This bio has been republished from Mina Loy: Navigating the Avant-Garde. See below for full attribution.
Born: 10 September 1890, Italy
Died: 13 November 1973
Country most active: France
Also known as: NA
Born on September 10, 1890 to Maria-Luisa and Celestino Schiaparelli, Elsa Schiaparelli grew up in Rome and moved to London as a teenager. Her 1914 marriage to theosophist Count Wilhelm de Wendt de Kerlot ended in 1920 after the couple moved to New York and Schiaparelli gave birth to their daughter, Maria Luisa (nicknamed “Gogo”). There, Schiaparelli began working with visual artists such as Man Ray and Jean Cocteau who she met through the French avant-garde painter Francis Picabia and his wife, Gabrielle, a writer. Upon relocating to Paris, Schiaparelli started designing sweaters featuring a trompe l’oeil pattern, premiering her first collection and opening her famous 21 Place Vendome store in 1927. Schiaparelli’s designs were strikingly original and, in response to the 1930s ideal of the New Woman, rejected traditional feminine silhouettes and styles. With functionality and comfort in mind, she designed dresses that covered the knee and convertible pieces to be worn multiple ways. A New Yorker article written in 1932 describes Schiaparelli as “not so much merely a dressmaker as a cunning carpenter of clothes” (Flanner 20). Victoria R. Pass identifies a “strange glamour” in Schiaparelli’s use of accessories meant to look like other objects, such as hats that appeared to be high-heeled shoes, gloves with claw-like embellishments, and insect-like brooches. Her collaborations with Salvador Dalí in the 1930s resulted in some of Schiaparelli’s most well-known pieces, including the Tear and Skeleton dresses as well as the Dinner dress, which featured a large lobster design and was famously modeled by Wallis Simpson, Duchess of Windsor. She also designed a number of garments for celebrities and costumes for films. Schiaparelli continued to produce designs while splitting her time between America and Europe during WWII, but had some difficulty reestablishing her business after the war. She showed her last collection in February 1954 and the company went bankrupt that December. Schiaparelli died in her sleep on November 13, 1973 in Paris after being hospitalized.
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Work cited
Samuels, Anna. “Elsa Schiaparelli.” Mina Loy: Navigating the Avant-Garde. Edited by Suzanne W. Churchill, Linda A. Kinnahan, and Susan Rosenbaum. University of Georgia, 2020. https://mina-loy.com/biography/elsa-schiaparelli/. Accessed 29 May 2023.