‘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. ↩

To put Mallarmé’s work in context; the mid-nineteenth century was a time when fashion, and images of fashion became a distinctly commercial and desirable commodity. Industrialisation and progress meant that fashion evolved into something multi-faceted, adapting to the Modern era. Dressing for a new contemporary culture became the main prerogative in the production of clothing, and with it came a new set of standards, idiosyncrasies and potential failures. All in all, fashion became a more observable and accessible phenomenon, and as such, a point of fascination for writers and artists alike. Theorists like Mallarmé, Charles Baudelaire and Théophile Gautier were, among others, reflective of a burgeoning interest in value of fashion in contemporary culture.

Mallarmé himself was an important figure as a writer and poet in Parisian literature circles of the time, know for his salons which invited readings and performances with fellow poets, writers and intellectuals, setting a context for his own work. His writing and work is largely associated with his involvement with Symbolism, as well as having an important influence on later art styles and movements such as Dadaism, Cubism and Surrealism.

Translated as ‘the latest fashion’, La Dernière Mode first came about on the suggestion from Mallarmé’s friend and neighbour, publisher Charles Wendelen, although the magazine was designed, compiled and executed almost entirely by Mallarmé. The first print run of 3,000, funded entirely by the poet, was largely a labour of love. Working with the illustrator Edmond Morin, the aesthetic of the magazine reflected the mode of the time, largely illustrative and gothic in style and design. The content of the project was a strange mix of fantasy and commercial authenticity, with Mallarmé writing most of the texts under a variety of pseudonyms; including ‘Marguerite de Ponty’ (for fashion, and the theory of fashion); ‘Miss Satin’ (giving news of the fashion houses of Paris); ‘Ix’, a male critic (for theatre and books); ‘Le Chef de bouche chez Brébant (for food), etc.¹ Under these pretenses, he made himself at once both a journalist and fashion designer, simultaneously able to promote the culture of fashion, as well as reflect upon its short-comings, thus creating a sort of myth through which he explored the boundaries of fashion. Behind the façade of the fashion magazine were thinly veiled witticisms and critiques of the culture of dressing. In a passage from the first issue, Mallarmé’s surreal prose is playfully critical:

‘That instinct of beauty, and of relation to climate, which, under each different sky, governs the production of roses, of tulips and carnations: has it nothing to say as regards ear-drops, finger-rings and bracelets? Flowers and jewels: has not each of them, as one might say, its native soil? This sunshine befits that flower, this type of woman that jewel?’

Stéphane Mallarmé, La Dernière Mode

Although La Dernière Mode has come to be regarded as a seminal work in the context of fashion academia, it still remains little known outside of this discourse, but remains an important and unique example of the power of myth-making in literature on commerce and contemporary culture.

1. Furbank, P. N. and Alex Cain. Mallarmé on Fashion. Oxford: Berg, 2004 ↩