire of the Holy Ghost of Dalí were going to descend.”
Here are just some of those “tongues of fire” that emerged from their creative connection:
The Bureau-Drawer Suit 1936: In 1936, Schiaparelli and Dali presented suits and jackets with bureau-drawer pockets reflecting themes prevalent in Dali’s work Anthropomorphic Chest of Drawers, 1936. This collaboration emerged from a drawing Dali offered Schiaparelli with this caption: “suit with semi-rigid and soft drawers, material imitation stripped chain, drawer pulls in natural oak – For Schiaparelli. Her friend Salvador Dali, 1936”. From this drawing Schiaparelli created a series of suits and coats with drawer pockets that she showed in her Winter 1936-1937 Haute Couture collection. Made in navy blue velvet, the suit was embellished with five drawer pockets with black plastic knobs.
Cecil Beaton immortalised these creations in a series of surrealist photos, published in the magazine Vogue in 1936. The surrealist source of the suit with “bureau-drawer” was made explicit in Cecil Beaton’s photograph of the original ensemble for the September 1936 issue of Vogue, where a model poses in an empty landscape against silhouetted rock-like forms. She holds the 15 June 1936 issue of Minotaure, with Dali’s cover illustration of a woman with the head of a minotaur/bull. The figure’s chest, an open drawer, recalls the suit’s pockets.
Models wear Schiaparelli clothing and hold an issue of Minotaure, a Surrealist magazine with a cover designed by Salvador Dalí. Photographed by Cecil Beaton, Vogue, 1936 / Getty Images
The Shoe Hat 1937: The high-heeled Schiaparelli “Shoe Hat” was created in 1937 in collaboration with Salvador Dalí. The idea for the hat was a photograph of Salvador Dali wearing a shoe on his head and another on his shoulder taken by his wife in 1933. The hat was made to wear with a black dress and jacket embroidered with red lips.
The Lobster Dress 1937: In the spring of 1937, Schiaparelli asked her friend Dali to draw a lobster for an evening dress made of white organdy. The lobster was a recurrent theme with Dali ever since 1934, as evidenced by the famous Lobster telephone of 1938. These works of art often have to do with sexuality: “Like lobsters, young girls have a delightful exterior. Like lobsters, they turn red when you get them ready to eat”. In linking the traditional symbolism of the white dress (bridal, virginity, purity) with the sexual connotations of lobster and its erotic placement on the dress, Schiaparelli pushed the boundaries of what was considered good taste. Whilst this dress was not mentioned in her autobiography “Shocking life”, it still became famous after its publication in photographs in Vogue, worn by Wallis Simpson. Back then she had just been married to Edward VIII, who abdicated the throne of England in 1936 to marry her.
Woman’s Dinner Dress (known as the Lobster Dress) (1937); and
Wallis Simpson, the Duchess of Windsor (1895-1986), photo Cecil Beaton (1904-80). UK, early 20th century.
The photograph (above) was taken by Cecil Beaton shortly before her wedding to the Duke of Windsor in May 1937. Dalí placed the lobster amid parsley sprigs on the front of the skirt (and apparently was disappointed when Schiaparelli would not allow him to spread real mayonnaise on the finished gown). Beaton took almost a hundred photographs during the session with Simpson, and Vogue devoted an eight-page spread to the results. Because of the sexual connotations of the design Wallis’s hopes for a series of “flattering” elegant photographs were dashed as the public noted that that the lobster was positioned almost as a fig leaf or a long arm reaching up to the precise part of her anatomy that had caused the abdication crisis.
For Dali and Schiaparelli their relationship wasn’t just about creativity and fabulousness. In Schiaparelli, Dalí gained entry into the world of Parisian high society, and with that came many of his wealthy benefactors. In Dali, Schiaparelli earned an art world pedigree that other designers, including her rival, Coco Chanel, desperately coveted. An unstoppable force on the Parisian scene of the 1930’s, together they altered an object’s conventional meaning by transforming it into an item of fashion and paved the way for future generations of artist/fashion designer collaborations. (As a postscript we have a second work in the NGV’s collection that resulted from this collaboration, a brooch from 1937, acquired in 2017 also with the support of Krystyna Campbell-Pretty and not on display)
BIBLIOGRAPHY: https://www.schiaparelli.com/en/21-place-vendome/the-life-of-elsa/, https://fashionhistory.fitnyc.edu/1937-schiaparelli-lobster/, https://www.artsy.net/article/artsy-editorial-fashion-designer-made-dalis-art-wearable, https://www.vogue.com/article/dali-schiaparlli-in-daring-fashion-exhibit-dali-museum, https://thedali.org/exhibit/dali-and-schiaparelli/, https://thedali.org/press-room/dali-schiaparelli-debuts/, https://www.schiaparelli.com/en/21-place-vendome/schiaparelli-and-the-artists/salvador-dali/schiaparelli-bureau-drawer-suit/, https://thedali.org/press-room/dali-schiaparelli-debuts/