Due to Covid-19 face masks have been the unexpected star accessory this year. There have been multiple features on all sorts of publications about how to make them, how to wear them and which materials to choose.
Some fashion designers and textile companies also started to manufacture face masks, and in some cases the results were surprising; in others they were rather questionable.
Daniel Roseberry accompanied his S/S 21 collection for Schiaparelli - that featured among the other designs a button-down shirt with Surrealist hand-painted breasts on the front and a clever broderie anglaise dress with faces - with extravagant gold jewelry pieces.
There were chunky zodiac sign necklaces, earrings shaped like noses, eyeglasses with enamel blue eyes, fingertip talons and nipple buttons. Now, Surrealist jewels of this kind are clearly nods to Salvador Dalí's iconic designs, but among the other pieces there were also gilt masks, one of them molded on model Maggie Maurer's lower face.
These face masks seemed a bit disturbing and, the more you looked at them, the more you wondered if they were actually devices to enforce silence upon the wearer or if the model in the shoot had just been kissed by King Midas.
Gold masks maybe prompt many of us to think about funeral trousseaus found in tombs - think about Egyptian funerary masks used to cover the face of a mummy or at the mask of Agamemnon discovered at the ancient Greek site of Mycenae (View this photo).
Yet in the case of Roseberry's mask for Schiaparelli, the face coverings didn't seem to be linked with funerary masks, but had a disquieting connection. Indeed, the more you look at the designs, the more you think about prosthetic technology from the First World War.
Prosthetic technology took a considerable step forward during and after the First World War: injured and disfigured soldiers became a familiar sight at the time and sculptors such as English Captain Francis Derwent Wood and American sculptor Anna Coleman Ladd worked directly with surgeons, creating restorative face masks for WWI soldiers.
Facial injuries were disheartening as soldiers had to deal with the physical loss and the psychological stress. Derwent Wood and Ladd's masks, modelled from photographs taken before the injury and painted in oils to resemble the former features of the patient, were attached to a patient's face from the eyeglasses or secured behind the ears (the same system used for Schiaparelli's mask).
Elsa Schiaparelli wanted to be surreal, ironic and fun with her designs, while these face coverings rather than looking extravagantly original, just seem to be a bit puzzling.
The gold pieces designed by Roseberry for Schiaparelli also call to mind another fashion connection - Claude Lalanne's gold sculptures for Yves Saint Laurent created for his Haute Couture A/W 1969 collection. Even though in that case Lalanne created mainly bustiers and bodices, the bright gold material and the idea of an anatomically inspired piece to wear on the body link those designs to these ones.
Who knows, maybe Lalanne's designs for Saint Laurent were also behind Roseberry's custom Schiaparelli Christmas gown in a green palette inspired by the Grinch character that he designed for Kim Kardashian.
The design featured a moulded leather superheroine-like six-pack bodice and a green silk velvet skirt with thigh-high slit. The design was also reminiscent of moulded corsets and of a 1979 dress by Mugler that featured a gladiator-style green leather breast-plate with matching chiffon skirts (Kardashian seems to have a thing for Schiap... remember the case of her perfum bottle?).
Who knows, maybe Roseberry has been taking inspiration from anatomy rather than surrealism, but you wish his researches had led him to something less disturbingly puzzling and more ironic and original.
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