Elsa Schiaparelli was born in 1890 into a prominent Roman family — her uncle was the astronomer Giovanni Schiaparelli, who identified the canali of Mars. She read philosophy, wrote erotic poetry as a teenager (to the scandal of her parents), and at 23 contracted a short-lived marriage to a theosophical lecturer, which ended in New York in 1920.

She arrived in Paris in 1922 with a two-year-old daughter and no profession. She opened her couture house in 1927. Within a decade she had become Chanel’s most serious rival.

Surrealism as Couture

Schiaparelli’s signature collaborations — with Salvador Dalí, Jean Cocteau, Meret Oppenheim, and Leonor Fini — produced some of the most-photographed garments of the interwar period. The lobster dress, embroidered with an enormous crustacean by Dalí, was worn by Wallis Simpson in a 1937 Vogue shoot that is reproduced in every subsequent history of the twentieth-century couture.

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A dress cannot just hang like a painting. It must be worn, which is to say, it must survive the tea.

Shocking

In 1937 she introduced Shocking Pink, a magenta of unprecedented saturation, named after her new perfume — bottled, at the suggestion of Leonor Fini, in a glass cast of Mae West’s torso. The colour remains trademarked; the bottle remains in production; contemporary collections by Daniel Roseberry, the house’s current designer, route directly through it.

The Closure and Revival

The house closed in 1954 and was dormant for six decades. Diego Della Valle reopened it in 2014. Under the creative direction of Bertrand Guyon and, since 2019, Daniel Roseberry, Schiaparelli has returned to the Paris couture schedule and to the red carpet, typically via the wardrobe of Lady Gaga or Beyoncé. The surrealist archive, turned out after sixty years, proved remarkably current.