#BUTTERFLY ENCASED IN GLASS PLUS#

The show took place on the day Russia invaded Ukraine backstage, Scott wore a shirt that read “Gilt without guilt”. His autumn 2022 show for Moschino was inspired by a fanciful mansion come to life, à la Beauty and the Beast, with models dressed like grandfather clocks or with candelabras on their heads (courtesy of the Surrealist milliner Stephen Jones), on a set inspired by 2001: A Space Odyssey). One recent exception: theme-prone designer Jeremy Scott. While carnival collections and skeletal dresses have recurred in fashion, few designers have found themselves at the same intense intersection of surreal themes and ominous timing. One month after the circus show, Adolf Hitler invaded Austria. It was jubilant and escapist but memorable for its taste of death, too with Dalí, she debuted a long black skeleton dress with padded ridges mimicking protruding bones. Describing it as “riotous and swaggering,” Schiaparelli unveiled lavish embroidery inspired by ringmasters and acrobats, and accessories like balloon handbags and ice cream cone hats. The 1938 circus show, in particular, with its hired dancers and clowns, has been long cited as an example of surrealism’s rise amid the threat of war.

Some of her works are on display in the Paris exhibition Shocking! The Surreal World of Elsa Schiaparelli (Getty) She was an early adopter of themed collections, choosing subjects like music, astrology, the pagan (making women look like Botticelli paintings) and the circus. The way Schiaparelli presented her work, too, is still relevant. Or, more recently, the Loewe collection of coats, jeans and sneakers covered in real sprouted grass by Jonathan Anderson, its creative director, and designer Paula Ulargui Escalona. The image calls to mind the transformative shrub make-up and floor-length capes seen in Thom Browne’s spring 2022 show. (Surviving near-suffocation, she later designed a summer dress covered in fabric appliqués resembling seed packets.) In her autobiography, Schiaparelli wrote of being an “ugly” child who planted seeds in her throat, ears and mouth, in hopes of growing “a face covered with flowers like a heavenly garden”. “Sweater-minded” women, she wrote in her 1954 autobiography, “fell on me like birds of prey,” among them a buyer from a New York department store.īut it is not just Schiaparelli’s surreal style signatures that continue to resurface in fashion (like Marc Jacobs referencing those knits in 2016, as just one example).

There is also an assortment of knits that made Schiaparelli a star: One of her earliest designs was a sweater printed with a trompe l’oeil bow around its neck that she first wore to what she called a “smart lunch” in Paris.

Some pieces were designed in collaboration with Dalí (Getty) Both pieces originally were designed in collaboration with Dalí. Nearby is a version of the off-white silk organza dress worn by Wallis Simpson for Vogue in 1937, the same year she married the former King Edward VIII an enormous lobster lolls down the front and back of the skirt. Even in a pair of bedazzled antigen test earrings, made nearly 50 years after her death, by a Spanish college student with a DIY hobby.Įncased in glass is a black Schiaparelli hat worn like an upside-down high-heel shoe. Look around and Schiap, as she was known, is everywhere.

#BUTTERFLY ENCASED IN GLASS PLUS#

This exhibition arrives as another attempt to correct that: not just to impress viewers with her original creations and artistic connections – plus a fair amount of Roseberry’s recent work – but to implant in them the knowledge of how far her curious mind and angular arms have reached into modern fashion. In her autobiography, Schiaparelli wrote of being an ‘ugly’ child who planted seeds in her throat, ears and mouth, in hopes of growing ‘a face covered with flowers’

Butterfly encased in glass