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Fashion Corsets Biography

The tide keeps bringing in Chanel. The classic jacket, the pearls and tweeds, the sassy aphorisms—“Fashion changes, but style endures.” At least 20 books on the couturière, who died in 1971, have rolled into print in the past 10 years. Yet amid the waves and crests of Chanel’s billion-dollar brand, there is an island called Elsa Schiaparelli. From 1935 to 1939, it was Schiaparelli who embodied French fashion, who turned women into witty totems of transformation and escape, who subverted the gathering storm with a surrealist’s sleight of hand and, in so doing, stole Chanel’s high-profile clients, leaving her, for a time, at sea.While Schiaparelli’s vision remains uniquely influential—having inspired designers as disparate as Yves Saint Laurent, Geoffrey Beene, Jean Paul Gaultier, Patrick Kelly, Franco Moschino and Lulu Guinness—there are surprisingly few books on her. We have her intelligent if evasive autobiography of 1954, “Shocking Life,” and Palmer White’s not particularly searching 1986 biography. Dilys Blum’s gorgeous catalog from the exhibition she curated at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, in 2003—“Shocking!”—is the most intellectual work. A trove of meticulous research, it takes us through the ascent of Schiaparelli, from her first collection of sweaters in 1927 to the great themed collections of her late-1930s reign (“Metamorphosis,” “Circus,” “Pagan,” “Zodiac,” “Commedia dell’arte,” “Music”), and then to her postwar descent. Into this company comes Meryle Secrest with her often sparkling but never quite weighty “Elsa Schiaparelli.”

Schiaparelli thought of herself as an artist (Chanel tried to dismiss her as “that Italian artist who makes clothes”), and, in her 1930s collaborations with Salvador Dalí, Jean Cocteau, Man Ray and others, she broke boundaries not just material but conceptual. While her fellow designers were in their workrooms evolving silhouettes slowly, “Schiap,” as she was known to friends, was in the center ring, cracking the whip with one fashion epiphany after another: the trompe l’oeil sweater, the wraparound dress, the zipper as design element, the hat like a shoe, the jacket embroidered to look like a chest of drawers (as Magritte might have said, “This is not a chest”). “Shocking” was the name she gave to a begonia pink that was imprinted on her memory at age 1—“bright, impossible, impudent, becoming, life-giving,” she recalled in her autobiography, “like all the light and the birds and the fish in the world put together”—and it was also the name of her first, and most successful, perfume. A shock to the senses is by definition a shock to the status quo.

When Ms. Secrest writes, however, that her book “had its start when I began to wonder why nobody dressed up anymore, even for evenings out,” it doesn’t exactly suggest a burning desire to know Elsa Schiaparelli. With Schiap’s inner circle gone, and only one immediate family member alive (granddaughter Marisa Schiaparelli Berenson, the model and actress), and no new diaries or letters found, there isn’t much breaking news upon which to build an expanded or revisionist history. Ms. Secrest is rather blasé about the questions she can’t answer (three times a blank is filled with the words “never mind,” except we do mind) and focuses her most energetic sleuthing on gaps in the Schiaparelli story: the early marriage; the nature of her privileged, constant and confusing travel in and out of France during World War II; and her life after the 1954 closing of her couture house (she died in 1973).

Elsa Schiaparelli, who described herself as a girl of “too ardent temperament,” was born on Sept. 10, 1890. Descended from renowned scholars on her father’s side—he was an Orientalist, his older brother an astronomer—and from Italian aristocrats on her mother’s, she grew up in a palace in Rome surrounded by culture, art and hidebound tradition. Schiaparelli believed herself to be ugly because her mother continually compared her looks, unfavorably, with her older sister’s. This was the wound of her childhood, and she retaliated with extreme imagination. When Ms. Secrest relates the oft-told story of the young Schiap planting seeds in her ears, throat and nose, hoping to become a garden of beauty, she adds a nice twist, suggesting that the females with flower-covered heads in some of Dalí’s paintings of 1936 may have been the offspring of the experiment.

In her virginal teens—in a trance of automatic writing, it seems—Schiaparelli penned a collection of impassioned poetry that a cousin saw into print, in 1911, to the horror of her parents. It was titled “Arethusa,” after the Greek myth in which one of Artemis’s followers, to escape the unwanted attentions of a river god, is turned into a stream. One longs to read at least one poem from the collection, Schiaparelli’s first formal act of creative conjuring, but not a single line of verse appears in Ms. Secrest’s biography. One assumes that all copies are lost. Yet in Marisa Berenson’s forthcoming “Elsa Schiaparelli’s Private Album,” there are photographs of the book’s title page, a poem written out longhand and old newspaper reviews. If something kept Ms. Secrest from providing examples or analysis of the poetry, we should be told what that was.

Schiaparelli finally did make her escape, heading to England in 1913 to take a position caring for orphans in a country house. The next year, in London, she went to a lecture on theosophy, given by a man she thought “handsome in a queer way.” He was Wilhelm de Wendt de Kerlor, of Polish descent and with quite a few identities—translator, lecturer on the paranormal, quack clairvoyant and not the “doctor” or “professor” he sometimes pretended to be. After the lecture, the two talked into the night and married the next day, again to the horror of Schiaparelli’s parents. Ms. Secrest’s chapter on this folly, the couple “zigzagging from one harebrained scheme to another,” is fascinating. From England to Cannes—Schiap at his side like a magician’s assistant—de Kerlor read palms, told bogus fortunes and attempted to forecast the course of World War I. In America, calling himself a “world-famous criminologist,” he tried to solve murders by seeing the perpetrator’s face in blood stains.

For five years, Schiaparelli hung in with this smooth kook, but in 1919, when she became pregnant with her only child and de Kerlor began an affair with Isadora Duncan, the couple separated. (In 1928, de Kerlor was murdered in a barroom quarrel in Mexico.) Late in the biography, circling back to Schiaparelli’s only marriage, Ms. Secrest writes: “In the long fight to establish herself as an artist and designer, what had sustained her was everything De Kerlor represented: the world of the spirit, psychic phenomena and unseen forces.” This rings true.

The “unseen forces” that led Schiaparelli into fashion were largely the friendships she made with other well-born women, one of whom encouraged a move to Paris. Out of necessity and invention, Schiaparelli was making her own clothes, and this was noticed, not least by the great couturier Paul Poiret, who said she should try fashion design. She did. After two years working for small houses, Schiaparelli produced, with the businessman M. Kahn as a silent partner, a small collection of jazzy knits. A lack of training in pattern-making and construction worked to Schiaparelli’s advantage, leaving her free to follow her own wayward instincts. Hers was a vision of embellished comment: One of Schiap’s favorite motifs was lips and she loved designs that were puns, non sequiturs and conversation starters. Compared with Alix Grès’s miracles of Hellenistic draping—mute phenomena in silk jersey—a Schiaparelli was loquacious. And while Chanel was delineating a sporty ease and prettiness, Schiaparelli glorified, in the words of Vogue editor Bettina Ballard, “the hard elegance of the ugly woman.” Beauty was beside the point—a woman in Schiaparelli was smart in every sense of the word.

Once France was occupied, Schiaparelli seemed to outsmart herself. Or maybe she was just Arethusa again, this time sliding between allegiances, never visibly taking sides. Like one possessed, she went back and forth between France, America, Portugal and South America, her freedom of movement made possible by friends in very high places. Schiap’s confidante Bettina Bergery—who was her house model, window dresser and publicist—was married to Gaston Bergery, a socialist politician turned collaborator who wrote the founding document of the Vichy state. Ms. Secrest reveals that police in France, Britain and America all watched Schiaparelli, each thinking she was guilty of something. J. Edgar Hoover, head of the FBI, thought she had set up an espionage system. Was she spying or just sly, opportunistic or imperiously oblivious? By May 1941,