Elsa Schiaparelli by Meryle Secrest

Author:Meryle Secrest [Secrest, Meryle]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-385-35327-4
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2014-10-06T16:00:00+00:00

Schiaparelli, who was a fine skier, chastising Bettina, who was not, in this photograph taken in Megève, France, 1930s (illustration credit 8.5)

“And remember Amelia Earhart’s evening dress with wings that make her look airborne … Remember how Michèle Morgan was bright and shy as a kitchen, straight from her concierge mama … blinking her Siamese cat eyes at the dresses. And little Annabella, like a fourteen-year-old boy, when she was working on her first René Clair film … and Constance Bennett and Gloria Swanson and freckled Myrna Loy in a coat much too big for her, and Joan Crawford with Douglas Fairbanks junior, and Gary Cooper, very shy, mad Dorothy Rubio with her great big diamond and Domenica Walter with hers—each of them convinced that her own was two carats more than the other …”

Bettina went on: “Do you remember how … Aragon, the great Communist, was so infuriated at having to deliver [some packages] by the tradesmen’s entrance that he wrote scatological verses on the walls of your tradesmen’s staircase and had them photographed in the Surrealist review?

“Do you remember how everyone in your shop loved Mamie Eisenhower when she sat in the salon with her folksie charm and such a lot of conversation, and how well she chose her clothes?”

Great numbers of stars of theatre or film, European as well as Hollywood, came to 21 Place Vendôme to be dressed. Starting in 1936, Schiaparelli designed for several Hollywood films, but her influence was felt long before that. In 1933, the costume designer Adrian had picked up broad padded shoulders for Joan Crawford, and the idea of split skirts, apron dresses, ostrich feathers, dinner dress with matching jackets, startling hats, and prominent zippers followed along without attribution, as well as a craze for big gold jewelry. The situation was quite different in Europe, particularly once she had established her London salon; in a single two-year period she outfitted stage and film actresses in fifteen productions.

Since every couturier wants a woman in the public eye to wear her clothes, Schiaparelli was no more relentless than anyone else. But the fact that she was dressing so many actresses and film stars would indicate that she had a knack that other designers lacked. As in the example of Katharine Hepburn, Schiaparelli enjoyed discovering unexpected aspects of her client’s physical appearance. She cites the example of a client from the Midwest who was timid, overweight, and did not know how to dress. With Schiaparelli’s help she went on a diet, had her hair restyled, chose very plain dresses and superb jewels along with daring colors. Schiaparelli wrote, “She seemed to become taller, and her rather large bones, that were a drawback in the beginning, became strangely interesting and took on a certain special beauty.” The lady had received the kind of clear-eyed, detached but friendly attention most women never get in a lifetime, and it came from someone who had made the successful experiment on herself.

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