It is only natural for contemporary designers to be inspired by recent exhibitions of garments and accessories created by bright fashion designers from the past. Last year's "Schiaparelli and Prada" event at the Met Museum allowed many to rediscover a key designer that most of us had forgotten, embittering at the same time those knowledgeable historians who always held Schiap in high esteem and who were often ignored for having done so. It would actually be interesting to discover how many modern designers saw that exhibition and how many of them were directly or indirectly inspired by it when they started creating their Autumn/Winter 2013-14 collections.
Four years ago (a relatively short time for ordinary mortals and an extremely long time for the ever changing fashion industry), Dolce & Gabbana lifted entire Schiaparelli looks(read: leg of mutton sleeves, cumbersome fur coats that evoked iconic monkey fur jackets, surrealist glove scarves and shocking pink dresses) and sent them out on their A/W 2009 runway.
Rather than seeing in the shops mere copies of previous Schiap looks, this Autumn we will see details and themes that first appeared in her collections.
Let's look at them in order starting from the insect theme. Insects appeared in Schiaparelli's "Pagan Collection" (1938) appliqued on the collar of a jacket, used as the buttons (remember her ornamental crickets?) of a skirt suit or to decorate a belt, a clear plastic necklace or a white straw hat (all images from the Met Museum collections; hat from the V&A archive).
Nature-related decorations such as blossoms, leaves, and insects were inspired by Botticelli's paintings. Floral motifs reappered in Lanvin's A/W 13 collection, that also featured three stand out pieces: a dress and a top encrusted with rather large winged insect and a trouser suit decorated with prints of green beetles (another bizarre buprestidae mystery? well, at least in this case Lanvin didn't use real insects...).
After briefly reappearing in quite a few collections from 2009, Schiaparelli's gloves with red leather or metallic appliqued inserts where the nails should have been (1936-1937) returned on Yohji Yamamoto's runway, in black with red/electric blue or silver nails.
Japanese designers were among the ones who displayed more Schiaparelli references: Undercover's Jun Takahashi opened his catwalk show in Paris with a Surrealist trench coat with prints of lips and eyes with grommeted eyeballs.
Schiap's skeleton dress was then reworked as skeletal hands clasping the waist of a model, as a thoracic cage appliqued on a jacket and as assorted rib cages printed on bustiers and dresses. Three dresses made from men's white shirts and collars were instead clever exercises in Surrealist fashion accumulation.
Tsumori Chisato's show opened with a mini-dress with bulbous sleeves matched with a turban à la Schiap, but that was just the beginning of a collection that soon turned into a love affair between the designer and a lobster.
The latter (a reference to Dali and Schiap's 1937 dress as worn by the Duchess of Windsor or to Gérard de Nerval's pet lobster?) appeared and reappered throughout the collection in graphic printed dresses and pants, knitted on capes, sketched on skirts and tops, embroidered on quilted jackets and attempting to surrealistically grasp a button, and crystallised on a long bright red and ocean blue skirt and bolero ensemble that looked like one of those classic evening designs by Schiap from the '30s.
While the main idea was rather philosophical as the designer was apparently wondering if a lobster feels pain, the lobster wasn't employed as the more conventional marine reference in this case (besides, this is a Fall collection, so it would have been out of place), but in an arty way, more similar to Schiap.
This was also clear from the fact that two final designs seemed to be a very colourful mix inspired by a sort of twisted Mirò-meets-Picasso-meets-Dali-meets-Pop Art sensibility (see also the stuffed lobster appliqued just below the shoulder in the final dress).
If you're looking for more affordable lobster designs, have a look also at Giles Deacon's Libertine range currently on sale on the now tacky but soon to be trendy (well maybe...) QVC home-shopping channel. The range features a lobster claw gold tone bangle and matching ring as well.
So it's confirmed: Schiaparelli is still trendy and is still infiltrating in one way or the other our wardrobes. Yet one doubt remains (and maybe we should ask Schiaparelli scholar Vicky Pass to help us finding an answer to this): Schiap's cutting edge designs with those insects crawling on jackets and accessories were a Surrealist declaration, but there is nothing original, surrealist or avant-garde in recreating and reissuing her designs, so do we keep on doing it because we love Surrealism, because she ironically played with the odd and the repugnant, themes that we have grown accustomed to grotesquely love in our times and society (albeit without Schiap's proverbial irony...) or just because we've grown lazy and have stopped experimenting with irony and Surrealism? Hopefully, we will find an answer before the next Autumnal season arrives.
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