Shocked: My Mother, Schiaparelli, and Me by Patricia Volk

Author:Patricia Volk [Volk, Patricia]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fashion, Family & Relationships, Personal Memoirs, Design, Biography & Autobiography, Family Relationships
ISBN: 9780307962102
Google: QNoUjkQPdikC
Amazon: 0307962105
Publisher: Knopf
Published: 2013-04-02T04:00:00+00:00

Schiap will never be pretty like her sister, Beatrice. Both of her cheeks are sprayed with moles. Her left cheek is worse, eleven raised ones. She hates to have her picture taken. “Schiap was an ugly child as standards go,” she writes. “Her mother began making disparaging remarks about her looks. She was always being told she was as ugly as her sister was beautiful.” The astronomer Giovanni Schiaparelli—discoverer of the Canals of Mars, and director of Milan’s Brera Observatory—tells his niece that, no, she isn’t bruta. “He liked me because he used to say I was born with the constellation of the Great Bear on my cheek. They were, of course, beauty spots.” Seven of the moles scattered over her left cheek loosely form the Big Dipper, the central part of Ursa Major. Uncle Giovanni invites Elsa to his observatory so she can look through his telescope and see her cheek in the sky. From then on she sees her face a different way. She is convinced her moles are lucky. Years later, she uses the Big Dipper repeatedly in her collections, embroidering it, printing it on fabric. She asks Cartier to make her a Big Dipper brooch using diamonds for the stars, and wears it, echoing her moles.

“Schiap still considered her sister much better looking than herself and this made her increasingly shy.” The little girl invents a way to make herself prettier than Beatrice. What is more beautiful than flowers? What if she can get flowers to grow on her face? If flowers are beautiful, her face will be beautiful. She convinces the gardener to give her seeds from her favorites: nasturtiums, poppies and morning glories. She closes the door to the bathroom and studies her face in the mirror. She pushes the seeds up her nose as far as they’ll go. She plants her ears and her mouth. She waits for her face to burst into bloom. Once her face is covered with flowers, she will be more beautiful than her sister.

That evening at dinner, something is wrong. Elsa barely touches her food. She’s having trouble breathing. Signora Schiaparelli dispatches a servant to the doctor’s house. The seeds are extracted except for one that has worked its way into her sinus, discovered at a later date.

Face planting marks Schiap’s first foray into Surrealism. Twenty years later, does she tell her good friend Salvador Dalí about it? One of her favorite paintings—Dalí gives it to her—is his Necrophiliac Springtime. In the painting, a beautifully gowned woman has a bouquet for a head.

No matter how famous Schiap becomes, throughout her life she returns to flowers to telegraph beauty. The firm of Lesage beads them onto sweaters, jackets and gowns. Silk flowers grow out of necklines, waistbands and hats. Sometimes flowers are the hat in its entirety. Pockets on summer dresses are printed with seed packets. Women pluck the glass nosegay from the Shocking perfume presentation and wear it as a brooch, so Schiap has it made into a brooch.

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