It’s tempting to accept the consumer-ready packaging of female writers, musicians, and artists in fashion industry-vetted contexts – whether they appear in ad campaigns, magazine covers or screen-printed on tote bags – at face value. Yet it’s worth questioning whether this packaging serves them and their work as holistically as possible; whether it builds and sustains an audience legitimately interested in the work itself or one that is merely attracted to the glamorous façade.

The daughter of Jewish immigrants born in a highly anti-Semitic climate, Lispector and her family emigrated to Brazil in 1921 when she was only two months old from Tchetchelnik, Ukraine (Russia) to escape the pogroms. Lispector often attributed this early disruption to ‘her sense of not quite belonging, especially to herself.’² While she adopted Brazilian Portuguese as her primary language, her marriage to a Brazilian diplomat took her to temporary homes in Italy, Switzerland, England, and the United States. Beginning in her teens, writing stories allowed her to make sense of her inner conflicts concerning gender roles, class struggles, economic status, and her own complicated cultural background; hers was a metaphysically curious writing style, one that often raised questions about the nature of being human in strange and haunting ways. Lispector led a varied and highly productive career – publishing novels, stories collections, children’s books, and even a weekly column for the national daily newspaper, O Jornal do Brasil – and won various literary awards, eventually becoming an undisputed literary legend in Brazil. Yet it has taken decades since her death in 1977 for her singular voice to reach English readers in translation.

For a writer so strongly invested in mining her complex inner world for material, Lispector’s exterior has received a disproportionate amount of attention. Today, it’s rare to encounter reviews of her work that do not reference her ‘glamour’, an adjective frequently associated with her appearance. As Benjamin Moser, one of Lispector’s biographers, points out in his introduction to the recent reissue of The Complete Stories, ‘The legendarily beautiful Clarice Lispector, tall and blonde, clad in the outspoken sunglasses and chunky jewellery of a grande dame of mid-century Rio de Janeiro, met our current definition of glamour.’³

A simple internet search of images of Lispector reveals a woman who exudes the sort of visual presence that, at least on the surface, appears utterly effortless: she was prone to painting her lips a deep rouge and donning statement necklaces, her hair elegantly swept off her face. In many of these images, she gazes off in the distance while a lit cigarette dangles between her fingers. Lispector’s strong sense of personal style (she even moonlighted as a fashion writer) signifies that she was well aware of the power of her appearance to generate curiosity along with higher book sales.

The conflation between displaying genuine respect for her literary talent and obsessing over her distinct brand of glamour is evident in American translator Gregory Rabassa’s frequently quoted description of Lispector: he ‘recalled being “flabbergasted to meet that rare person who looked like Marlene Dietrich and wrote like Virgina Woolf.”’⁴

Despite the fact that Lispector’s first novel, Near to the Wild Heart (published in December 1943, around her twenty-third birthday) earned her impressive accolades – one critic even called it ‘[…] the greatest novel a woman has ever written in the Portuguese language’⁵ – she maintained a difficult relationship to the press for much of her career. Her hesitation to divulge information about her personal life, along with her distrust toward journalists to tell her story authentically, without layers of projection, led to a mythologising of Lispector that remains tied to the very mention of her name today.

It seems that this impenetrable Lispectorian mystique has only served to add to her appeal. In Brazil, she is a household name, long considered to be one of the country’s most significant writers. Recently, beyond the Brazilian borders, critical interest in her work and translated reissues of her novels and stories have steadily increased over the past decade.

Yet as Moser points out in his biography of Lispector, Why This World, ‘The legend was stronger than she was.’⁶ This legend overshadowed the woman herself, a fact that frustrated Lispector throughout her lifetime. Writing in 1976, the year prior to her untimely death from cancer, she reflected on the increased attention she had steadily gained over the years as her legend grew:

‘This all leaves me a bit perplexed. Could it be that I’m fashionable? And why did people complain they didn’t understand me and now seem to understand me? […] The truth is that some people created a myth around me, which gets in my way […]’⁷

Lispector correctly believed that the press considered her a slate onto which they could project their own assumptions about what went on in her head, rather than portray her as a multifaceted woman: equal parts writer, housewife, and mother. No matter how much widespread praise Lispector’s writing has attained post-mortem, her literary credibility will forever be bound to this glamorised mythology.

Similarly to Lispector’s experience once she found herself in the public limelight, the fashion and literary worlds alike have, in recent months, created their own sorts of mythologies around other artistic women – from Patti Smith and Iris Apfel to Joni Mitchell and Joan Didion – by collaborating with them, casting them in ad campaigns, and bestowing upon them the title of ‘style icon.’ As fashion and publishing houses alike have increasingly promoted, and ultimately profited from, the commercialisation of these independent, sartorially savvy, women, they have attained a new kind of cultural clout since their heyday in bygone eras. A conflict comes into play, however, when we claim to respect a female writer’s work while simultaneously idolising her desirable aesthetic. This dynamic has been further reinforced in the case of writer – and recently crowned ‘style icon’ – Joan Didion, following her role in the spring/summer 2015 Céline campaign shot by fashion photographer Juergen Teller and released last January.

Didion’s blunt reaction to the New York Times reporter who called her to comment (“I don’t have any clue,” and “I have no idea.”)⁸ suggested a reluctant ambiguity toward the fashion world’s embrace of her as a cultural figure worthy of admiration. Yet while Didion claimed an unawareness toward the buzz surrounding her style, there is no denying that both Céline and Didion benefitted from perpetuating the idea that she – and by extension, her work – were worth discussing anew, in part because of what she wore and how she wore it. As a recent New York Times piece by Matthew Schneier exploring the Didion fashion phenomenon confirmed, ‘According to Nielsen BookScan […] sales of her work in 2015 to date are up nearly 55 percent over the comparable period the previous year.’⁹

Designers and editors alike are clearly not blind to the commercial benefits of aligning themselves with these established, powerful muses whose personal style can be whittled down to singular garments and accessories that signify an insouciant cool: a pair of oversized statement shades for Didion; an old black coat and clean white shirt for Smith; dark red lipstick for Lispector. Theirs is an everyday way of dressing defined by distinctive simplicity, something the image-saturated and seasonally-spinning fashion universe so often lacks.

The ways in which women like Lispector and Didion have been marketed more recently for public consumption – attaining the status of both literary and unconventional style icon, respectively – highlights a tendency for such figures to offer the potential for increased cultural capital, specifically when viewed through the lens of nostalgia. Built as it is on maintaining a perpetual longing for times and places past (e.g. Lispector’s glamorous 1940s style; Didion’s 1970s California cool), this sort of iconic, nostalgic branding generates a significant profit. Other women, especially younger women, will inevitably try to emulate this iconic sartorial or writing style to feel closer to the women – by purchasing a pair of Céline sunglasses to look just like Didion or proudly displaying a copy of Lispector’s story collection on their bookshelf, for example. Yet given the logic underlying the very idea of a ‘style icon,’ which requires that they remain peerless, faultless, and perpetually out of reach, it is no coincidence that for the brand or publisher, this unfulfilled longing for closeness to the idol translates into increased accessories and book sales.

As so often occurs to suddenly embraced entities in fashion’s orbit, these writers’ fashionable auras may inevitably begin to lose some of their lustre over time. Still, the question remains as to whether fashion’s stamp of approval ultimately helps or hurts the female artist in question in the long term. If nostalgic branding encourages consumers to stop short at the glamorous image – to purchase the writer’s work solely on the basis of that image – then it risks less serious critical attention being paid to the work itself.

As the sudden, intense resurgence of interest in both Didion’s older works and Lispector’s translated works in the US have shown, the current expectation for female writers to also embrace themselves as profitable brands puts their work in danger of dilution. If the fashion world continues to ghost these women’s significant contributions to the long male-dominated literary canon on the gendered basis of their distinctly ‘feminine glamour,’ then it will perpetuate the idea that their writing is not capable of speaking for itself – that it cannot be divorced from what the woman wore while she wrote her life’s work.

Olivia Aylmer is a New York-based stylist, writer and graduate of Barnard College at Columbia University.

1. C Lispector, trans. Stefan Tobler, Água Viva, New Directions, New York, 2012, p. 39 ↩

2. Vieira, Nelson H., “Clarice Lispector.” Jewish Women: A Comprehensive Historical Encyclopedia. 1 March 2009. Jewish Women’s Archive. ↩

3. B Moser, The Complete Stories of Clarice Lispector, New Directions, New York, 2015, p. ix ↩

4. B Moser, “Introduction: The Sphinx,” Why This World: A Biography of Clarice Lispector, Oxford University Press, New York, 2009, p. 2 ↩

5. Ibid., p. 125 ↩

6. B Moser, “Introduction: The Sphinx,” Why This World: A Biography of Clarice Lispector, Oxford University Press, New York, 2009, p. 4 ↩

7. Ibid., p. 361 ↩

8. Jacobs, Alexandra. “Joan Didion on the Céline Ad.” New York Times, 7 Jan. 2015. ↩

9. Schneier, Matthew. “Fashion’s Gaze Turned to Joan Didion in 2015.” The New York Times, 18 Dec. 2015. ↩

‘We are never neither really someone else, nor really the same person.’

– Philippe Lejeune, On Autobiography, 1989.

IN ANDRÉ BRETON’S NOVEL Nadja, first published in 1928, the author describes an unconventional woman who embodies the principles behind Surrealist art: a ‘disinterested play of thought’, the practice of ‘psychic automatism’ and the search for the ‘marvelous’ in everyday life.¹ Italian-born French couturière Elsa Schiaparelli (1890-1973) was a real-life Nadja who incarnated these ideals in an ambiguous way. Like the persona of Paul Poiret, hers too was built around her status as an artist rather than a dressmaker. Ironically, this promotional strategy was achieved through refined commercial acumen: by associating themselves with art rather than business they imbued their work with a magical aura that became key to their commercial success. The designer’s autobiography, Shocking Life (1954), wove together her personal and professional contradictions and secured a legacy after her maison had ceased to exist.

A recurring theme in the text and in her work is that of metamorphosis. In the book, Schiaparelli employed rhetoric strategies to shape the narrator as an ever-changing self, impossible to pin down. As in her designs, where she subverted taste and functionality of a garment – an insect became a button, a shoe inspired a hat, a trompe l’œil effect turned a jumper into a shirt. A key word in the Surrealist vocabulary, metamorphosis bears strong associations with transformation, mystique, and duality. In this way, Schiaparelli’s autobiography is a literal mirror to the Surrealist themes in her dress designs, navigating the blurred lines between art and fashion, history and fantasy, political engagement and studied indifference in the construction of her public persona.

The title Shocking Life alone suggests multiple readings. ‘Shocking’ refers to her life, one of excitement, privilege and excess; it also references ‘Shocking Pink’, the colour she created, which acts as a synecdoche for her provocative designs; finally, it underscores her commercial success by echoing the name of the fragrance she launched in 1937. But as critic Judith Thurman observes, ‘what is most shocking about Schiaparelli […] is her obscurity.’²

The obscurity that Thurman pinpointed is the key feature of Schiaparelli’s protean and self-constructed persona in Shocking Life. Throughout the book, the designer alternatively refers to herself as ‘I’, ‘she’ and ‘Schiap’. In the foreword her personality is presented as inherently contradictory: ‘She is unpredictable but, in reality, disarmingly simple. She is profoundly lazy but works furiously and rapidly […] She is generous and mean […] she both despises and loves human beings […] If she is charming she can also be the most hateful person in the world.’ The effect is a constant mirroring of fragments of her own persona, which makes it difficult for the reader to see beyond the theatricality of rhetoric. While personal and historical accounts abound, the misadventures, the travels, the economic success, the troubled family life and the observations on World War II seem to follow one another for the sake of spectacle rather than reflection, to dazzle readers rather than draw them in. Schiaparelli’s technique follows the refusal of logic, rationality, clarity and order advocated by Bréton in his 1924 Surrealist Manifesto, a text that was in turn influenced by Freud’s studies on dreams and the unconscious. Schiaparelli’s focus in the text is the surface: of the events, of her self, of her persona.

Much like Paul Poiret, Schiaparelli resorts to the romantic myth of the misunderstood artist. She describes her youth as a constant struggle against the expectations of her family; she was ‘revolutionary and stubborn’, ‘far too imaginative’ and ‘ultra-sensitive’, looking for a creative outlet to express herself. Her view of fashion is summarised in the following passage:

‘Dress designing, incidentally, is to me not a profession but an art. I found that it was the most difficult and unsatisfying art, because as soon as a dress is born it has already become a thing of the past […] The interpretation of a dress, the means of making it, and the surprising way in which some materials react – all these factors, no matter how good an interpreter you have, invariably reserve a slight if not bitter disappointment for you. In a way it is even worse if you are satisfied, because once you have created it the dress no longer belongs to you. A dress cannot just hang like a painting on the wall, or like a book remain intact and live a long and sheltered life.’

Schiaparelli expresses dissatisfaction with the commercial nature of fashion while also drawing from Surrealist rhetoric to describe to her creative process as ‘a dream’. The issues of originality, fantasy, and authorship that emerge echo depictions of fashion, femininity and sewing machines in Surrealism at large. Her use of terms from the artistic discourse, with which she was intimately familiar, also elevated the credibility of her persona and added an aura of exclusivity to her brand. The Surrealist fascination with everyday objects and articulation of the self as unstable or ‘decentered’³ meant that fashion became an important site for the exploration of identity. Many Surrealists gravitated around fashion working as photographers, illustrators and designers, and did in fact embrace its commercial nature. Rather than to prove herself to them, however, Schiaparelli had to prove herself to mass audiences, which generally considered art and fashion as very distinct realms.

In reality, Schiaparelli engaged with the commercial nature of fashion just as well as her rival Coco Chanel, who famously dismissed her as ‘that Italian artist who makes clothes’. Not only did she promote her ‘hard chic’ silhouette to the masses by associating her brand with Hollywood darlings like Marlene Dietrich, Greta Garbo and Katharine Hepburn, but she was the first designer to lend her creations out as a promotional strategy to often photographed Parisian women such as French actress Arletty and socialite Reginald Fellowes.

Schiaparelli’s business acumen was confirmed by the launch of her fragrance Shocking, whose bottle was designed after the body shape of Mae West, then one of the most celebrated Hollywood actresses. As fashion historian Colin McDowell observes, her maison was financially secure thanks to the licensing of nail varnish, underwear and menswear, but also less fashionable goods such as mattresses and shower curtains.⁵

Omissions abound in Schiaparelli’s autobiography, where silences matter as much as her dramatic stories. The designer glosses over her controversial political connections during World War II and constantly downplays the role of her less-than-glamorous business endeavours. It is the space between what is said and unsaid that allows her to craft a mythical persona. Like Nadja, who seeks to crash bourgeois values through her clothing and embodies Breton’s view of irrationality as the essence of femininity, Schiaparelli thrived on contradiction; her public persona offered her a consistent strategy to avoid the implications of her incongruence.

Alex Esculapio is a writer and PhD student at the University of Brighton, UK.

1. A. Bréton, The Manifestoes of Surrealism, University of Michigan Press, Ann Arbor, 1972. ↩

2. J. Thurman, “Mother of Invention,” The New Yorker, 27 October 2003, p.58. ↩

3. C. Evans, “Masks, Mirrors and Mannequins: Elsa Schiaparelli and the Decentered Subject”, Fashion Theory, Volume 3, Issue 1, 1999, pp. 3-32 ↩

4. R. Martin, Fashion and Surrealism, New York, Rizzoli, 1987. ↩

5. http://www.businessoffashion.com/articles/education/elsa-schiaparelli-1890-1973. ↩

While fashion designers today reach the heights of celebrity status, the roots of the phenomenon lie in fin de siècle intellectual salons in Paris, where fashion first became an autonomous discourse and a vehicle of contemporaneity.¹ As popular haunts for bohemia and artists alike, literary salons favoured the cult of personality and, along with parties, performances and gallery openings provided artists with the opportunity to socialise with peers and potential buyers. Thus, the successful management of public personas became crucial. This new necessity also reflected a shift in the production and dissemination of art. Its creators were increasingly forced to embrace democratisation and to negotiate their position within mass culture. Suspended between pure creativity and commercial demands, fashion assumed centre stage.

By the beginning of the twentieth century, mass consumption and new forms of mediation and promotion meant that authors, artists and designers had to engage with a sophisticated system that on the one hand promoted the cult of the individual, but on the other catered to a broader audience than ever before. As literature scholar Rod Rosenquist points out, the key genres of literary modernism – the Bildungsroman and the autobiography – all suggest a close link between modernism and celebrity culture.²

Paul Poiret was one of the first fashion designers to understand the power of a well-crafted public persona. Patron of the arts, legendary party host, chief promoter of Oriental taste, costume designer, allegedly the first fashion designer to free women of corsetry. He was also the first couturier to create a signature fragrance and venture into furniture design; Poiret owed much of the success of his enterprise to the promotion of himself as a brand.

Not surprisingly, he was also the first fashion designer to write an autobiography. A highly subjective genre, the autobiography allows its author to perform their self on the page by combining history and fantasy. Fashion editor Diana Vreeland called this mix of facts and fiction ‘faction’.³ She herself employed this rhetorical device throughout her life, most notably in her own memoir D.V. (1984), whose title references her flamboyant, adventurous persona as fashion editor for Harper’s Bazaar and Vogue.

Poiret’s autobiography was published in three volumes: En Habillant l’Époque (1930), Revenez-y (1932) and Art et Phynance (1934). Only the first one has been translated into English with the title King of Fashion (1931), which since became Poiret’s nickname in the American press.⁴ The books came out at the time when Poiret – whose fashion house had closed down in 1929 – was a ghost of his former self in the public eye. On the brink of poverty and largely ignored, he was eager to have his voice heard and secure his cultural legacy.

Poiret’s memoir follows the traditional chronological order of autobiographies. As the reader discovers the author’s childhood, it is immediately clear that Poiret’s performance in the text is based on his identification as an artist, rather than a dressmaker:

‘I am told that one of the first words I uttered was: ‘Cron papizi,’ and the initiate understood that this way of asking for a pencil and paper (crayon et papier). Thus, my vocation as a painter revealed itself before my vocation as a dressmaker; but my earliest works were not preserved – they seem to have had no interest or meaning save for myself.’

King of Fashion: The Autobiography of Paul Poiret, by Paul Poiret, 2009

Poiret then proceeds to recall his early sensitivity to colours, exquisite smells and beauty, as if in retrospective he could foresee his career as designer and parfumier. ‘Inspired by the brilliance of flowers,’ he writes ‘I tried to make inks and colours […] Or else I wanted to extract the perfume from the roses, and I confined them in bottles of alcohol and soda water.’ At the age of twelve his vocation as designer manifested itself: ‘Did I already dream of stuffs and chiffons? I think I must have. Women and their toilettes drew me passionately.’ Such descriptions evoke Poiret’s future predilection for Orientalist fantasies and also establish his persona as ‘artist of the cloth’, thus validating fashion as a discipline worthy of intellectual pursuit.⁵ By underlining the inherent importance of the toilette, Poiret also seems to echo Honoré de Balzac’s famous claim ‘La toilette est l’expression de la societé’ (the toilette is the expression of society),⁶ The discourses of fashion and art often overlap as the designer shares anecdotes about his collaborations with Paul Iribe, Georges Lepape, Raoul Dufy and Georges Barbier.

Throughout his memoir, Poiret draws heavily upon the motif of the misunderstood artist. In doing so, he positions himself within the eighteenth and nineteenth century tradition of ‘great men’ whose work was misjudged by the audience.⁷ He addresses this conflict explicitly while discussing the work of painter Raoul Dufy, who designed stationery and textiles for the house of Poiret. However, it is clear that the designer is indirectly talking about himself in the passage:

‘For an artist the useless is more precious than the necessary, and he is made to suffer when people try to make him admit the inanity of his daring, or when only that which is saleable is chosen from his work. An artist has antennæ that vibrate far ahead of ours, and he has presentiments of the future trends of taste long before the vulgar. The public can never say that he is mistaken; it can only express humility, in matters it cannot understand.’

The motif of the misunderstood artist is balanced by another literary topos, that of modesty, which shows the designer’s familiarity with the genre. Yet his desire to establish his cultural legacy surfaces again, accompanied by a critique of the minimalist, streamlined modernism represented in the Thirties by Coco Chanel:

‘People have been good enough to say that I have exercised a powerful influence over my age, and that I have inspired the whole of my generation. I dare not make the pretension that this is true, and I feel, indeed, extremely diffident about it, but yet, if I summon up my memories, I am truly obliged to admit that, when I began to do what I wanted to do in dress-designing, there were absolutely no tints left on the palette of the colourists […] I am truly forced to accord myself the merit of all this, and to recognise also that since I have ceased to stimulate the colours, they have fallen once more into neurasthenic anæmia.’

The designer’s tone and persona convey a sense of nostalgia for a time where his creative output was in tandem with the zeitgeist. His desire to shape Parisian cultural life with his ideas may appear self-aggrandising, but it also reflects the utopian spirit behind the ideal of the total work of art. He writes, ‘I dreamed of creating in France a movement of ideas that should be capable of propagating a new mode in decoration and furnishing.’ An admirer of the Wiener Werkstätte, Poiret did believe in shaping everyday life as aesthetic experience through clothing, craft and art.

Poiret’s articulated performance of the self in King of Fashion offers multiple readings. It is first and foremost an attempt to articulate his cultural legacy and situate himself in history. It also parallels the modern conflict between art and commerce perceived by many designers and artist, a condition enabled by the increased privatisation of the practice and experience of art. But the significance of the text today, at a time when fashion seems consumed by an obsession with heritage and branding,⁸ is that it provides a privileged, nuanced perspective into the origins of contemporary celebrity culture.

Alex Esculapio is a writer and PhD student at the University of Brighton, UK.

1. N. Troy, Couture Culture: A Study in Modern Art and Fashion, MIT Press, Cambridge, 2003. ↩

2. R. Rosenquist. ‘Modernism, Celebrity and the Public Personality’, Literature Compass, Volume 10, Issue 5, 2013, pp. 437-448. ↩

3. Quoted in Lisa Immondino Vreeland’s documentary The Eye Has To Travel, 2011 ↩

4. P. Poiret, King of Fashion: The Autobiography of Paul Poiret, V&A Publishing, London, 2009, p. 153. ↩

5. C. Breward, Fashion, Oxford University Press, Oxford and New York, 2003, p. 103. ↩

6. quoted in V. Steele, Paris Fashion: A Cultural History, Berg, Oxford and New York, 1988. ↩

7. T.B. Porterfield and S.L. Siegfried, Staging Empire: Napoleon, Ingres, and David, Pennsylvania State University Press, Philadelphia, 2006. ↩

8. Paul Poiret’s global trademark rights and archives were recently sold to Shingsegae International, already a partner of Céline and Givenchy among others. This is one of the many recent attempts to resurrect historical fashion houses. See http://fashionista.com/2015/08/paul-poiret-resurrection. ↩