Pass (2011) Fashion and Surrealism in The Years Between The World Wars TESIS DOC UNIV ROCHESTER

Strange Glamour: Fashion and Surrealism in the Years between the World Wars
by
Victoria Rose Pass
Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree Doctor of Philosophy
Supervised by Professor Janet C. Berlo Program in Visual and Cultural Studies Department of Art and Art History Arts, Sciences and Engineering School of Arts and Sciences University of Rochester Rochester, New York 2011
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Curriculum Vitae
Victoria Rose Pass was born in Baltimore, Maryland on February 12, 1981. She attended Boston University from 1999 to 2003 majoring in Art History with a minor in Theater, and graduated magna cum laude with a Bachelor of Arts degree. She received a Master of Arts in Art History in 2005 from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Pass began her studies in the Program in Visual and Cultural studies program at the University of Rochester in 2005. In 2008 she received the Celeste Hughes Bishop award from the Program in Visual and Cultural Studies. She passed her qualifying examination in 2007. Pass was awarded the Deans Teaching Fellowship in 2010 and the Deans Dissertation Fellowship for the 2010-2011 academic year.
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Acknowledgements
During my years as a graduate student my wonderful grandmother Florence would often ask me, how many years have you been in college now? It was always painful to tally that number. The road to getting my PhD has been a long one, but it was made shorter and much sweeter by the many wonderful people I have shared it with and who supported me along the way. I wish that Florence, and all of my grandparents could have been here to see me finish this degree. Nanny told me stories of her mother saving up to buy her nylons during the depression, and her job at Stewarts department store, working on what was basically one of the earliest computers, a payroll machine. My Grandpa Richard loved to tell me tales of his days as a latch key kid, cutting out shirt cardboards to line his shoes, and his incredible recommendations of great movies to watch from the 30s and 1940s were always spot on. He also delighted in reminded me that I used to live on the street in Chicago where the Saint Valentines Day Massacre took place, and that my Grandmother once met Al Capone. These stories clearly laid the foundation for my love of history, and I think in a strangely powerful way, my interest in the years between the world wars, when my grandparents were growing up. I lost both Richard and Florence while in Rochester, and regret that I did not have them around longer to ask Nanny about her beautiful graduation dress, or Grandpa to recommend one more movie for me to watch.
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There are also many wonderful people to thank at the University of Rochester. My advisor Janet Berlo who has been incredibly kind and encouraging and she truly embraced this project, which I imagine must have seemed a bit odd at the beginning. She has been a reliable source of advice and guidance and I really could not have done this without her eagle eye for editing. Copies of the New York Times Style magazine and articles pulled from the newspaper tucked in my mail box have always reassured me that she was there when I needed her to be, but allowed me to work at my own pace and in my own way. Janets classes helped me develop a style of research and an appetite for material culture that formed the foundation of this project and her feminist scholarship has served as an example for me that I hope I will someday live up to. Janet has truly been an invaluable mentor and I hope I will make her proud in the years to come. Rachel Haidu has also been a key member of my committee and I want to thank her for being generous with her time and for her careful and thorough comments on my work. Rachel really pushed me to take the ideas that were in my project further, and challenged me to do things that frankly scared me when I started work on this project. She has an uncanny knack for drawing out the important ideas and arguments in my work, which sometimes get hidden behind the archival material. Without her this dissertation would not be nearly as interesting as I hope it is now.
I would also like to thank Joan Rubin who was incredibly helpful as I was beginning to construct this project. She brought a perspective on Modernism and issues of gender that helped to shape the project in important ways. Victoria Wolcott was incredibly kind, and stepped in for Joan at the eleventh hour so that I could defend in time to graduate in 2011. In fact it was her class, The Beats and Beyond were I started to think about fashion in my research. Beyond my committee, many other professors at the University of Rochester have helped me as I navigated the last six years including Bob Foster, Douglas Crimp, Paul Duro, and Joan Saab. I have learned not only in their classrooms, but from their examples as teachers and scholars. I would also like to acknowledge the financial support of The Susan B. Anthony Institute at the University of Rochester, which funded some of my research and the University for the Deans Dissertation Fellowship that supported my final year of work on this project, and particularly Dean Wendy Heinzelman for her role in instigating this new fellowship. I would also like to thank the many dear friends I have made here in Rochester, many of whom were part of various dissertation groups, participants in writing retreats, unwitting proofreaders, or members of library chain gangs: Gloria Kim, Aubrey Anable, Avivia Dove-Viehban, Derek Rushton, Dinah Holtzman, Nicola Mann, Becky Burditt, Michelle Finn, Kira Thurman, Godfre Leung, and Alex Alisauskas, Mara Gladstone, and Lucy Mulroney.
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Nicola and I started this journey together and her friendship has meant so much to me over the last six years. She has proofread my work, listened as I vented frustrations, and generally made life in Rochester a lot more fun. Becky Burditt has always been there for me when I needed a reassuring friend, and her kindness is limitless! Gloria Kims exuberant spirit has made life in Rochester much more fun and she is an incredibly generous friend. Ayana Weekley somehow magically appeared in Rochester, just when I needed her, we became fast friends, and I firmly believe that without her and our many hours of work in the libraries and coffee shops of Rochester, I would not have finished this dissertation when I did. Her humor and kindness have meant so much to me. I would also like to thank Marni Shindleman, whose friendship and invitation to join her Masters Swim Team came at exactly the right moment. Our drives out to Penfield and hours spent in the pool have truly kept me sane over the last year and a half. Outside of Rochester I want to thank my friend Jessica Curtright who has been an incredible ally and partner in crime since our time at Boston University. Her amazing collection of Vogue tear sheets clearly lead the way for this project, and I am truly lucky to have her as a friend. Id also like to thank my wonderful friends in New York City who have hosted and entertained me on my numerous research trips to the city: Alyssa Pack, Sarah Coulter, Caity Mold-Zern, and Cheryl Olszowka.
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Id also like to thank Kymberly Pinder, Deborah Mancoff, and Thomas Sloan at the Art Institute of Chicago as well as Jodi Cranston at Boston University who all played important roles in getting me to the University of Rochester. I would also like to recognize the many incredible archivists and librarians who have been instrumental in the research for this project. Karen Trivette Cannell, Juliet Jacobson, and Clara Berg pulled loads of material in Special Collections at the Fashion Institute of Technology Library, and found incredible material that I never could have on my own. Id also like to thank Julie Le at the Costume Institute Library as well as librarians at the Watson library both at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and librarians at the Brooklyn Museum and New York and Monroe County Public Libraries. I would especially like to thank the staff of the Rush Rhees Library at the University of Rochester, particularly Stephanie Frontz, Katie Kinsky, Mark Bollmann, Kim Kopatz, and Irma Abu-Jumah who have made the Art Library such a welcoming and fun place to work, and who have all gone above and beyond the call of duty for me. Stephanie Frontz has been incredibly kind and generous, and with the help of Kari Horowitz at the Rochester Institute of Technology Library shuttle cartons of fashion magazines back and forth for me to look at, and often shuttled me as well! Stephanie was also an incredible help with my research, and has constantly turned up new sources for me, she has also been a really wonderful friend. I also want to thank Pat Sulouff and
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Suzanne Bell who generously and meticulously copy-edited this manuscript. Without the help of these fantastic librarians, this project would not be nearly as rich, and the process of researching it would have been far more tedious. Finally I want to thank my wonderful parents Stuart and Peggy, whose unflagging support of all of my endeavors has been an invaluable source of strength for me. My fathers comic book and science fiction axioms have served me well, after all, No one can defeat Paste Pot Pete! My moms humor has always had a way of getting me to laugh at the most difficult situations. I want to thank them both for all of the love and support they have given me, the museums they took me too, and the love of learning they encouraged in me.
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Abstract
This project examines the complex relationships between Surrealism and fashion between World War I and World War II. Scholarship on art and fashion has typically understood fashion as being passively influenced by art or using art for the sake of profit. I argue that far from being superficial and incidental to Surrealism, fashion played an integral role in this artistic movement. By engaging with art historical responses to Surrealism I have found new ways to understand a new fashion aesthetic in the 1930s, which I call Strange Glamour. I examine the development of this aesthetic and the relationship between fashion and surrealism by focusing on a series of key events. I begin in chapter one with 1921, the year in which Coco Chanel launched her perfume Chanel No. 5 and Marcel Duchamp created his perfume readymade, Belle Haleine. I compare the ways that Chanel and Duchamp questioned conventions of authorship in art and fashion through the molding of their public persona. These figures instigated a new kind of relationship between the artist or designer and the work of art or garment in which both parts are crucial to making sense of the whole. The second chapter focuses on 1927, the year that designer Elsa Schiaparelli created her first design, a trompe loeil sweater that is directly linked with the Surrealists engagement with the uncanny. This chapter also considers Man Rays photographs of hats, which illustrated an article by Tristan Tzara on subconscious expressions of sexuality in the everyday world in the Surrealist magazine
Minotaure in 1933. Far from being automatic writing, as Tzara describes, I argue that these hats were the self conscious creation of Elsa Schiaparelli. The 1931 Paris Colonial Exhibition and the 1937 exhibition La Mode au Congo at Galerie Charles Ratton frame the third chapter, which considers the role of primitivism in Surrealism and fashion during these years, particularly in relation to sexuality. I examine the designs of French milliner Madame Agns that were influenced by the 1931 exhibition, and the unique hats made by American milliner Lilly Dach in response to a collection of hats she purchased from the Congo. I also consider a unique group of photographs of the Congolese hats by Man Ray that were shown at the Ratton exhibition. The fourth and final chapter examines the links between Schiaparellis designs of the late 1930s, the uncanny, and Andre Bretons idea of convulsive beauty, beauty which was meant to shock. I consider Schiaparellis designs in the context of Surrealist objects, and examine the important (and often neglected) links between Surrealist and fashion exhibitions in the 1930s. My dissertation demonstrates that an examination of the relationship between fashion and Surrealism can enrich our understanding of this period in art and fashion and can also illuminate larger theoretical issues positioned at their intersection. Through a rigorous engagement with archival sources, I trace the historical relationships between fashion and Surrealism and point to the continued importance of collaboration, dialogue, and influence between these realms.
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Table of Contents
Curriculum Vitae Ackgnowledgments Abstract List of Figures Introduction Chapter 1 Chapter 2 Chapter 3 Chapter 4 Conclusion Bibliography Figures Art and Fashion? Perfume and Plastic Pearls: Chanel and Rrose Slavy Trompe lOeil Sweaters and Mad Caps: Early Surrealism and Fashion The Colonels Lady and African Sadie are Sisters Under their Hats Strange Glamour Legacies of Strange Glamour ii iii ix xii 1 47 111 165 233 319 342 359
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List of Figures
Figure 1. Figure 2. Figure 3. Figure 4. Figure 5. Figure 6. Figure 7. Man Ray, Noire et Blanche, 1926 Man Ray's Noire et Blanche, in French Vogue, May 1926 A.M. Cassandre, Cover of Harpers Bazaar, September 15, 1937 Paul Smith, Kenyon and Eckhardt, Gunther Fur ad, Harpers Bazaar, September 15, 1937 Paul Smith, Kenyon and Eckhardt, Gunther Fur ad, Harpers Bazaar, October 1937 "Saints and Sinners," Man Ray photographs with Verts drawings, Harpers Bazaar, September 15, 1937 "Peruvian Magic," drawings of Schiaparelli's Inca inspired designs, including the Shocking pink chullo used by Dal for the Rue Surraliste at the Exposition Internationale du Surralisme, Harpers Bazaar, October 1937 Man Ray photographs of Schiaparelli's hats for Tristan Tzara's "D'un Certain Automatisme du Gout," in Minotaure, October-December 1933. Gala Dal wearing a Schiaparelli evening coat from the winter 193738 collection with Salvador Dal, and Jane Clark wearing the Dregs of Wine, embroidered evening jacket from the same collection, with her husband Kenneth Clark (then director of Londons National Gallery of Art) at a 1939 opening night party at the Museum of Modern Art. "Plane Clothes," by Amelia Earhart, in Harpers Bazaar, January 1929 "The Sweater Costume is Favored by the Sportswoman," Vogue March 15, 1927 "St. Moritz in the Snow," Harpers Bazaar, March 1930, photographs by Seeberger Vogue cover with Susan Lenglen-style tennis costume, July 15, 1927 Ad for Contouration facial treatments, Vogue, September 28, 1929 Photograph by George Hoyningen-Huene from "Why Not Be Beautiful?," Vogue November 15, 1926 Caption reads: "The sanctum of the modern beauty doctor is as hygienic in every detail as a famous surgeon's operating theater." Constantin Alajov, cover of The New Yorker, October 2, 1926 359 359 360 360 361 361 362
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Figure 10. Figure 11. Figure 12. Figure 13. Figure 14. Figure 15.
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Figure 17. Figure 18. Figure 19. Figure 20. Figure 21. Figure 22. Figure 23. Figure 24. Figure 25. Figure 26. Figure 27. Figure 28. Figure 29. Figure 30. Figure 31. Figure 32. Figure 33. Figure 34. Figure 35. Figure 36. Figure 37. Figure 38.
Berley Studios sketch of a flapper or garonne look, from Miller Soeurs, Paris Max Meyer sketch of Chanel suit, Spring/Summer 1923 Some Moments from the Gaiety of this Palm Beach Season, Vogue, April 1, 1920 "The Season's Bouffant Frocks and Ina Claire Find Mutual Charms in Each Other's Company," Vogue, May 15, 1920 Man Ray, Coco Chanel, 1935 Max Meyer, Chanel Vest, c. 1916-1920 Max Meyer, Chanel coat and dress, c. 1916-1920 Chanel's jersey dresses in Les Elegances Parisiennes, March 1917 Chanel designs from Vogue, January 15, 1917 Max Meyer sketch of a Chanel coat made of peacock blue jersey and brown fur, c. 1915-1920 A Chanel "little black dress" in Vogue, October 1, 1926 captioned: Here is a Ford signed Chanel Marcel Duchamp and Man Ray, Duchamp as Rrose Selavy, 1920-21 Marcel Duchamp and Man Ray, Duchamp as Rrose Selavy, 1920-21 Reginald Marsh, "So This is That Greenwich Village Where All Those Queer Artists Live," Harpers Bazaar, October 1922 Detail, Reginald Marsh, "So This is That Greenwich Village Where All Those Queer Artists Live," Harpers Bazaar, October 1922 Rigaud Perfume ad, Harpers Bazaar, September 1920 Max Meyer, Chanel coat and hat, c. 1922 Sem (George Goursat), Advertisement for Chanel No. 5, 1921 Sem (George Goursat), poster advertising Chanel No. 5, c. 1923 Costume from a production of Jacques Offenbach's La Belle Hlne, Vogue January 1, 1920 Max Meyer sketch of Chanel ensemble of blue jersey with yellow and green embroidery, c. 1921-1922 Chanel dress with Romanoff embroidery, Vogue, May 15, 1925
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"Why the Duke Sold the Famous Diamond," in The Atlanta Constitution, December 25, 1927 Chanel and Serge Lifar of the Ballet Russe, 1930s Chanel and Vera Bate, c. 1925 Best & Co. ad, New York Times, August 27, 1924 Best & Co. ad, New York Times, September 4, 1924 Wanamaker's ad, New York Times, August 19,1924 Chanel, 1929 Chanel dresses in Vogue, April 15, 1925 Sonia Delaunay, Design for clothes and Citron B-12, 1925 "Some Clothes Take Their Sports Seriously," Harpers Bazaar, December 1921 The Chanel Silhouette from "Drian Shows the Silhouette from Head to Heels," Harpers Bazaar, August 1922. "Drian Shows the Silhouette from Head to Heels," Harpers Bazaar, August 1922. Max Ernst, Habits of Leaves, from Histoire Naturelle, 1927 Max Ernst, Origin of the Pendulum, from Histoire Naturelle, 1925 Schiaparelli's Bow Knot sweater in Vogue, December 15, 1927 Gimbel Brothers Department Store in New York sold copies of Schiaparelli sweaters for $7.99, 1928 Glenna Collett, a pioneering U.S. golf champion, receiving a trophy in 1929 in a Schiaparelli bowknot sweater "Smart English Sweaters" in Vogue, April 15, 1927 Harper's Bazaar, December 1928 Center, Schiaparelli sweater with African motif, "Modernistic Designs Predominate," Harpers Bazaar, December 1928 Schiaparelli blue blouse with an anchor appliqu in Harpers Bazaar, April 1929 "The Last Word in Paris Fashions," with what may be Schiaparelli's x-ray sweater, Chicago Daily Tribune, Jan 6, 1929
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Figure 61. Figure 62. Figure 63. Figure 64.
Madame Vittorio Crespi wearing a pale blue evening dress with a shimmering Rhodophane apron, Vogue, January 1935 "An X-Ray of Fashion," Harpers Bazaar, September 1933 Schiaparelli in her divided skirt on a trip to Britain in May 1931 Spanish tennis player Lili de Alvarez wearing a silk tennis ensemble designed for her by Schiaparelli in 1931. The British press criticized her harshly for wearing a divided skirt. Schiaparelli's divided skirt drawn by Dorothy Dulin, Chicago Daily Tribune, June 20, 1931 Dorothy Dulin drawing of a Schiaparelli striped divided skirt and ensemble on the center model and model in lounge chair, Chicago Daily Tribune, April 30, 1933 Carl Erickson, Schiaparelli beach costume, Harpers Bazaar, June 1930 Schiaparelli in her trompe loeil dress and a coq-feather cape, 1931 "Bas Relief," Vionnet gowns photographed by George HoyningenHuene for Vogue, November 15, 1931 Detail of a Schiaparelli trompe l'oeil sweater featuring a necktie, 1927-30 Schiaparelli sweater with trompe l'oeil French sailor's middy, 1928 Man Ray's "rayographs" in Vanity Fair, November 1922 Man Ray, Marquise Casati, 1922 Man Ray and Flix Nadar photographs in Minotaure, OctoberDecember 1933 Man Ray photograph of Schiaparelli in her lacquered wig by Antoine, Minotaure, October-December 1933 "As in the Time of Kate Greenaway," drawing by A.E. Marly, in Harpers Bazaar, April 1930, ensembles by Poiret and Suzanne Talbot Schiaparelli gown photographed by Baron De Meyer, Harpers Bazaar, August 1931 Bloomingdale's ad for copies of Schiaparelli Mad Caps including the "Sayville Row" New York Times, September 4, 1933 Bloomingdale's ad for copies of Schiaparelli "Mad Caps," New York
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Figure 67. Figure 68. Figure 69. Figure 70. Figure 71. Figure 72. Figure 73. Figure 74. Figure 75. Figure 76.
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Times, September 4, 1934 Schiaparelli's "Helmet" hat, Harpers Bazaar, April 1933 "It Is Conventional to Be Extreme," Schiaparelli ensemble in Harpers Bazaar, April 1933 Flapper style dresses by Lanvin, Patou, Chruit, and Worth, photographed on mannequins by Hoyningen-Huene, Vogue, October 15, 1927 Schiaparelli boucle coat in Harpers Bazaar, September 1929 Ad for Golflex clothing in Vogue, September 15, 1928 Schiaparelli coats in Vogue, October 15, 1931 George Hoyningen-Huene, Schiaparelli's Tyrolean hat worn with a sports suit with a grey and yellow tweed jacket, a high necked blouse in silk jersey stiffened with yellow taffeta, 1932-33 Actress Ina Claire in a Schiaparelli Mad Cap. Claire helped to popularized this style, 1932 Katherine Hepburn wearing Schiaparelli's Mad Cap, undated Cover of LOfficiel, May 1931: "Mme Agns, drawn on our cover by Jean Dunan, wears a charming evening gown, knikers skirt, of coarse white silk crpon created especially for her by the Maison Schiaparelli on the occasion of the Colonial Exhibition. Her coiffeur, 'A.O.F.,' one of her latest creations, consists of a crin foundation embroidered in artificial silk." [sic] Two views of Madame Agns in one of her hats in LOfficiel, May 1931 Agns hat in LOfficiel, May 1931 Postcard with George Specht, Nobosodrou, Femme Mangbetu, c. 1925 Josephine Baker modeling an Agns hat inspired by "La Croisire Noire," in LOfficiel, August 1926 Simone Breton in Andr Breton's Atelier, c. 1927 George Maillard-Kessle, Helena Rubinstein with African mask, c. 1935 Paul Poiret, Harem trouser and "lampshade" tunic costume from the Thousand and Second Night Party, 1911 Man Ray, Simone Kahn (with Fang Mask), 1921
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Figure 98. Figure 99. Figure 100. Figure 101. Figure 102. Figure 103. Figure 104. Figure 105. Figure 106. Figure 107. Figure 108. Figure 109. Figure 110. Figure 111. Figure 112. Figure 113. Figure 114. Figure 115. Figure 116. Figure 117. Figure 118. Figure 119. Figure 120.
Man Ray, Simone Kahn (with Vanuatu male figure, Eastern Malekula), 1927 Man Ray, Untitled (Bangwa "Queen" sculpture with model), c. 1934 Man Ray, Untitled (Bangwa "Queen" sculpture with model), c. 1934 Man Ray, Nancy Cunard, c. 1926, appeared in British Vogue, October 5, 1927 Man Ray, Untitled (Noire et Blanche variant), 1926 Man Ray, Untitled (Kiki with a mask), 1926 Agns on the cover of LOfficiel, May 1927 Agns on the cover of LOfficiel, June 1926 Cochinchinois dancers prepare for their first plane flight, L'Illustration, August 22, 1931 Nyota Inyoka, n.d. Agns hats in a Best and Company window display, New York, 1931 Hats by Maria Guy and Agns, Harpers Bazaar, May 1931 Agns hat in LOfficiel, May 1931 Agns hats in LOfficiel, May 1931 Agns hat from "De Vincennes Versailles par les Champs lyses," LOfficiel, June 1931 Man Ray, Nusch Eluard in a Schiaparelli ensemble, Harpers Bazaar, March 1935 "Schiaparelli among the Berbers," from Vogue August 15, 1936 Alfred Eisenstaedt, Lilly Dach doing research in Picture Collection of New York Public Library, April 1, 1944 Reboux hats photographed by Man Ray, Harpers Bazaar, November 1937 Man Ray, Untitled, from the Mode au Congo series, 1937 Man Ray, Untitled, from the Mode au Congo series, 1937 Man Ray, Untitled, from the Mode au Congo series, 1937 Man Ray, Untitled, from the Mode au Congo series, 1937
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Man Ray, Untitled, from the Mode au Congo series, 1937 Man Ray, Untitled, from the Mode au Congo series, 1937 Ndngese titleholder's hat from Lilly Dach's collection, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Early 20th century Man Ray, Untitled, from the Mode au Congo series, 1937 Man Ray, Untitled, from the Mode au Congo series, 1937 Man Ray, Untitled, from the Mode au Congo series, 1937 Man Ray, Untitled, from the Mode au Congo series, 1937 Man Ray, Untitled, from the Mode au Congo series, 1937 Man Ray, Untitled, from the Mode au Congo series, 1937 Man Ray, Untitled, from the Mode au Congo series, 1937 Man Ray photograph. Congolese finery. Exhibition at the Galerie Charles Ratton. Cahiers d'Art 12, no. 1-3, 1937 Man Ray's Mode au Congo photographs in Harpers Bazaar, September 15, 1937 Hat by Lilly Dach in Life, September 13, 1937 African (Tikar peoples) hat from Lilly Dach's collection in Life, September 13, 1937 Lilly Dach hat from a Bullock's Wilshire ad, Los Angeles Times, September 21, 1937 Hat by Lilly Dach in Life, September 13, 1937 Congolese hat from Lilly Dach's collection in Life, September 13, 1937 Hat by Lilly Dach in Life, September 13, 1937 Kuba Mask (Mukyeem) from Lilly Dach's collection in Life, September 13, 1937 Lilly Dach hat from a Bullock's Wilshire ad, Los Angeles Times, August 9, 1937 Cecil Beaton, "Paris Openings," Vogue, March 15, 1935 Joan Crawford in a suit of white flannel after filming The Understanding Heart, 1927
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Edward Steichen, Joan Crawford in a jacket and dress by Schiaparelli, 1932 Von Horn, Tallulah Bankhead in Schiaparelli, Harpers Bazaar, December 1934 Sketch of Salvador Dal in his diving suit, " Vogue's Eye View of Unsung Heroes behind the Paris Openings," Vogue, September 15, 1936 George Hoyningen-Huene, Schiaparelli coat and gown, Harpers Bazaar, October 1935, 74-5 Andre Durst, left: Piguet dress, right: Schiaparelli dress and friar's cape, Vogue, January 1, 1936 Salvador Dal, Window display for Bonwit Teller, "She was a Surrealist Woman like a Figure in a Dream," December 1936 Sketch of a Schiaparelli suit with cow buttons, Henri Bendel Sketch Collection, Spring 1937 George Platt Lynes, Frances Farmer wearing a midnight blue sequined Schiaparelli evening gown, Harpers Bazaar, November 1937 Edward Steichen, Copy of Schiaparelli's red evening coat with escargot buttons for Bergdorf Goodman, Vogue, January 1, 1937 Man Ray, Elsa Schiaparelli, 1932 Salvador Dal, Three Young Surrealist Women Holding in Their Arms the Skins of an Orchestra, 1936 Horst P. Horst, "Suits Go Soft," Vogue, March 15, 1936 Schiaparelli's pink crin evening coat fastened with two butterflies, worn over a black gown, LOfficiel, May 1937, photograph by Photo Anzon Pascale in the window of Schiaparelli's Place Vendme shop with Jean-Michel Frank's gilded cage, Paris Pablo Picasso, Bird Cage and Playing Cards, 1933 in Harpers Bazaar, November 1939 Cecil Beaton, "The Future Duchess of Windsor," Wallis Simpson in Schiaparelli, Vogue, June 1, 1937 Cecil Beaton, Schiaparelli and Dal's "Bureau Drawer" suits in Vogue, Sept. 15, 1936
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Figure 146. Figure 147. Figure 148. Figure 149. Figure 150.
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Cecil Beaton, Schiaparelli and Dal's "Bureau Drawer" coat, 1936 Lobster dress, a Schiaparelli and Dal collaboration, 1937 Cecil Beaton, "The Future Duchess of Windsor," Wallis Simpson in Schiaparelli and Dal's Lobster Dress on the left hand page, Vogue, June 1, 1937 Schiaparelli's linen beach dress with Dal's Lobster, "Summer Catch," Vogue, May 15, 1937 Schiaparelli's "Vegetarian Bracelet," in Vogue July 1, 1938 Jean Moral, Molyneux suit and hat, Harpers Bazaar, April 1936 Photo Anzon, Schiaparelli and Dal's Mutton Chop Beret, LOfficiel, January 1938 Photo Durvyne, Schiaparelli and Dal's Inkwell Hat, LOfficiel, April 1938 Schiaparelli ensemble, Vogue September 1, 1935 George Saad, Schiaparelli's and Dal's High Heel Hat worn with her Lip Suit, LOfficiel, October 1937 Marcel Verts, Illustration of High Heel hat designed by Dal and Schiaparelli, winter 1937-38, Harpers Bazaar, November 1937 Objet Scatologique Factionnement Symbolique (Scatological Object Functioning Symbolically), 1930 Schiaparelli suits and hats in Vogue, September 15, 1937 Hats in Contemporary Modes, Spring 1936 Schiaparelli house sketch for the High Heel Hat, a collaboration with Salvador Dal, Winter 1937-8 Sketch of a Schiaparelli suit, Fall 1936, Davidow Inc. Schiaparelli, dinner suit with mirror design, Winter 1938-9 Marcel Verts, Schiaparelli jacket with hand mirror closures, Harpers Bazaar, April 1938 Elsa Schiaparelli, blue silk jersey evening coat (now faded to purple) with embroidery designed by Jean Cocteau and manufactured by Lesage, Fall 1937 Erik Nitsche, accessories spread, Harpers Bazaar, December 1936
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Figure 163. Figure 164. Figure 165. Figure 166. Figure 167. Figure 168. Figure 169. Figure 170. Figure 171. Figure 172. Figure 173. Figure 174. Figure 175. Figure 176. Figure 177. Figure 178.
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Studio Anzon, Schiaparelli's grey dinner suit embroidered with a drawing by Jean Cocteau, LOfficiel, August 1937 Schiaparelli designs from the Fall 1937 collection. From left: dinner dress and jacket, with 1900 inspired hat, gown with Jean Cocteau motif, evening gown with pleated tulle cape, waltzing dress with mimosa print. New York Times, May 30, 1937 Schiaparelli, Hand Belt, black taffeta with Lucite hands with pink painted fingernails at ends, thumbs forming hook and hole closure, Fall 1934 Marcel Verts, Schiaparelli's Claw Gloves, "Spinach is Fashion," Harpers Bazaar, September 15, 1938 Kollar, gloves by Schiaparelli, Harpers Bazaar, March 15, 1938, p. 132-3 Kollar, Schiaparelli fur gloves, Harpers Bazaar, September 15, 1937, p. 104 Kollar, Schiaparelli's long suede gloves with an ermine stripe, Harpers Bazaar, November 1939 Marcel Vertes, Schiaparelli's "Victorian Pouf" hat, blouse and matching stocking, and gartered gloves, Harpers Bazaar, January 1938 Giorgio De Chirico, cover of Vogue, November 15, 1935 Raymond de Lavererie, cover of Vogue, February 15, 1937 Schiaparelli, "Falsies" evening dress, brown wool crepe with gold braid, 1936 Salvador Dal, Aphrodisiac Dinner Jacket, 1936 Schiaparelli's "Sex Appeal" dress, Vogue, September 1, 1937 Pavel Tchelitchew, "The essence of all that is Schiaparelli," Schiaparelli in a fez and "circus tent" veil, Harpers Bazaar, March 15, 1938 Christian Brard, "Circus Parade at Schiaparelli's," Vogue, April 1, 1939 Elsa Schiaparelli and Salvador Dal, Skeleton Evening Dress, 1938 Tear-Illusion dress, collaboration between Schiaparelli and Dal, Summer 1938
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Schiaparelli house sketch for the Tear-Illusion dress, a collaboration between Schiaparelli and Dal, Summer 1938 Salvador Dal, design sketch for Skeleton Gown, 1938 Elsa Schiaparelli and Salvador Dal, Skeleton Evening Dress (details), Summer 1938 Schiaparelli house sketch for the Skeleton Evening Dress, a collaboration between Schiaparelli and Dal, Summer 1938 Marcel Verts, "Harper's Folies," on the right hand page: "Designed especially for Coo Coo the Bird Girl by Schiaparelli," The Skeleton dress, a sequined clowns hat, the backwards suit, and the Inkwell hat, Harpers Bazaar, March 15, 1938 Thrse Bonney, Schiaparellis first major shop at 4 Rue de La Paix, 1929 Schiaparelli's Paris Boutique designed by Jean-Michele Frank with Giacometti's shell light and spiral ashtray, from Shocking Life, 1954 Schiaparelli's Window Dolls," Harpers Bazaar, June 1937 Jean Moral, Schiaparelli beach ensembles, Harpers Bazaar, July 1935 Cecil Beaton, "Fun at the Openings," Vogue, April 1, 1935 Ilse Sing and Gerard Kelly, Schiaparelli Belt, Harpers Bazaar, October 1935 Wols, photographs of Le Pavillon de l'Elgance, in Femina, August 1937 Wols, Le Pavillon de l'Elgance (Mannequin Row), 1937 Wols, Le Pavillon de l'Elgance (Vionnet), 1937 Rue Surraliste, Exposition Internationale du Surralisme, Galerie Beaux-Arts, Paris, 1938 Raoul Ubac, Marcel Duchamp's Mannequin "Rrose Slavy," Exposition Internationale du Surralisme, Galerie Beaux-Arts, Paris, 1937 Andr Masson, Mannequin "Le ballon vert bouche de pense," (the green gag on the mouth of thought (or pansy) Exposition internationale du surralisme, Galerie Beaux-Arts, Paris, 1937 detail of Schiaparellis Shocking pink chullo, "Peruvian Magic," Harpers Bazaar, October 1937
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Figure 202. Figure 203. Figure 204. Figure 205. Figure 206. Figure 207. Figure 208. Figure 209. Figure 210. Figure 211. Figure 212.
463 463 464 464 465 465 466 466 467 467 468
Figure 213.
468
Figure 214.
469
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Figure 215. Figure 216. Figure 217. Figure 218. Figure 219. Figure 220. Figure 221. Figure 222.
Kurt Seligmann, Ultrameuble, view with sitter at the Exposition Internationale Du Surralisme, Galerie Beaux-Arts, Paris, 1938 Surrealism in Paris," Vogue, March 1, 1938 Salvador Dal, Mae Wests Face which May Be Used as a Surrealist Apartment, 1934-5 Mae West dressed by Schiaparelli in Every Days a Holiday, 1937 Andre Durst, designs from Schiaparelli's Fall 1937 collection, "Merry Widow Revival," Vogue, June 1, 1937 Leonor Fini and Elsa Schiaparelli, Shocking Perfume Bottle and Packaging, 1937 Leonor Fini, La Peinture, L'Architecture, 1939 George Hoyningen-Huene, Chanel dress with Leonor Fini's Armoire Anthropomorphe and her Corset Chair, Harpers Bazaar, September 1, 1939 Leonor Fini, ensembles by Schiaparelli, Harpers Bazaar, March 15, 1940 Bustled evening dresses worn by women at the Gala de la Tour Eiffel. Jean Peltier printed satin with a Mae West inspired figure walking a poodle. Summer 1939. Nina Lean, Model Shari Herbert wearing Schiaparelli's "Forbidden Fruit" evening gown, in Time, October 10, 1949 Schiaparelli dress from the Winter 1949-1950 collection in Newsweek, September 26, 1949 Miron Wollens ad featuring Claire McCardell dress, Vogue, September 15, 1949 First Papers of Surrealism installed at the Whitelaw Reid Mansion, New York City, by Duchamp Charles James, emerald green satin evening gown, 1954 Joan Fontaine, Rosalind Russell, Florence Nash, and Phyllis Povah in The Women (1939) directed by George Cukor, costumes by Gilbert Adrian Model in the fashion show scene from The Women (1939) directed by George Cukor, costumes by Gilbert Adrian Model in the fashion show scene from The Women (1939) directed by George Cukor, costumes by Gilbert Adrian
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Figure 233. Figure 234. Figure 235. Figure 236. Figure 237. Figure 238. Figure 239. Figure 240. Figure 241.
Model in the fashion show scene from The Women (1939) directed by George Cukor, costumes by Gilbert Adrian Joan Crawford and Rosalind Russell in The Women (1939) directed by George Cukor, costumes by Gilbert Adrian Gilbert Adrian, Silk Day Dress, c. 1942 Gilbert Adrian, "Shades of Picasso" evening dress, 1944 Gowns by Adrian, using fabric prints by Salvador Dal, March 1947 John Galliano for Christian Dior, Spring-Summer 1997 Alexander McQueen, Fall/Winter 2001-2 Alexander McQueen, Fall/Winter 2001-2 Shaun Leane for Alexander McQueen, Ribcage Corset, Sping/Summer 1998. In "The Deathbed" scene in the exhibition AngloMania, The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Jean-Paul Gaultier, Fall 2010 Jean-Paul Gaultier, Fall 2010 Isaac Mizrahi, Spring 2011 Isaac Mizrahi, Spring 2011 Peter Lindberg, Dolce & Gabbana dress and vintage Lilly Dach hat, in Fashionand All that Jazz, Harpers Bazaar, September 2009 Paraphernalia, New York, 1968 Cindy Sherman, Untitled #296, 1994 Cindy Sherman, Untitled #122, 1983
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Figure 242. Figure 243. Figure 244. Figure 245. Figure 246. Figure 247. Figure 248. Figure 249.
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Introduction
Art and Fashion?

A Surrealist is a man who likes to dress like a fencer but does not fence; a Surrealist is also a man who likes to wear a diving-suit but does not dive Surrealism is nothing but Dada with a dash of Freud. M. F. Agah, SURrealism or the Purple Cow, Vogue, November 1, 1936 That Surrealist: Move into second place. This gent takes to the limelight the way an onion takes to the frying pan. It doesnt matter about chiaroscuro any more but you have to be up on the psychological implication of each brush stroke. He likes you chic rather than exotic, prefers nails brilliant with Revlons Hothouse Rose. -Nail that Man, Glamour, November 1941
This project started while I was flipping through the pages of Man Ray in Fashion, a catalog for the exhibition MAN RAY/BAZAAR YEARS: A Fashion Retrospective at the International Center of Photography. Most of the photographs in the book were unfamiliar to me, but then I turned the page to a photograph I knew very well, Noire et Blanche (1926) with the caption: Published in French Vogue, May 1926. (Figure 1) (Figure 2) I knew this photograph as an example of modernist primitivism, a formal study of contrasts, tonal values, and textures. Suddenly, imagining the photograph on the pages of French Vogue, I was drawn to the model, Kiki, her slicked back hair, perfectly painted bow lips, and flawlessly plucked eye brows. There was fashion, hiding in plain sight. This opened up a whole new context for Man Rays work that I had not considered before. What did Modernist Primitivism
have to do with fashion in the 1920s? Now I imagined Man Ray not just among other artists and models, but with flappers, magazine editors, and fashion designers. Looking at the images in Man Ray in Fashionmodels in the stock poses of mannequins, solarized photographs, models heads cropped out of photographs, double and triple exposuresI wondered what these surreal photographs would have looked like in Harpers Bazaar, where Man Ray was a staff photographer from 1934 to 1942. What was happening in fashion in the 1930s that drew Bazaars editor Carmel Snow and art director Alexey Brodovitch to Man Rays work? Looking through issues of Harpers Bazaar from their tenure, it is clear that Man Rays work is not an anomaly in this context. In the 1930s, artists such as Man Ray, Edward Steichen, Salvador Dal, Giorgio de Chirico, Pierre Roy, and Leonor Fini were doing work for Harpers Bazaar and Vogue. Illustrators and photographers such as Miguel Covarrubias, Cecil Beaton, Christian Berard, Erik Nitsche, George HoyningenHuene, Horst P. Horst, Marcel Verts and A.M. Cassandre were all influenced by modern artistic movementsSurrealism in particularin their work for fashion magazines. The September 15, 1937 issue of Harpers Bazaar, for example, begins with a surreal representation of Paris by graphic designer A.M. Cassandre on the cover and the caption, the complete story of the Paris openings.1 (Figure 3) Through a trompe loeil hole in the cover, symbols of the city float in an
1
Harpers Bazaar (15 September 1937), cover.
abstract space: the Arc de Triomphe, one of Guillaume Coustou Is Marley Horses, and the obelisk from the Place de la Concorde floating in black space. An advertisement for Gunther furs appears on page 19: a woman in a reverential pose wearing a fur coat stands in a barren dreamlike landscape with electrical wire running backwards in space to a triumphal arch, and two birds shapes, one in outline, one a in negative space point downwards in the sky. (Figure 4) This was part of a series of Surrealist ads for Gunther designed by Paul Smith for the firm Kenyon and Eckhardt that included a number of Surrealists illusions, such as Man Rays metronome from Object to be Destroyed (1923-32), and arches of Giorgio de Chirico.2 (Figure 5) This issue also includes a spread of photographs by Man Ray, some with playful sketches by Marcel Verts over-top. (Figure 6) In the spread titled Saints and Sinner, Verts sketches include a suit by Italian fashion designer Elsa Schiaparelli with lip-shaped pockets, her new body hugging bodice style that Vogue called Sex Appeal, and a veil, by American designer Mainbocher with paillettes shaped as lips falling over the wearers mouth. Later in the issue is another sketch by Verts of Schiaparellis High Heel hat. A spread by Jean Cocteau shows gowns by Schiaparelli and Chanel. There is a story about the Pavillon dElegance at the Exposition Internationale des Arts et Techniques dans la Vie Moderne in Paris. Surrealist-inspired photographs by the German photographer Wolf Schulze, also known as Wols, illustrate the article, playing up the strangeness of the mannequins with their impasto
2
Frank Caspers, "Surrealism in Overalls," Scribner's Magazine 104, no. 2 (August 1938), 18.
surfaces and hysteric gestures. There were also drawings of designer Elsa Schiaparellis Peruvian-inspired accessories including a Shocking pink knitted ski mask.(Figure 7) The mask was inspired by a Peruvian chullo (a knitted hood) that Schiaparelli saw at the Paris Exposition and included in her winter 1937-38 collection. This mask appeared, not only in magazines, but the following year on the head of a mannequin dressed by Salvador Dal at the Exposition Internationale du Surralisme. In addition, it was worn by curator Chick Austin during his Surrealist show, Magic on Parade, at the Wadsworth Athenaeum in Hartford, Connecticut in 1939. Surrealism was not just evident in the photographs and illustrations in fashion magazines such as Harpers Bazaar, but in the clothing itself: from Marcel Rochas 1934 Bird dress to Charles James coats and gowns that took on the appearance of biomorphic sculpture, from Lilly Dachs Dal-inspired hats in 1937, to Elizabeth Hawes cheeky Tarts dress with arrows pointing to the bust and derriere from that same year.3 These juxtapositions of the work of Surrealists artists and the Surrealist aesthetic of much of the fashion in 1930s fashion magazines suggest connections between art and fashion that are much deeper than those acknowledged by scholars of this period. In this dissertation, I argue that throughout the 1930s fashion was infused with an aesthetic that I call strange glamour. This aesthetic is
3
For illustrations see: Rochas: Richard Martin, Fashion and Surrealism (New York: Rizzoli, 1987), 195. James: Ghislaine Wood, ed. Surreal Things : Surrealism and Design (London: V&A Publications, 2007), 150. Hawes: Jan Glier Reeder, High Style: Masterworks from the Brooklyn Museum Costume Collection at the Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2010), 122-3.
connected to the same visual sensibility and intellectual concerns of Surrealism creating jarring juxtapositions and displacements meant to shock viewers. Throughout this project, I will argue that strange glamour engages with three interrelated aspects of Surrealism: the uncanny, ethnographic Surrealism, and convulsive beauty. The term glamour insists on the constructed nature of this aesthetic. There is nothing natural about this aesthetic. In his book, Glamour: A History, Stephen Gundle ties the concept of glamour to modernity, precisely because of its connection to the self-fashioning at the heart of modern capitalism: glamour contained the promise of a mobile and commercial society that anyone could be transformed into a better, more attractive, and wealthier version of themselves.4 Grundle defines glamour as, an alluring image that is closely related to consumptionThe subjects of glamour are very varied. They may be people, things, places, events, or environments, any of which can capture the imagination by association with a range of qualities, including several or all of the following: beauty, sexuality, theatricality, wealth, dynamism, notoriety, movement, and leisure.5 Strange glamour is associated particularly with sexuality, theatricality, dynamism, and notoriety. In fashion it is a way of dressing often formulated to shock. It works through disjuncture and juxtaposition to create beauty that can best be understood in the context of Surrealism. Glamour is key to my argument because it describes images that can be thought of as both art and fashion: photographs, films, or even paintings.
4 5
Stephen Gundle, Glamour: A History (New York: Oxford Univeristy Press, 2008), 6. Ibid, 5-6.
While strange glamour was an aesthetic that permeated fashion in the 1930s, Elsa Schiaparelli was its most important promoter and her presence looms large in this project. Schiaparelli and the Surrealists were deeply engaged in the same questions and concerns, in ways which have yet to be acknowledged in either art history or fashion history. Dilys Blums excellent monograph on Schiaparelli has begun to address this absence, and has helped open up a space to reconsider Schiaparellis importance.6 Studying Schiaparelli as a member of the Surrealist circle opens up a wider context in which to understand her work and the work of artists in the years between the wars. It also establishes the important influence of popular forms of culture, and their creators on artists. This reconsideration of Schiaparelli, as not simply a follower but a participant in Surrealism, will establish a way of looking at fashion in a critical way, as an important form of expression worthy of study. Schiaparelli, an Italian, started designing under her own name in 1927, and quickly rose to fame. By the early 1930s, Schiaparelli has overtaken Chanel in popularity, particularly in the American market.7 Schiaparelli explained: America had always been more hospitable and friendly to me. She had made it possible for me to obtain a unique place in the world. France
Dilys E. Blum, Shocking!: The Art and Fashion of Elsa Schiaparelli (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003), 7 Axel Madsen, Chanel : A Woman of Her Own (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1990), 198-91.
gave me the inspiration, America the sympathetic approval and the result.8 Schiaparellis legacy had been completely eclipsed by Chanel because while Schiaparellis house slowly petered out after World War I, Chanel staged a triumphant comeback in 1954, the same year Schiaparelli showed her last collection. Schiaparellis exuberant and avant-garde creations have often been dismissed as mere jokes. Particularly famous are her outrageous hats, especially those on which she collaborated with Dal: the Mutton chop hat, the High Heel hat, and the Inkwell hat. These absurdist designs led her contemporary, fashion illustrator Drian, to ask of Schiaparelli, Blague ou Gnie? (Joke or Genius?)9 Schiaparellis humor and use of the absurd in fashion is perhaps her most important legacy in contemporary fashion. Designer Christian Lacroix explained that Schiaparelli was the first to open couture to contemporary artistic currents and give it a sense of the ludicrous. The joy and dynamism, the variety and mix of colors and shape. The lack of prejudicein short, freedomare the most inspiring in her fashion work.10 The humor inherent in Schiaparellis fashion should not prevent us from taking her work seriously. Like the Surrealists, Schiaparelli used humor in
Elsa Schiaparelli, Shocking Life: The Autobiography of Elsa Schiaparelli (London: V & A Publications, 2007), 112. 9 From a song composed by Drian: Blague ou genie?/En culbutant la mode,/Elle lhabille en folie/Et signeSchiaparelli! My Translation: Joke or Genius?/ In tumbling fashion/She dresses her in folly/ And signsSchiaparelli! Ibid, 64. 10 Valerie Steele, Women of Fashion: Twentieth-Century Designers (New York: Rizzoli International, 1991), 69.
her clothes to jolt her viewers, encouraging them to look again, and reconsider. From the beginning of her career Schiaparelli experimented with the uncanny and surreal combinations. She also directly collaborated with a number of Surrealists, including Man Ray, Merit Oppenheim, Salvador Dal, and Jean Cocteau. Schiaparelli is often dismissed as merely a clever designer who adopted, or even exploited the ideas of the Surrealists in her work, taking their lead. Art historian Dickran Tashjian claims that Schiaparellis contribution lay mainly in transposing Dals Surrealist ideas to clothing,11 yet I argue that Schiaparellis work goes beyond mere appropriation, and is deeply engaged with Surrealism. The importance of Schiaparellis work in the art world has been largely ignored and covered over. She was not a follower of the Surrealists, but was their contemporary, part of their circle. For example, Man Rays photographs of hats illustrating Tristan Tzaras essay, Dun Certain Automatisme du Got, (Regarding a Certain Automatism of Taste) in 1933 are actually photographs of Schiaparellis designs. (Figure 8) She was never credited in Minotaure as the designer. Had these images appeared in Vogue or Harpers Bazaar, a credit line would have mentioned not only Man Ray, but also Schiaparelli, and perhaps even a store where the hats might be purchased. The photographs are widely known and reproduced in books both about Surrealism and fashion of the 1930s, yet the disparity between the
11
Dickran Tashjian, A Boatload of Madmen : Surrealism and the American Avant-Garde, 1920-1950 (New York: Thames and Hudson, 1995), 84
discourses in these two realms is noteworthy. While the photographs are always acknowledged as the work of Man Ray, the hats were not acknowledged as the designs of Elsa Schiaparelli until Dilys Blum published them in her 2003 book Shocking!: The Art and Fashion of Elsa Schiaparelli.12 Here we see a clear example of Schiaparellis work inspiring Surrealists Tzara and Man Ray. There was a dialogue going on between art and fashion that has not yet been acknowledged in scholarship on Surrealism or fashion. It is not only Schiaparellis work that is dismissed by scholars, but also the work of Surrealists who directly engaged with fashion through collaborations with designers or fashion magazines. Underlying the dismissal of this work as merely commercial, of course, is the gendering of both fashion and commercial culture as feminine. Implicit in this gendering is a dismissal of fashion as shallow and unworthy of serious attention. I aim to reclaim this work as an important part of the Surrealists bodies of work. For example, Salvador Dal has often been dismissed as an unserious artist because of his work in shop window display, jewelry, fashion, Hollywood and at the 1939 Worlds Fair.13 Dal was excommunicated from the Surrealist movement by Breton in 1941 for being too commercial, and dubbed Avida
12
She also acknowledges this in her essay for the Surreal Things catalogue. Blum, Shocking!: The Art and Fashion of Elsa Schiaparelli, 127. Dilys E. Blum, "Fashion and Surrealism," in Surreal Things: Surrealism and Design, ed. Ghislaine Wood (London: V&A Publications, 2007), 139. 13 Dickran Tashjian calls Dals shop window for Bonwit Teller schlock, and describes Dals installation at the 1939 Worlds Fair as having caused him to lose credibility by virtue of his publicity-seeking. A decaying Dal Dream of Venus became emblematic of his decline in the United States. Tashjian, A Boatload of Madmen : Surrealism and the American Avant-Garde, 1920-1950, 91 and 65.
10
Dollars. Keith Eggener writes in 'An Amusing Lack of Logic': Surrealism and Popular Entertainment: Dals work after 1932 is often said to evince a loss of creative drive. Another way of explaining it is to see his repetition as part of a strategyaimed at promoting familiarity, even a sort of brand loyalty By the late 1930s, Dals burning giraffes and soft watches were safe, proven, reliable Surrealism, the standard by which competitors were measured.14 While Dal was often dismissed for being so successful at self promotion, Man Ray, on the other hand, managed to compartmentalize his fashion work. Man Rays photographs for Harpers Bazaar are often cast out of his oeuvre because they are simply fashion photographs made to finance his art or, as in the example above, the presence of fashion is ignored entirely. Even when Man Rays fashion work is accepted as a part of his oeuvre, as in Dickran Tashjians book A Boatload of Madmen: Surrealism and the American Avant-Garde, it is with a sense of hierarchy. Tashjian argues: It was largely an unerring sense of the erotic, combined with an eye for originality that allowed him to remain a Surrealist in the realm of fashion and in turn raised him above his Surrealist peers working in the fashion industryMan Ray attempted to integrate his work. He saw no compromise in the quality of his photographs for fashion magazines. His essential sense of antiart, cultivated by Duchamp and Dada, led him to contend that everything is art, including commercial photography.15 Tashjian takes pains to argue that Man Rays work in fashion was part of a revolutionary Surrealist project, because in Man Rays words: I like to carry
14
Keith L. Eggener, "'An Amusing Lack of Logic': Surrealism and Popular Entertainment," American Art 7, no. 4 1993), 42. 15 Tashjian, A Boatload of Madmen : Surrealism and the American Avant-Garde, 1920-1950, 78-9.
11
my propaganda into the enemys camp.16 He goes so far as to argue that Man Ray vented his contempt for the fashion industry openly in a drawing entitled Couture for Les Mains Libres: a slender woman in the latest gown is sexually assaulted by a pair of scissorsin so far as Man Ray drew the image, the violence remains his; yet the image could be taken to expose the violence perpetrated by the fashion industry on women, turning them into sex objects, isolating parts of the body for display in a process that shares more with the pornographic than with the erotic.17 This is a difficult argument to accept considering that Man Rays own work regularly puts the female body on display, cutting it up, fetishizing it, and objectifying it. Tashjians remarks are telling, because of how far he goes in order to maintain Man Rays position as an artist above commerce. It is clear how uncomfortable Tashjian is with Man Rays participation in fashion, which he demonizes as violent in its objectification of women. In order to integrate Man Rays fashion works as full artistic expressions of a master, he must argue that Man Ray is critiquing the world of fashion, and by extension commerce, as opposed to participating in it. Tashjian is forced to acknowledge the shakiness of his own argument conceding, in so far as Man Ray drew the image, the violence remains his, yet the author maintains that this is evidence of a critique of fashion.18 Tashjian fails to recognize the ways in which many of Man Rays photographs, even those that were not for fashion magazines, are engaged with the conventions of fashion photography.
16 17
Ibid, 83. Ibid, 103 18 Ibid,103.
12
It is also clear that Tashjian has a limited and clichd understanding of the fashion industry. He is unable to see that what he describes as a violent objectification occurring in fashion, occurs regularly in art, particularly Surrealism. Other art historians have minimized the importance of female artists within the Surrealist movement as well as the contributions of female artists in other genres, such as fashion design, that were important to Surrealism.19 Ann Finholt, for example, tries to downplay the agency that James Thrall Soby attributes to fashion designers in his 1941 book The Early Chirico. Finholt quotes Soby this way: [de Chiricos young followers] have also been partly responsible for the new imaginative elegance in fashionTheir strong personalities have been reflected in the creations of a Schiaparelli as opposed to the earlier ones of a Paul Poiret. (italics mine)20 The full quotation, however, notes Sobys reservations: I do not mean for a moment that they [de Chircos followers] have been wholly responsible, or that fashion has followed them like a lagging, rich child. But I do mean that their strong personalities have been reflected in the creations of a Schiaparelli as opposed to the earlier ones of a Paul Poiret.21 Clearly Soby gave fashion designers credit for their innovations that Finholt downplays in order to elevate de Chirico above the commercial masses. She wants us to believe that
19
See for example Whitney Chadwick, Women Artists and the Surrealist Movement (London: Thames and Hudson, 1985). 20 Ann Finholt, "Art in Vogue: De Chirico, Fashion and Surrealism," in Giorgio De Chirico and America, ed. Emily Braun (New York: Hunter College of the City University of New York, 1996), 90. 21 James Thrall Soby, The Early Chirico (New York: Dodd, Mead & Company, 1941), 101.
13
Schiaparelli cannot be considered a follower of de Chirco, but is merely a reflection of his male acolytes. Modernists have always feared art and artists prostituting themselves for capitalist gain. This fear is embodied in the world of fashion, which combines women, money and sexuality. Yet Surrealists willfully engaged the world of fashion throughout their practices, including the use of mannequins in exhibitions, fashion photography, textile, jewelry, and fashion design as well as appropriating images from magazines and catalogues into their work. Looking at the production of fashion designers in relation to Surrealism brings the voices of these women into conversation with the largely male, and often misogynist movement. There are a number of female artists who were associated with Surrealism whose presence and importance to the movement has yet to be fully recognized: Leonor Fini, Frida Kahlo, Lee Miller, Nusch Eulard, Jacqueline Lambda, Gala Dal, Claude Cahun, and Meret Oppenheim As fascinating as the work of these women is, I am after a more elemental shift in the way we examine a movement like Surrealism. I want to bring fashion into view as a form of expressioncultural, political, personal and otherwisethat can be read and understood on the same terms as art has been. This will allow us to consider the personal style of these women, which was often as unique as their art work, as part of their artistic output.
14
Defining Fashion In the context of this project it is important to define fashion as distinct from clothing or dress. Here I am focusing solely on womens fashion, not because mens fashion is not worthy of study, but because in the 1920s and 1930s womens fashion is far more dynamically engaged with artistic and intellectual movements. Fashion is made when an article of clothing is assigned meaning and value that goes beyond its physical construction and practical use. Fashion is a semiotic language through which cultural meanings are constructed.22 Modern fashion, as it developed in the midnineteenth century, is produced at the nexus of designers, pattern-makers, seamstresses, magazine editors, writers, illustrators and photographers, as well as the women who actually wore and wear these clothes. Fashion is not just a couture dress, but the whole culture that surrounds and disseminates it. In the 1920s and 1930s, this includes magazines and newspapers, as well as popular films and plays. Traditional accounts of fashion have often understood it as reflecting simplistic constructions, first of class through the seventeenth century, and then of gender into the present time.23 Kaja Silverman complicates this notion in her essay Fragments of a Fashionable Discourse, in which she argues that clothing and fashion, in articulating the body,simultaneously
22
Nancy J. Troy, Couture Culture: A Study in Modern Art and Fashion (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2003), 11. 23 Kaja Silverman, "Fragments of a Fashionable Discourse," in On Fashion, ed. Shari Benstock and Suzanne Ferriss (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1994), 183.
15
articulates the psyche.24 She contends that every transformation within a societys vestmentary code implies some kind of shift within its ways of articulating subjectivity.25 By examining fashion in concert with art in the interwar period, I hope to tease out how clothing, particularly womens clothing, relates to the psyche in a more complex way than has been previously understood. Here I will work to reimagine how looking might function in fashion. I believe that looking at fashion is not limited to a standard understanding of a masculine gaze that objectifies women, nor do women vicariously identify with this sexualized gaze. There are many more possibilities for the complex array of ways in which women look at and dress for one another. A full understanding of fashion must move past notions of voyeurism, narcissism, and gender as performance. While these are important components of an understanding of fashion, there is a crucial aspect of fashion that involves women looking at women in a manner different from assuming the male gaze.26 Flicking through the pages of a fashion magazine a woman does not see the model only as an object, but projects herself into the clothes the model wears, imagining how she will look in them, where she might wear them.
24 25
Ibid, 191. Ibid, 193. 26 See Iris Marion Young, "Women Recovering Our Clothes," in On Fashion, ed. Shari Benstock and Suzanne Ferriss (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1994), 197-210, for a traditional discussion of women looking at women as men. Young attempts to analyze womens interactions with women through fashion, but ignores what I think is a particular dynamic and look that goes on between women through fashion, or at least between men and women who make themselves part of the discourse on fashion that is much different than a traditional understanding of a male gaze as voyeuristic.
16
Even if this woman never buys these clothes or ever sees them in the flesh, she has consumed fashion. By examining fashion as revealing something about the historically constructed psyche of the woman wearing it, we can also move past many of the false assumptions that have been made about the industry. Some authors have assumed that fashion is imposed by men on women, but in the early twentieth century this is not the case. It is crucial to note that most of the producers of fashion in the years between the wars were women. A significant number of fashion and beauty companies were run by women in the 1910s and 1920s.27 As we will see, Coco Chanel and Elsa Schiaparelli created significant businesses; Chanels house is still an important luxury and couture brand. Other women such as Jeanne Lanvin, Nina Ricci, Madame Grs, and Madeline Vionette built important fashion houses in Paris, some of which are still active. In the US, women such as Elizabeth Hawes and Claire McCardell were designing important ready to wear lines, and Hattie Carnegie pioneered high end ready-to-wear and imported important Paris designers to the U.S. Women were also running many of the most important fashion publications including Vogue and Harpers Bazaar.28 It is also worth noting that images of women in fashion magazines, whether in ads or in editorial content, were meant for the consumption of
27
Kathy Peiss chronicles the rise of many female beauty entrepreneurs in the early twentieth-century including Helena Rubinstein, Elizabeth Arden, Annie Turnbo Malone, and Madame C.J. Walker. 28 Carmel Snow took the helm of Harpers Bazaar in 1934, and Edna Woolman Chase had been at Vogue since 1914. Vogue has had a long history of being edited by women. Both publications employed many women on the editorial and writing staffs, as well as women artists and photographers.
17
other women, and were subject to a different kind of gaze all together, a more homosocial one. Women were looking at women in these magazines, not, I would argue, in a voyeuristic way, but in a more imaginative and productive way. Minna Thornton and Caroline Evans examine contemporary fashion images wondering, do women assume a transvestite gaze in relation to images of women which are eroticized, by looking as men, with a voyeuristic or controlling gaze? Or is the female gaze narcissistic, one which identifies with the image through likeness and recognition? Perhaps women vacillate between both ways of looking...29 I would argue that beyond a narcissistic gaze, a womans gaze in a fashion magazine can be performative. A woman can project herself into the Chanel gown, imagining how she would look, where she would wear the gown, what she might wear with it. The image of a film and stage star, such as Ina Claire who frequently posed for fashion magazines, allowed women to imagine that they could be equally glamorous, that they could travel in the same circles, in the same beautiful clothes, and have the same experiences as the women they saw wearing these clothes. A SaksFifth Avenue advertisement from 1924, for example, touted: Gabrielle Chanel made these frocks and negligee for Miss Ina Claire. Now starring in Grounds for DivorceSaks-Fifth Avenue now presents re-productions of these very models for the smart New York woman at very moderate prices.30
29
Caroline Evans and Minna Thornton, Women & Fashion : A New Look (New York: Quartet, 1989), 103. 30 "Saks-Fifth Avenue Advertisement," New York Times, 21 October 1924.
18
Fashion, particularly in the years between the wars, is a world in which both the producers and consumers are women. Kathy Peiss, for example has suggested a more broad understanding of womens use of makeup, as a cultural practicemaking up more often underscored womens ties to other women, not to men.31 Lindy Woodhead perhaps goes too far in War Paint: Madame Helena Rubinstein and Miss Elizabeth Arden, arguing that these two cosmetics moguls, helped give women a freedom of expression analogous to women gaining the right to vote.32 Whether this is true or not, there is certainly a more nuanced way to read womens use of fashion and cosmetics. Instead of privileging a male viewer and audience, this approach privileges a female one.
Fashion and Art It is not my intention to create what I see as a false uniformity between artists and fashion designers. Throughout this project I am careful to distinguish between the two. I do however seek to abolish the false hierarchy that exists between the two pursuits. Fashion is resolutely commercial, which is at the heart of why it is rarely taken seriously, particularly in relation to art. In a 1996 interview with Artforum, Richard Martin discussed the place of fashion at an art institution like the Metropolitan: I will say that one of the
31
Kathy Lee Peiss, Hope in a Jar: The Making of America's Beauty Culture (New York: Metropolitan Books, 1998), 176. 32 Lindy Woodhead, War Paint: Madame Helena Rubinstein and Miss Elizabeth Arden: Their Lives, Their Times, Their Rivalry (Hoboken: John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 2003), 7.
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good things about fashion is that its commerce is blatant. The art world generally likes to be very discreet about commerce. Fashion is about manifestationits always out in the open.33 This comment gets to the root of the problems art historians have had in including fashion in a Surrealist lexicon. Yet art is commercial too. It is a commodity. It is given monetary value, bought and sold, even advertised. Artists in the interwar period especially, were grappling and experimenting with arts role as a commodity. In part, my interest in leveling the art/fashion hierarchy is an interest in reasserting these commercial qualities of art, qualities that are often hidden. Only through abolishing these false hierarchies, can we conduct a truly interdisciplinary study of social, historical and artistic contexts of this period. My work will reveal the ways in which Surrealism infused many parts of daily life in the 1930s, and had many more practitioners than the few men, and even fewer women, whom Andre Breton admitted to his circle. Andre Breton was the main arbiter and theorist of Surrealism in Europe. His manifestos and novels outlined the mainstream Surrealist aesthetic and he retained the right to excommunicate those artists he felt were not living up to his standards. In her study of fashion and art at the turn of the twentieth century, Couture Culture: A Study in Modern Art and Fashion, Nancy J. Troy writes, it is safe to say that dominant accounts of early twentieth-century art have
33
Darryl Turner, "Couture De Force " Artforum International 34 (March 1996 March 1996), 16.
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failed to see the relevance of fashion for their object of study. Typically, fashion has been regarded as superficial, fleeting, and feminized. 34 Building on Troys important work, I plan to argue that far from being superficial and incidental to Surrealism, fashion played an integral role in this artistic movement. Fashion is as relevant to the study of other artistic movements, as other modes of popular culture that have been accepted as vital to the understanding of these movements. Nancy Troy argues that most accounts by art historians have dealt with artists who designed clothes, such as the Russian Constructivists, or Sonia Delaunay. She claims that, settling for a narrow definition of the relationship between art and fashion in terms of garments designed by artists or clothing that qualifies as art, [art historians] approach privileged formal similarities that are often visually powerful but, nevertheless, generally lack substance when it comes to the exploration of deeper, structural relations which, in turn, do not necessarily result in any stylistic or formal resemblances between particular items of clothing and specific works of art.35 Troy is referring to Richard Martins work on Surrealism as well as on Cubism and Fashion when she talks about privileging formal similarities. The same is true of much of the scholarship on Surrealism and fashion. The only serious book-length study, Richard Martins Fashion and Surrealism (1987), focuses mainly on affinities between Surrealism and fashion from the 1930s to the present. His book looks at shared operations in Surrealism and fashion: Metaphor and Metamorphoses, Bodies and
34 35
Troy, Couture Culture: A Study in Modern Art and Fashion, 2. Ibid, , 3.
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Parts, Displacements and Illusions, Natural and Unnatural Worlds, and Doyenne and Dandy.36 Even Martin, a fashion scholar and the curator of The Costume Institute at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in the 1990s, succumbs to the view that Surrealist art was the agent of trends: Only later, primarily through the premier Surrealists working in Paris in the 1930s, did Surrealism finally seize the fashion arts Overtaking the fashion arts with zeal, Surrealism has never leftSurrealism remains fashions favorite art.37 Martin describes his own understanding of visual culture, particularly in relation to his work on Fashion and Surrealism: I probably do have a dream of visual culture, whole and thrilling. And I look for it, long for it, and sometimes find itI admit that my belief in a powerful, persuasive, comprehensive visual culture has a degree of faith and yearning to it I want to believe in the cross-pollination between all these fields.38 Martins own work, including the book Fashion and Surrealism, hints at the potential for this cross pollination but does not go far enough. Martins focuses on affinitiesjuxtaposing objects that look alike, as in the infamous MoMA primitivism show of 1984. Finding influence and understanding a more complex and nuanced relationship between art and fashion demands further inquiry. Moving beyond affinities and formal similarities, there are clear structural similarities between art and fashion. In Couture Culture, Nancy
36 37
Chapter titles from: Martin, Fashion and Surrealism. Ibid, 11. 38 Turner, "Couture De Force " 116.
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Troy considers the common commercial structures of art and fashion. Troy argues that in the early 20th century art and fashion shared a driving concern with intellectual property and ideas of originality and reproduction. Artists such as Duchamp and Picasso, Troy contends, depended on the same balance between originality and mass-market reproduction as did fashion designers. Both artists and couture designers depended on being able to differentiate their high end work from mass reproductions, whether they were authorized or not. Artists such as Duchamp played with ideas of mass reproduction and originality in art very consciously. He explored these ideas most forcefully in his ready-mades which, Troy notes, refer to ready-made clothing, the opposite of couture and high-end made-to-order clothing. In the inter-war years, both fashion and art were striving to redefine themselves. Troy chronicles the rise of the modern gallery system along-side the rise of haute couture. Haute couture refers to the fashions produced by the exclusive fashion businesses in Paris, begun by Charles Frederick Worth who, in 1868, opened the first couture house. Couture houses produce highend luxury fashion in limited amounts, often utilizing a great deal of work done by hand as opposed to machine. These fashions were often copied by ready-to-wear companies for mass market. Couturiers were beginning to expand their businesses, not only supplying painstakingly handmade garments to the very wealthy, but also selling ready-to-wear garments as well as perfume to the middle classes.
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Fashion was beginning to penetrate all classes in Europe and the United States, through mass marketing, fashion magazines, and department stores. While not everyone could afford a designer dress, many could afford a copy, or could make one themselves. While couture houses were diversifying, couturiers were increasingly defining themselves, and being defined by others, as artists. Worth, and particularly Paul Poireta designer who opened his own couture house in 1903popularized the concept of the fashion designer as artist/genius, as opposed to a tailor or dressmaker.39 This distinction was important to bring stature and value to their brands in the face of rampant copying. The issue of copying and authenticity also became a problem for the Surrealists. When Andre Breton began to worry about the dispersion of Surrealism into the realm of capitalism Man Ray suggested, only half-jokingly for a trademark label to be placed on the bottom of all authentic works: Cest un objet surraliste.40 The trademark label is precisely the way fashion designers had been tackling the problem of copying since the beginning of the twentieth century. The labels often used the designers signature, linking them to the practice of the artist affixing his or her signature to a piece of art. In the wake of increasing democratization of fashion, designers were working to codify a new relationship between art and fashion, as well as
39
Bonnie English, A Cultural History of Fashion in the Twentieth Century: From the Catwalk to the Sidewalk (New York: Berg, 2007), 8. See also Troy, Couture Culture: A Study in Modern Art and Fashion, 46-7. 40 Krzysztof Fijalkowski, "Black Materialism: Surrealism Faces the Commercial World," in Surreal Things : Surrealism and Design, ed. Ghislaine Wood (London: V&A Publications, 2007), 112.
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between fashion and self presentation. Bonnie English argues that the impact and influence ofincreased consumerism and visual display of fashion upon early twentieth-century artists such as Pablo Picasso, Eugene Atget and Marcel Duchamp is significant [to the development of] art as object and art as product.41 I would add to this the rising relevance of performance, and the performance of the persona of the artist, which resulted from mercantile spectacle and twentieth century modes of fashion and self presentation.42 These new art processes and objects also call into question traditional notions of authorship, originality, and authenticity, at precisely the same time as increased mechanization and the copying trade were raising the same issues in the world of fashion. Fashion magazines were also finding a new role as conduits for celebrity culture both in the realm of fashion and art. They became venues for avant-garde writing, art, and graphic design, in addition to selling fashion in an increasingly direct way.43 At the same time, the avantgarde magazine was becoming increasingly important to movements such as Surrealism.44 The art magazine is one example of the number of commercial techniques that Surrealism learned from fashion and mass culture as a whole.
41
English, A Cultural History of Fashion in the Twentieth Century: From the Catwalk to the Sidewalk , 19. 42 Here I am thinking particularly about Duchamp and Dal. 43 Until 1922 fashion magazines did not list US stores where fashions could be purchased. Women would simply take the picture of the garment they liked to their dressmaker or sew it themselves. In 1922 Vogue began to list stores in New York City where garments could be purchased, and throughout the 1920s and 1930s magazines began publish names of stores in different parts of the country that carried the designs on their pages. Penelope Rowlands, A Dash of Daring : The Life of Carmel Snow (London: Simon & Schuster, 2006), 63. 44 Rosalind E. Krauss, The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1986), 101.
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Krzysztof Fijalkowski outlines Surrealisms responses to modernist, and particularly shopping and consumer culture in his essay for the 2007 Surreal Things exhibition catalogue. He charts two different responses: One was to chart the fascination, and often the absurdity, of the newIf celebration seemed a risky venture for Surrealists, however, a second and more radical tack was also available: to comprehend and critique the emerging consumer world by conducting an archeology of the very things against which the novelty of commerce kicked: yesterdays modernity.45 Fijalkowski understands the Surrealists as either celebrating the absurdity of the constant change inherent in consumer culture, or a critique of that obsession with the new by referencing outmoded objects of mass production. I would add that Surrealists also directly participated in this culture of commerce and shopping, particularly in their frequenting of flea markets and their often obsessive collecting of non-western art.46 Not only did Surrealists participate in this popular visual culture, but it shaped their artistic practices. Ad Reinhardt described Surrealism as being anti-art, perhaps because of its association with popular culture: Intellectually and aesthetically the important thing was that there was absolutely no relation between the abstractionists and the surrealists [sic]. The main idea and the whole tradition of abstract art centered pretty much around art-as-art or that art either had to involve with aesthetic essence or not. Whereas the surrealists were involved with everything else. I suppose even programmatically they were anti-art. They were involved in, I dont know, life or love or sex or I dont know what. They were living it up. I remember Mark Rothko saying he liked the
45
Fijalkowski, "Black Materialism: Surrealism Faces the Commercial World," 103. Also see Fosters chapter Outmoded Spaces in Hal Foster, Compulsive Beauty (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1993), 157191. 46 Breton and Max Ernst are good examples of these practices.
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surrealists because they gave better parties than the abstract painters. [italics mine]47 The everything else that Reinhardt refers to is everything that is not art, that it life. This examination of the interactions between Surrealism and fashion will demonstrate the ways in which these artists and designers strove to blur the lines between art and life. Examining Surrealism in fashion is important because it inserts Surrealism in the everyday lives of the women wearing the garment, and those who see her. This examination understands Surrealism as a crucial part of the visual culture of the inter-war years. A garment can change a womans walk, or her shape; it can reveal or conceal; it can confound the viewer or wearer with textures that dont look like they feel. We can see how this plays out in the lives of the Surrealists themselves in the photo of Jane Clark (wife of Kenneth Clark, then director of Londons National Gallery of Art) and Gala Dal wearing Schiaparelli gowns at a 1939 opening at the Museum of Modern Art. (Figure 9) Whether they were producing it, wearing it themselves, (Frida Kahlos favorite perfume, after all, was Schiaparellis Shocking!), or their wives were wearing it, fashion was a part of the lives of Surrealists, a part of the visual culture that surrounded them.
47
Isabelle Dervaux, "A Tale of Two Earrings: Surrealism and Abstraction, 1930-1947," in Surrealism USA, ed. Isabelle Dervaux (New York: National Academy Museum, 2005), 51.
27
Dada and Surrealism World War I accelerated changes already occurring both in art and fashion. The war helped to propel the progress of mechanized clothing manufacture, with the need to produce uniforms quickly in large numbers. It not only led to a rise in industrialized production, but also revealed the horrifying potential of mechanized warfare. The war wrought terrifying casualties: between 10 and 13 million men in the armed forces and between 7 to 10 million civilians died, and 20 million were wounded. Moreover, the economies and infrastructures of Europe were in ruins.48 World War I spawned several artistic movements including Dada, which began as a response to the horrible rationalism of the war. For Dada artists, and later for the Surrealists, the war was the ghastly culmination of modernity and progress. Scientific and industrial innovation had automated many processes that had promised to make life easier, and better, but it had also mechanized war. This new warfare with aircraft, aerial bombardment of cities, land mines, poison gas, and machine guns made killing efficient and war even more devastating both to the military and civilians. Dada artists used chance and the absurd in their art to respond to this absurd rationalism and empiricism of war and death. Dada also grappled with the meaning of art in a world increasingly populated by mass produced objects. Chapter one begins with an exploration of Dada, and particularly
48
Thomas F. X. Noble et al., Western Civilization : The Continuing Experiment, Third ed., vol. II (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2002), 866.
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Marcel Duchamp, as they set the stage for the developments of Surrealism, a movement that would also grapple with modern life and consumer culture. The chapter considered Duchamp and Coco Chanel as two key figures who revolutionized the role of the artist and fashion designer respectively. Chanel redefined the role of fashion designer as a celebrity rather than an artist, as Poiret and Worth had fashioned themselves. Her designs were associated with her own body and lifestyle and were marketed to women who longed to live the glamorous life Chanel herself lived. Likewise, Duchamp refigured the artist as someone who does not rely on aesthetic taste, but instead chooses at random, objects which become art. Both Chanel and Duchamp used their radical re-conceptualizations of their roles in order to negotiate the increasing importance of mass production and the growth of celebrity culture. The following chapters will consider how the Surrealists and fashion designers used these new models to work within their own aesthetic and ideological parameters. Andre Breton, in particular, capitalized on the new celebrity model of the artist. He constructed the Surrealist circle with himself at the center, as arbiter of who was an authentic Surrealist. Writing about and publicizing the movement, he became the public relations director for a circle of burgeoning art/celebrities. Breton had participated in the Dada movement, but felt the need for a change in the early 1920s. Instead of using the absurd to resist the terrifying logic that spawned the war, Breton favored delving into the unconscious. Breton held onto the ideas of the chance
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encounter and the incongruous from Dada, but extended this exploration with the addition of modern psychoanalytic ideas. Breton and his cohorts were working in opposition to artists and theorists who favored a return to classicism after the war. Pre-war France had come to represent decadence; through the war France had been purged of these afflictions to emerge true to its real self: disciplined, strong, organized and clear-minded. In the cultural rhetoric of reconstruction, this latter cluster of terms was brought together under the single unifying headingClassicism.49 Le Corbusier and Amde Ozenfant, the artists who founded the Purist group, used ideas of modernism and progress in the service of rebuilding France and the rest of Europe after the War. These artists wanted to move forward through rational progress towards a peaceful modern world, a modern vision of classicism.50 They stressed logic, order and control, three concepts which the Surrealists would strongly oppose in their work.51 Breton and the Surrealists turned away from notions of classical order and rational progress. In his 1924 Surrealist manifesto, Andre Breton wrote: I believe in the future resolution of these two states, dream and reality, which are seemingly so contradictory, into a kind of absolute reality, a surreality, if
49
Briony Fer, David Batchelor, and Paul Wood, Realism, Rationalism, Surrealism : Art between the Wars (New Haven: Yale University Press, in association with the Open University, 1993), 17. 50 I am drawing some of these ideas from Amy Lyford, Surrealist Masculinities : Gender Anxiety and the Aesthetics of Post-World War I Reconstruction in France (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007), 1-14. 51 Fer, Batchelor, and Wood, Realism, Rationalism, Surrealism : Art between the Wars, 20.
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one may so speak.52 The goal of Surrealist artists was to bring together the world of the dream and reality. Breton, and the Surrealists developed an alternative aesthetic in stark opposition to the clean classical forms of Le Corbusier, and the sleek geometry of Art Deco. Breton emphasized chance and techniques that resisted logic. In his first manifesto of 1924, Breton defined the movement: SURREALISM, n., Psychic automatism in its pure state, by which one proposes to expressverbally, by means of the written word, or in any other mannerthe actual function of thought. Dictated by thought, in the absence of any control exercised by reason, exempt from any aesthetic or moral concern. ENCYCLOPEDIA. Philosophy. Surrealism is based on the belief in the superior reality of certain forms of previously neglected associations, in the omnipotence of dream, in the disinterested play of thought. It tends ruin once and for all all other psychic mechanisms and to substitute itself for them in solving all the principal problems in life. 53 In these early years Surrealism centered on literature, but as the movement progressed, visual arts also became engaged in these ideas of chance and the unconscious. Breton and other Surrealist writers were interested in using techniques such as automatic writing to tap into the subconscious in their work. This tactic was used by visual artists through games such as the exquisite corpse, and techniques such as frottage and decalcomania, involving chance.54 Generally speaking, there are two recognized strains of
52 53
Andr Breton, Manifestoes of Surrealism (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1972), 14. Ibid, 26. 54 Exquisite corpse, originated as a writing practice where each participant writes part of a sentence, conceals it and passes it on for the next participant to add to it. Visual artists made drawings this way. Decalcomania, which Max Ernst famously used, involved printing an image on paper or glass from a
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Surrealism, one that emphasizes abstraction as a mode through which to tap into the subconscious, and another that uses realism to make the uncanny images of dreams and the subconscious visible. Equally important to defining Surrealism are the two quotations that serve as the epigraph of this introduction. In defining Surrealists in Vogue and Glamour, these statements emphasize the absurdist nature of Surrealism in the public imagination. Dals fall through a shop window while he was decorating it with a bath tub, or his lecture at the 1936 Surrealist Exhibition in London delivered in a diving mask, or Merrit Oppenheims furry teacup (Objet, 1936) shown at the 1936 MoMA show Fantastic Art, Dada, Surrealism, cemented the movement in the mind of the American public as an art form loosely connected to the serious study of psychology, but mostly as a group of strange and humorous artists hungry for the spotlight. They emphasize the role of fame and notoriety, as well as costume in selfperformance of the Surrealist. The fact that these definitions use the terms of fashion and celebrity culture to define an artistic movement, is not merely coincidence. The movement was clearly linked to fashion in the popular imagination. The last three chapters in this project will take as their subject a strain in Bretons Surrealist aesthetic. Each of these strains will be examined in the context of a comparison of Surrealist artists and fashion designers. Chapter
painted surface. Ernst also used frottage, in which a textured surface such as wood or plaster is used to create a rubbing on paper.
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two takes the concept of the uncanny as its subject, drawing on Bretons own writings as well as Hal Fosters analysis in Compulsive Beauty of the uncanny as the central organizing principal of Surrealism. The psychological experience of the uncanny can be evoked through the conflation of things that are irreconcilable: reality and fantasy, the actual world and the dream world. A classic example of the uncanny is a familiar image in the world of fashion, the mannequina figure that conflates human and non-human, animate and inanimate. This chapter focuses on the early work of Elsa Schiaparelli and her collaborations with Man Ray. The 1930s are often seen as a period in which femininity returns to fashion, a retreat from the freeing androgyny of the 1920s. Waistlines were brought back up to actual waist level, bias cut gowns clung to the bodys curves, and romanticism pervaded many of the looks shown in this period. 55 Looking at Schiaparellis early designs in the context of the Surrealist uncanny, however, reveals a more complex turn from the styles of the 1920s. These designs, rather than being androgynous, create uncanny conflations of masculine and feminine, which Man Ray helped to expose in his photographs. I look at Man Rays photographs of Schiaparelli and her work as collaborations between the artist and designer that reveals their shared interest in the uncanny.
55
Elizabeth Wilson, Adorned in Dreams: Fashion and Modernity (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2003), 43.
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In chapter three, I compare the work and collecting practices of Man Ray and Andre Breton to two milliners, Madame Agns and Lilly Dach, all of whom were interested in objects coming to Europe from Africa. Between the 1920s and 1930s, there was a shift in Modernist Primitivism from an abstract interest in African forms reflected in Cubist art, to what James Clifford calls Ethnographic Surrealism. According to Clifford, Ethnographic Surrealism is a way of engaging with African (as well as Oceanic and Native American) objects that acknowledges that they had a meaning in their original setting and attempts to evoke this meaning by placing them in dialectical relationships with other objects. I argue that this same shift occurs in what I term fashionable Primitivism. In the 1910s and 1920s designers were creating garments that seamlessly incorporated African-inspired colors, motifs and materials. In the 1930s, Lilly Dach and many other designers were creating dialectical images with their designs. Looking at these dialectical fashions alongside the dialectical images created by Man Ray in his photographs, and Breton in his collections shows not only the shared aesthetic between fashion and Surrealism, but also the ways in which Man Ray and Bretons practices engage with fashion and shopping. Chapter 4 explores Bretons concept of convulsive beauty in both art and fashion. In this chapter I argue that strange glamour, particularly Schiaparellis vision of it is connected to Andre Bretons concept of Convulsive beauty, a beauty meant to evoke a visceral reaction of shock from the viewer.
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Schiaparellis clothes shock viewers not just because they are bizarre and sometimes whimsical but because they disrupt the stable identity of the wearer. Schiaparelli used Surrealist motifs to create clothing that had a different kind of sex appeal than the leggy youthful flapper. It was not vulgar or girlish. It was mature and acknowledged the scopophilic gaze, often thwarting it, or winking back. Through an examination of her collaborations with artists such as Jean Cocteau and Salvador Dal, this chapter examines the ways in which Schiaparelli takes Surrealist themes and ideas and makes them her own. In doing so she contributes to the larger movement. The chapter also examines the influence of Schiaparellis display practices, both in her boutique and at the 1937 Paris Exposition Internationale on the exhibition practices of the Surrealists, particularly at the 1938 Exposition Internationale du Surralisme.
Surreal Consumers Each of these chapters not only links the fashion aesthetic of strange glamour to the aesthetic strains of Surrealism, but also connects Surrealism to the realm of commerce. Each chapter insists on the important connections between art and commercial culture, which too often are covered over by the artists themselves and subsequent scholarship. Andreas Huyssen explains that, contrary to the claims of champions of the autonomy of art, contrary also to the ideologists of textuality, the realities of
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modern life and the ominous expansion of mass culture throughout the social realm are always already inscribed into the articulation of aesthetic modernism. Mass culture has always been the hidden subtext of the modernist project.56 The aim of each chapter of this project is to reveal this hidden subtext within Dada and Surrealism. Huyssen describes the way in which mass culture has been gendered feminine, because it has been understood as seductive, illusory, shallow, and passive, involving consumption rather than production.57 This gendering has devalued mass culture, along with the women who are often described as its primary consumers. While Huyssen acknowledges the misogyny inherent in gendering mass culture as feminine, he still hangs on to the devaluing of mass culture: the problem is not the desire to differentiate between forms of high art and forms of depraved forms of mass culture and its co-optations. The problem rather is the persistent gendering as feminine of that which is devalued.58 In my work, by eliminating the hierarchy specifically between fashion and art, the gendering of these areas can also be troubled. This allows creativity to be ascribed to male and female producers and consumers of both mass culture and art. More troubling, however, is the way in which Huyssen buys into the passive structuring of mass culture. He argues that, certain forms of mass culture, with their obsession with gendered violence are more of a threat to women than to men. After all, it has always been men rather than women
56
Andreas Huyssen, After the Great Divide: Modernism, Mass Culture, Postmodernism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986), 47. 57 Ibid, 55. 58 Ibid, 53.
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who have had real control over the productions of mass culture.59 While this is certainly true in certain realms of mass culture, Huyssen simply transforms women from being the victimizersthreatening to take over modern culture with base mass cultureinto victims assaulted by the mass cultural products of men. The story that I wish to tell here is far more complicated. There are many true victims in the fashion system, as it existed in the early twentieth century and as it exists now, from sweat shop laborers to women starving themselves to fit into a designer gown. There is also an important way in which fashion, particularly in between the wars, broke out of this cycle of female victim and male victimizer, female consumer and male producer. Women were vital cultural producers in all areas of fashion, and fashion was one of the few industries in which women could rise to power. For example, Victoria Billings charted the ride of a Womans Elite that radically changed the production and consumption of fashion in the America.60 She argues that American women who moved into the fashion business brought their own experience as fashion consumers into the role of producer.61 This suggests that consumption has the potential to become a generative act. I want to insist that this is the case particularly in fashion. I will argue in this project that the kinds of consumption women participated in are precisely the same kind of consumption that Andre Breton and other Surrealists engaged with as
59 60
Ibid, 62. Victoria Billings, "Altered Forever: A Women's Elite and the Transformation of American Fashion, Work and Culture, 1930-1955" (PhD dissertation, University of California, Los Angeles, 1990), 404-6. 61 Ibid, 402.
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they trolled the Paris Flea Market and staged exhibitions that looked more like boutiques than galleries. Their collecting has been understood as part of their artistic practices, and by looking at it alongside of the self fashioning of women, we can see womens consumption as a creative act as well. The dialogue that takes place between the female designer and the female wearer contributes to a space of homosocial exchange. Fashion is both an expression of the designer and the wearer, as well as being a commodity. A designer creates a particular vision, but once it is worn it becomes a collaboration between designer and wearer. In her autobiography Shocking Life, Elsa Schiaparelli explained the complex relationship that she as a designer had with the clothes she created: The interpretation of a dress, the means of making it, and the surprising way in which some materials reactall 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. A dress has no life of its own unless it is worn and as soon as this happens another personality takes over from you and animates it, or tries to, glorifies it or destroys it, or makes it into a song of beauty. More often it becomes an indifferent object, or even a pitiful caricature of what you wanted it to bea dream, an expression62 Schiaparelli alludes to the collaboration inherent in the process of design, referring to the drapers, pattern-makers, seamstresses, fabric manufacturers, and embroiderers who worked with her on each of her designs as
62
Schiaparelli, Shocking Life: The Autobiography of Elsa Schiaparelli, 42.
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interpreters, noting that their work can change her original ideas. Once this group creates a finished garment, it is changed yet again by the woman who wears it.
Fashion and the Changing Lives of Women Underlying my research is the conviction that fashionand by extension consumerism and consumptioncan be transformative. A new style of dressing can open up new possibilities for the woman wearing it. This is particularly relevant in the 1920s and 1930s when the lives of women were changing radically after their mobilization into the workforce during the war. Many accounts of fashion in the years between the Wars have understood the 1920s to be a period when fashion helped to liberate the bodies of women, who had begun taking on new roles in public life during World War I. Sportswear was an increasingly important part of womens wardrobes in the years after World War I, and was one of the key influences on womens fashion in the 1920s.63 As in the art world, fashion also took two distinct tracks in the post-war years. Some designers, such as Paquin and Jeanne Lanvin, represented a return to order, designing romantic feminine clothing emphasizing a nipped-in waist with curvy hips. Other designers, such as Chanel and Patou, were proponents of the garonne look, a revolutionary and androgynous style featuring short haircuts with low tight fitting cloche hats
63
Madge Garland, "The Twenties: Sport and Art," in Couture: An Illustrated History of the Great Paris Designers and Their Creations, ed. Ruth Lynam (Garden City: Doubleday & Company, Inc., 1972), 76-77.
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and streamlined looks cut straight on a slim boyish figure. The look reach[ed] its peak in 1926 and continu[ed] with little change until 1929.64 Famous women athletes in the 1920s led the way in fashion, often being dressed by the leading couturiers. Chanel and Patou were known for their sportswear designs. Patou designed for famous athletes including French tennis champion Suzanne Lenglen who caused a sensation when, as she played a 1921 match, her rolled down stockings were revealed under her pleated dress that came just below her knees. Lenglen changed fashion on the tennis court, bringing in a shorter dress as opposed to an ankle length skirt and blouse, as well as a bandeau for the hair, as opposed to a hat. Her modern look and athletic style of play often revealed her undergarments. The British Womens Life Magazine encouraged Lenglen devotees to wear two pairs of practical, and not lacy undergarments that ended at the knee.65 In the 1920s, sports were promoted as part of a healthy lifestyle, and a sun-tan no longer signified working outdoors, but instead upper class leisure and time spent at beachside resorts. Women both in the middle and upper classes were increasingly participating in more active pursuits in the 1920s, following in the footsteps of
64
Valerie D. Mendes and Amy De La Haye, 20th Century Fashion (London: Thames & Hudson, 1999), 59. 65 Catherine Horwood, "Dressing Like a Champion: Women's Tennis Wear in Interwar England," in The Englishness of English Dress, ed. Christopher Breward, Becky Conekin, and Caroline Cox (Oxford: New York, 2002), 51.
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the New Women of the turn of the century.66 Women were playing golf, tennis, and skiing in larger numbers in the 1920s as leisure time for the middle class grew. Historian Gary Cross argues that, the first forty years of [the twentieth-century] witness the most dramatic expansion of leisure in modern history. Both time and resources grew dramatically for recreational activitiesthis was an era of Common Enjoyment, and soon leisure rather than work would be the core of personal experience.67 Cross credits these developments to the standardization of the eight hour work day in Europe and the United States in the post-war period. He argues that increased mechanized efficiency, work reform movements now employing psychology and science in their arguments, and post war demands, in Europe at least, for more freedom and leisure after the intense years of the War made leisure increasingly important.68 Women were taking advantage of this new leisure time and exploring various pursuits including sports, driving, and even flying. Just as clothing for tennis was becoming less restrictive, and emphasizing increased movement, so was clothing for golf and the beach. Vogue and Harpers Bazaar were responding to womens needs for clothing for the beach, driving, train travel, and perhaps even flying in an airplane. Sportswear was increasingly being worn for occupation other than sports, including visiting the country, a resort, driving, flying, or just walking around the city shopping.
66
In interwar Britain the game of tennis could be said to have epitomized middle class Englishness. Ibid, 45. 67 Gary S. Cross, A Social History of Leisure since 1600 (State College, PA: Venture Publishing, Inc., 1990), 163. 68 Ibid, 163-165.
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Certain women (mostly upper and upper middle class) with more disposable income, were increasingly mobile and were demanding a wardrobe to match. Harpers Bazaar and Vogue featured articles on what to wear while piloting or flying as a passenger in a plane, including an article by Amelia Earhart in 1929. By then she was a pilot and was well known as the first female passenger on a transatlantic flight.69 She describes what she wears as both a pilot and passenger.70 (Figure 10) The magazines also featured photographs of women dressed for summer and winter sports. (Figure 11) (Figure 12) These were often not models, but society women who were dressed for free by designers with the condition that they wear only that designers clothes. In a short article appearing below a photograph of a model in a graphic Vionette sweater, Harpers Bazaar exclaimed: A journey by carshould be colored by adventure. Highroads being nowadays devoid of any romantic atmosphere, romance should be replaced by sportthe sport of Speed.71 The article goes on to suggest an appropriate wardrobe for speeding down the road in an open car, whether as a driver or a passenger. This should include a leather cap, goggles and a lined leather coat, with scarves securely fastened, tucked inside ones coat, with nothing allowed to fly in the wind. Anything not pinned or strapped flies. Especially at over sixty miles an hour. One, of
69
It is interesting to note that many female fashion editors and fashion magazine staff, by the 1930s, were regularly passengers on transatlantic flights to see the Paris collections, as were the sketches and photos, flown back on planes from Paris to New York. 70 Amelia Earhart, "Plane Clothes " Harpers Bazaar (January 1929), 95. 71 The Black and White Sweater," Harpers Bazaar (December 1927), 60.
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course, resembles a mummy tightly wound and bound.72 The article notes that one need not worry about her mummy-like appearance as she is unlikely to be recognized while traveling at top speed. As sportswear came into fashion, lines began to blur between morning, afternoon and evening dress. This blurring had already begun during World War I when fabric was scarce as was the domestic labor required to maintain a complex wardrobe of four changes of clothes a day.73 By 1928 Lenglen-style tennis dresses were marketed in Vogue as appropriate for golf, for tennis, for the picnic, [or] for the river.74 (Figure 13) Chanel promoted an increasingly casual wardrobe for women, helping to popularize trousers, among other menswear, for women. She famously introduced jersey fabric as a suitable material for womens dress and promoted what Paul Poiret called, pauvret de luxe, poor look that was luxurious.75 Chanel used simpler and straighter cuts in her handling of jersey. Her long lean dresses and ensembles without cinched waists matched perfectly the fashionable short haircuts of the 1920s. Chanels fashion began a trend to a kind of elegance in dressing that appeared simple, minimal and effortless, even if it took hours of effort to create.76 Because the look stressed simplicity, it was in some ways easy to copy and
72 73
Ibid 60. This had been the norm for wealthy women before the war. Mendes and De La Haye, 20th Century Fashion, 51-2. 74 Cited in, Horwood, "Dressing Like a Champion: Women's Tennis Wear in Interwar England," 51. 75 Mary Louise Roberts, "Sampson and Delilah Revisited: The Politics of Fashion in 1920s France," in The Modern Woman Revisited : Paris between the Wars, ed. Whitney Chadwick and Tirza True Latimer (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2003), 72. 76 Ibid, 82.
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spread throughout France and the world through magazines, ready to wear copies, and department store copies. In her essay Sampson and Delilah Revisited: The Politics of Fashion in 1920s France, Mary Louise Roberts discusses the response to the androgynous look of post war womens fashion. She writes that many critics found the short bobs and slim figures of modern women in the 1920s profoundly disturbing. These critics often believed that this androgynous look implied that women were no longer interested in being mothers, or taking on their traditional roles in society in the post war era. It was feared that women were not only dressing like men, and smoking like men, but acting like men, potentially being mistaken for them, or becoming lesbians. Contemporary supporters of these new fashions, however, declared that this new way of dressing was liberating, allowing women freedom of movement: Defenders of the new look created a vivid image of a new kind of woman who leads a mobile, athletic, and independent life. To do so, they adopted two discursive strategies. First, they aligned the new styles with the aesthetic of modern consumer culture, defined in terms of mobility and speed. Second, they conflated physical and psychological qualities in their logic of human behavior: how one dressed encouraged behaviors analogous to the visual image produced.77 Roberts is discussing this in a French context, but American magazines certainly bear her argument out, featuring women engaged in modern pursuits such as sports, driving or flying. Images of new technological beauty treatments are also a part of this notion of the modern woman whose beauty
77
Ibid, 77-78.
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regimen is streamlined thorough technology. (Figure 14) A spread in Vogue, for example, proclaims: "The sanctum of the modern beauty doctor is as hygienic in every detail as a famous surgeon's operating theater."78 (Figure 15) These images of mechanized beauty put women in both the roles of technician and client. One area that Roberts neglects in her essay is the way that women were entering into positions of power in the fashion and beauty business in the 1920s. She notes that Chanel is the first world famous female couturier, but by the end of the 1920s there would be several more. In America, Elizabeth Arden and Helena Rubinstein were but two of the female beauty moguls of the period whose global corporations also extended to Europe. Fashion magazines were also places where women could enter the work force at a higher level. Edna Woolman Chase directed Vogue from 1914-1952, and in 1927 was acknowledged as the editor of the magazine on the masthead. 79 In 1933 Carmel Snow, who had been the fashion editor at Vogue, was made editor of Harpers Bazaar. Caroline Evans and Minna Thornton note that in the early years of the twentieth century the only comparable area of opportunity was show business, with the difference being that the stage requires the presentation of the woman herself as performer and decorative object rather than as a power behind the scenes.80 Many women were part of
78 79
Why Not Be Beautiful?," Vogue (15 November 1926), 69. Rowlands, A Dash of Daring : The Life of Carmel Snow, 102. 80 Caroline Evans and Minna Thornton, "Fashion, Representation, Femininity," Feminist Review, no. 38 1991), 53.
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the fashion workforce, at all levels of magazines, couture houses, and other garment manufacturers. These were precisely the jobs for that women were wearing the new androgynous fashions of the 1920s. Roberts concludes that though these styles were not physically liberating, they did have some amount of political capital, creating an image of libration for women. Many of the designs of this period were just as physically liberating though. Knitwear, especially for sportswear and swimwear, allowed women to move much more freely than before. Womens garments were much lighter than they had been. Roberts contends that the disappearance of the corset was inconsequential because of the need for girdles to slim figures to boyish proportions. While girdles were common undergarments throughout this period, the changes made in the 1920s had lasting repercussions for the comfort and utility of womens clothing. Roberts contends that Schiaparelli and designers like her reversed the androgynous 1920s look to a gentler, more sculptured look. Typical of this new style were the coiffures that replaced the bob: framed by curls around the face, they had a softer, more "feminine" look. Fashion once again began to follow the contours of a woman's body and to delineate, even emphasize, sexual difference. The length of skirts, which gradually grew throughout the 1920s, stabilized at mid-calf by 1930, and fashion generally grew more "respectable" and "responsible." The notion of "liberty" and "scandal" in fashion disappeared.81
81
Roberts, "Sampson and Delilah Revisited: The Politics of Fashion in 1920s France," 84.
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As we will see, Schiaparellis clothes, while they did bring more emphasis to the female figure, never shied away from the shocking, and in many ways deconstructed traditional notions of female beauty. This project will reconsider the work of Schiaparelli, as well as Chanel, Lilly Dach, and Mme Agns, as a part of a vital visual culture engaged with art. I will demonstrate the contributions of these women to visual culture, and specifically to art. Their work did not simply ape the aesthetic of the Dadaists and Surrealists, but rather negotiated this aesthetic on the new terms of fashion. Schiaparelli, in particular, found ways to transform the ideas of a movement that often objectified and marginalized women, into tactics which empowered them. By leveling the hierarchy that places eternal art over fleeting fashion, we can see the ways in which both men and women responded to the changes taking place in the 1920s and 1930s.
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Chapter 1
Perfume and Plastic Pearls: Chanel and Rrose Slavy

Coco Chanel and Marcel Duchamp spent the first decades of the twentieth century living in different worlds. Chanel spent her time in the fashionable and wealthy circles of Paris and the resort towns of France, such as Deauville. Duchamp, on the other hand, emigrated to New York City, and lived amongst the bohemian circles of Greenwich Village. Despite their separate existences, both Chanel and Duchamp experienced a meteoric rise to fame in the 1910s. Duchamp scandalized New York, and the rest of the United States with his shockingly abstract painting Nude Descending a Staircase (1912), which appeared in the 1913 Armory Show. His 1915 arrival in New York was feted by Vanity Fair, and he was quickly setting off new scandals in the New York art world during World War I. Chanel on the other hand had become famous for raiding the closets of her lovers, showing up to the races in their coats and ties. By the time she opened her dress shop in Deauville in 1914 she was already well known for her unusual mode of dress. Duchamp and Chanel were figures born out of the burgeoning celebrity culture of the 1910s. They understood the ways in which newspapers and magazines were turning people into commodities and they used these processes in their work. Duchamp famously created multiple celebrity alteregos for himself, most notably Rrose Selavy, an aspirational woman in the process of forging her fashionable look. Man Ray photographed the artist in
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the guise of Selavy between 1920 and 1921. Amelia Jones argues, as do many scholars, that these photographs disrupt notions of bourgeois femininity and the commodified woman. Nancy Ring sees Man Rays photographs and Belle Haleine, Duchamps perfume readymade, as instances of Duchamp renouncing a secure masculine authorial identity. This is certainly part of the significance of these works, but it ignores their full participation in celebrity culture. Both Ring and Jones consider the radical effects World War I had on gender. Ring puts Duchamp, along with Man Ray and Francis Picabia, in the context of what she terms a crisis of masculinity, brought on by the mechanization of soldiers in World War I.82 She reflects on the ways that these artists created images of masculinity in their work in a period when gender was in tremendous flux. Jones considers Duchamps position specifically as a man who did not participate in the war, and left behind his family and country for the duration.83 Building on their work, I will examine Duchamps images of Rrose Selavy in the context of the fashion and beauty culture which, I argue, they respond to. Art Historian Nancy Troy has argued persuasively in Couture Culture: A Study in Modern Art in Fashion, that Duhamps readymades are reacting to the crisis of authorial originality brought on by mass production, a crisis
82
Nancy Ring, "New York Dada and the Crisis of Masculinity: Man Ray, Francis Picabia, and Marcel Duchamp in the United States, 1913-1921" (PhD dissertation, Northwestern University, 1991), 8-9. 83 Amelia Jones, "Equivocal Masculinity: New York Dada in the Context of World War I," Art History 25, no. 2 (April 2002), 162-205.
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which also plagues fashion designers. Troy compares Duchamps approach to this crisis with designer Paul Poiret, arguing: Duchamp and Poiret operated not in two entirely different sphere hermetically sealed off from one another, as the dominant discourses of fashion and art history might lead us to believe. Rather, each in his own way, in his own intellectual or professional arena, confronted the same problem, one that was arguably among the most recalcitrant (and compelling) of the modern period: the instability of the authorial subject faced with the collapse of distinction between originality and reproduction, the work of art and the object of mass production.84 Troy offers a structural comparison between Poiret and Duchamp, looking at the way these two figures engage with mass production. Poiret continually attempted to assert himself as an artist, attempting to use his label as a signature that would assure buyers of the originality of his creations. Duchamp, on the other hand, created the readymades, which existed on the shaky ground between art and commodity. Unlike Poiret, Chanel embraced mass production, in a way remarkably similar to Duchamp. While Poiret relied on a traditional image of the designer as a fine artist, both Duchamp and Chanel rethought the identity of the artist and fashion designer in the midst of mass production. Valerie Steel has argued persuasively in Chanel in Context, that the kind of clothing that Chanel was designing was not as new and radical as her biographers would have us believe, but rather was very similar to the designs
84
Troy, Couture Culture: A Study in Modern Art and Fashion, 292.
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of her contemporaries.85 Steele writes that Chanel, represented the new type of fashion designer, who combined in her person the hitherto masculine role of the fashion genius with the feminine role of fashion leader (not the dressmaker, but the celebrity).86 Chanel not only represented this new type; I would argue that she created it. Her significance does not reside in the attitude or style of her clothes as much as it is the way in which she marketed this attitude to women, using herself as the model. Chanels life story of a kept woman who managed to earn financial independence and build a fashion empire represented the upward mobility at the heart of the fantasy of modern capitalism. Chanels fame allowed her to break down the class distinctions between a dressmaker and her clients. Troy writes that, Chanels life story become indistinguishable from her clothing, jewelry, and perfume. Chanel, as well as her early biographer, acted as a catalyst to this process by equating changes in the style or material of her clothing with changes in her love life, thereby encouraging the collapse of distinctions between her professional development on the one hand and the wealthy men with whom she has affairs on the other.87 The modernity of Chanels life as a single woman was embodied in the minimal shapes and simple materials of her clothes. Chanel gave her clothes meaning by connecting them to her own famous life and lifestyle. This meaning gave clothes with a Chanel label a higher value than the copies that flooded the market. In fact the proliferation of copies only make the genuine
85
Valerie Steele, "Chanel in Context," in Chic Thrills : A Fashion Reader, ed. Juliet Ash and Elizabeth Wilson (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), 125. 86 Ibid, 123. 87 Nancy J. Troy, "Chanel's Modernity," in Chanel (New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2005), 19.
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article more desirable. She created, self consciously, a persona that fit perfectly into the tenor of the times and never shied away from taking credit for fashion innovations later in her life. Neither did her biographers. About her little black dress, she proclaimed, Before me, no one would have dared to dress in black.88 It was Chanels celebrity image, which she carefully constructed, that sold her clothes. While Poiret fought the copying of his works in the U.S., Chanel welcomed it, realizing that any use of her name was good publicity. She adopted mechanical reproduction, using machine-made jersey and industrially-produced plastics to create fake pearls and other costume jewelry. Nancy Troy explains that Chanel, more than any of her contemporaries, embraced the idea that her designs, like Marcel Duchamps readymades, flourished at the interstices between the unique couture creation and the mechanical reproduction destined for the masses.89 Duchamp, like Chanel, also took the model of the female fashion celebrityin the form of Rrose Selavyto author some of his works. Duchamp is both the male artistic genius and the female celebrity, autographing photographs and readymades. Working from Troys suggestion that Duchamp and Chanel are both working on the edge between art and commodity, this chapter will examine the way in which Chanel and Duchamp fashion identities and alter egos in the 1910s and
88 89
Danile Bott, Chanel: Collections and Creations (London: Thames & Hudson, 2007), 175. Troy, "Chanel's Modernity," 20.
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1920s. Chanel and Duchamp used celebrity culture to radically alter the role of the fashion designer and artist in the twentieth century.
Performing the Flapper and Garonne Constantin Alaovs cover for the October 2, 1926 issue of the New Yorker presented to the readership of the magazine a puzzling image. (Figure 16) The cover shows what at first looks like a man dressed for the hunt. Upon further inspection, it becomes clear that the figure is, in fact, a woman dressed in a riding habit, applying a last touch of lipstick as a man in the lower corner sounds a horn. This incongruous image in many ways sums up some of the crucial development in the social lives of women in the years after World War I. Women participated in public life more than ever before, and in particular through sports such as biking, tennis, golf, and hunting. The clothing they wore for these sporting pursuits was often inspired by menswear. Chanel herself epitomized this trend. She had become famous, even before she was a designer, for the unique ensembles she wore while riding with her lover Ettienne Balsan. While most women were still wearing skirts and riding side saddle, Chanel had jodhpurs made from the pattern of a pair borrowed from a stable boy so she could ride astride.90 These ensembles were well known by Balsans circle of wealthy friends and their lovers. When Chanel began her relationship with Boy Capel, the famous polo player, her sartorial experiments
90
Madsen, Chanel: A Woman of Her Own, 40.
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became even more well know as she paraded on the polo grounds of Deauville wearing sweaters from Boys closet.91 The terms flapper and garonne were the American and French labels applied to new women like Chanel, who expressed their liberated status in large part through fashion. Unlike the more generic term new woman, these labels referred more distinctly to a way of dressing that suggested the new political and social position of such women, who were increasingly independent and part of public life. The clothing of the garonne and flapper emphasized a straight streamlined silhouette, and a slim boyish figure. Waistbands were worn low around the hips, and short haircuts were often topped with low slung cloche hats. A Berley Studios sketch of a Miller Soeurs pleated sheath dress with a modernist asymmetrical cardigan, and a cloche hat over perfectly cropped hair, exemplifies this style.92 (Figure 17) Like a number of other designers of the period, Chanel adopted the menswear styles she took from her lovers closets in her own designs, including a suit and tie from her spring/summer collection in 1923. (Figure 18)
91
The trend continued when Chanel was in a relationship with the Duke of Westminster. She often raided his closet and was inspired by the tweeds and other English country garb for her own designs. Edmonde Charles-Roux, Chanel and Her World: Friends, Fashion, and Fame , revised and expanded ed. (New York: The Vendme Press, 2005), 245. 92 The Berley Studios was a subscription service for fashion sketches owned by Ethel Rabin. American manufacturers and design rooms subscribed to get sketches of the latest Paris fashions as well as original designs. Sketches are held in the Fashion Institute of Technology Librarys special collections. Miller Soeurs was a small fashion house in Paris which started out making copies of designers clothing and, After they'd copied for a while, they got so they could design well enough themselves so they set up a model house of their own. Elizabeth Hawes, Fashion Is Spinach (New York: Random House, 1938), 63.
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Makeup was a key component in these androgynous flapper and garonne styles. By the 1920s the spectacle of applying makeup in public was an integral part of modern fashion. These public acts exposed the masquerade of femininity. Makeup had been identified with women of loose morals for decades, but by the 1920s and 1930s, its use had become common for many women in Europe and America. The public application of makeup had also become widespread in this period. In the 1910s and 1920s cosmetics were moving from the vanity table to the streets: designed to be flourished in public, compacts flashed silver and enamel finishes, imitated golf balls and cigarette cases, and were even turned into belt and shoe buckles.93 The artifice of the feminine masquerade was being revealed. This public act of making up was especially important for the flapper and garonne, the compact becoming a crucial prop for their gender performance.94 As the New Yorker cover demonstrates, the lipstick became a key prop for the garonne, confirming her femininity within the dandified dress of a huntsman. Kathy Peiss argues that these public acts of applying makeup at work or in restaurants, on commuter trains, and in movie houses drew attention to the fabrication of appearance... As they put on a feminine face, these women briefly claimed public space, stopping the action, in a sense, by making a
93
Peiss, Hope in a Jar: The Making of America's Beauty Culture, 130. See also, Woodhead, War Paint: Madame Helena Rubinstein and Miss Elizabeth Arden: Their Lives, Their Times, Their Rivalry, 129-130. 94 Peiss, Hope in a Jar: The Making of America's Beauty Culture, 186.
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spectacle of themselves.95 This new presence of cosmetics in everyday life and in public spaces helps to explain Duchamps use of Rrose Selavy and the perfume bottle in his work. Cosmetics and perfume were even more visible to both men and women in the 1920s. They were no longer relegated to private spaces and modest understated application.96 While at first these public acts of making-up were controversial, by 1933 Vogue proclaimed, putting on lipstick [in public] had become one of the gestures of the twentieth century.97 These gestures, which exposed the feminine masquerade, form the context in which Marcel Duchamp experimented with such performances. In Man Rays 1921 photographs of Duchamp as Rrose Selavy, Duchamp takes on the trappings of the flapper or garonne. Using the performativity of flapper style, Duchamp plays on its inherent androgyny dressing as a fashionable woman for Man Rays camera. Their photographs create the image of a fashionable celebrity as the author of Duchamps works. Rrose Selavy mixes the masculine role of creator and the feminine role of celebrity spokeswoman. Duchamps performance not only mixes genders but also conflates art and commodity. Like Chanel, Rrose both creates and markets readymades. Duchamps masquerade is inspired by women such as Chanel who connected her personal life to her professional production. Chanel, more than
95 96
Ibid, 186. See Woodhead, War Paint: Madame Helena Rubinstein and Miss Elizabeth Arden: Their Lives, Their Times, Their Rivalry, 129-130. 97 Peiss, Hope in a Jar : The Making of America's Beauty Culture, 155.
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any other designer in the 1920, became inextricably linked with her own designs; she was her own best model for the kind of costly simplicity that she was marketing. Her glamorous lifestyle was the best advertisement for her clothes, and fashion magazines often talked about and illustrated the clothes that she herself, not just her famous clients, wore. A sketch by Drian in Harpers Bazaar is just one of many examples of Chanel modeling her own clothes. Chanels casual pose and black dress are not so far away from Duchamps dark coat and seductive pose, and their hats are nearly the same shape. These images of Duchamp and Chanel exemplify the performative celebrity culture of the 1920s.
Celebrity Culture and the Aspirational Woman in the 1910s and 1920s In the wake of World War I, a new kind of mass culture fixated on personalities was developing.98 Taking advantage of the new visibility of women of all social classes since the War, Chanel became the most famous fashion designer of the 1920s. Unlike the other designers of the period, whose lives were not of interest to the public, Chanel banked on her celebrity to make her designs unique. Even before she was a designer, Chanel was surrounded by celebrity culture. Actresses, courtesans, and the famous mistresses of wealthy men had been the main celebrities of the period before World War I. Chanel entered the celebrity realm of the demi-monde when
98
Gundle, Glamour: A History, 145.
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she took up residence in Etienne Balsans country home, Royallieu, when she was 25. His mistress Emilienne dAlenon, who was still living at Royallieu when Chanel moved in, was one of the most famous courtesans of the time. Yet the age of the courtesan was beginning to fade; old rules of propriety were vanishing. This change was hastened by World War I that brought many women into the workforce, and changed the rules about where women could go and what they could do. In Glamour: A History, Stephen Gundle argues that the ways in which World War I brought together men and women of all classes helped to propagate a new kind of mass culture, including the tabloid press. 99 The ascendancy of America into a dominant role in the creation of popular culture, largely through the increasing centrality of Hollywood in the world-wide film industry, created new opportunities for women of all social classes. Sports stars, race car drivers, and flying aces also began to make their mark. Gundle explains that while some titled amateurs were famous for their participation in such modern or fast paced pursuits, many professional men and women in these fields came to great fame in this period. Aviatrixes such as Amelia Earhart and Amy Johnson, race car driver Hell Nice, and tennis champion Susan Lenglen all helped to launch fashion trends of their own, or with the help of enterprising designers looking for publicity.100 Self-made men and
99
Ibid, 140-141. The next chapter will cover this trend more fully. See also Karla Jay, "No Bumps, No Excrescences: Amelia Earhart's Failed Flight into Fashions," in On Fashion, ed. Shari Benstock and Suzanne Ferriss (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1994), 76-94.
100
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women were rising to prominence in celebrity culture. Chanel was just such a self-made woman. Crucial to this development is the growth of illustrated magazines, such as Vogue, Harpers Bazaar, Time, Vanity Fair, The New Yorker, LIllustration in France, as well as the many magazines that grew up around the Hollywood film industry such as Photoplay. Vogue, owned by Cond Nast, launched a British edition in 1916 and a French one in 1921. This branching out of the magazine gave it a broader international audience for its fashion and celebrity content. Both Vogue and Harpers Bazaar covered the lives of the wealthy and famous, from debutantes to stars of the stage and screen. These magazines photographed such figures, particularly women on vacation, at the race track, or traveling by car, plane or boat. (Figure 19) They reported on where famous women were going, what they were doing, and most importantly, what they were wearing while doing it. Amelia Earhart wrote an article for Harpers Bazaar in 1929 on what to wear while flying. (Error! Reference source not found.) For Vogue, Actress Ina Claire modeled the newest fashions available in American department stores. (Figure 20) A Vogue article from 1922, Paris Turns its Face toward Saint Moritz, describes the smart world, and what they are wearing while spending the winter in Saint Moritz.101 The article notes that Chanels designs are worn by several of the famous vacationers in the resort, including the influential interior
101
J.R.F., "Paris Turns Its Face toward Saint Moritz," Vogue (January 15 1922), 30.
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decorator and society figure Miss Elsie de Wolfe, also known as Lady Mendl.102 Fashion was central to the reporting of this burgeoning field of the press. In France, for example, the magazine Les Modes featured photographs of actresses and singers dressed in the latest fashion. Their reporters wrote about what women of the upper class and the demimonde were wearing to sporting events and the most fashionable events of the season.103 Gradually these personalities become more and more international in scope. For example, the American dancers Vernon and Irene Castle were famous both in Europe and the United States. Irene Castle was one of the first women to bob her hair around 1914. She is also credited with encouraging women to stop wearing corsets through her patronage of the British designer Lucile.104 These are two of the fashion revolutions that Chanel is often mistakenly credited with. Castle, though not from the upper class, created a stir with her fashion sense on the dance floor. In 1939 Fred Astaire and Ginger Rodgers starred as the couple in the film The Story of Vernon and Irene Castle. A long montage in the middle of the film shows the growing fame of the Castles and how their fame was commodified. Three women going through a revolving door find themselves in identical copies of an ensemble worn by Irene. A hatbox appears with an Irene Castle
102 103
Ibid 31. Amy De La Haye and Shelley Tobin, Chanel : The Couturire at Work (London: Victoria & Albert Museum, 1994), 12. 104 Woodhead, War Paint: Madame Helena Rubinstein and Miss Elizabeth Arden: Their Lives, Their Times, Their Rivalry, 116.
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Hat label. Castle bonbons, beauty cream, Vernon Castle shoes, and cigars then appear in quick succession. The film is no exaggeration. Not only did everyone want to dance like the Castles they wanted to live like them too. The most potent sequence in this montage comes when Irene is shown cutting off her own hair, followed by a newspaper with the banner headline Irene Castle Cuts her Hair!, and a montage of women getting the Castle bob. The Castles were in Deauville (helping to popularize the tango) in 1913, as Chanel was opening her shop. They represented a new kind of celebrity used to market a wide range of products. The public was fascinated with all aspects of their private lives, and the same would soon be true of Chanel. Chanel was a particularly new breed in Europe, a self-made woman.105 After World War I, the aristocracy began to be less and less important. The revolutions across Europe, and in particular the recent Russian revolution, had proven how quickly aristocrats and royalty could be overturned. World War I had thrown together men and women of all classes, beginning the process of leveling the powerful class distinctions that had governed before the war. Before World War I, a designer would never have socialized with his or her clients, but by the end of the war such rigid class distinctions were fracturing.106 Chanel, in particular, is responsible for changing the role of the
105
I say this with some restraint since her first investors were her lovers, but they were repaid, and with the exception of their monetary support, Chanel really did build her business mostly on her own. 106 Designers such as Charles Worth were not a part of high society. Designers had been seen on the same level as dressmakers and tailors, as servants to their upper-class clients. Chanel broke that mold,
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designer, from paid servant to glamorous celebrity.107 Nancy Troy argues that through her connection to wealthy and titled men, and her style, Chanel attained a degree of celebrity that allowed her to overcome, or at least ignore, the class distinctions that had previously prevented dressmakers from achieving acceptance among wealthy and powerful elites.108
Simplicity, Costly Simplicity109 Chanel began constructing her public persona from her very early years as the live-in lover of tienne Balsan, a wealthy man with a passion for horses. Chanel used clothing to distinguish herself from the other live-in mistresses and kept women who favored decadent and highly adorned clothing. Chanel preferred to wear simple clothes, including mens britches or jodhpurs for riding, a favorite activity at Royallieu. Her unconventional style, which favored mens clothes and simplicity over adornment, caught the eye of the beau monde. She began selling hats after many of the women in her circle wanted the same simple hats she was wearing. Her next lover, Boy Capel, set her up with a shop in Paris. His fame as a polo player got Chanels unique style noticed at the clubs where he played. Chanels presence on the polo field
Society had never before opened its doors to couturiers, however talented they may have been, and these creative women had been elegated to the status of faiseuses or dressmakersThen, suddenly, for Chanel everything changed.Charles-Roux, Chanel and Her World: Friends, Fashion, and Fame , 203. Madsen, Chanel : A Woman of Her Own, 70. 107 English, A Cultural History of Fashion in the Twentieth Century: From the Catwalk to the Sidewalk, 31. 108 Troy, "Chanel's Modernity," 19 109 Baron Adolf de Meyer, "Drian Shows the Silhouette from Head to Heels," Harpers Bazaar (August 1922), 51.
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is caricatured in a 1913 drawing by Sem of Chanel embracing Capel who is represented as a polo playing centaur. Capel has one of Chanels chic hats balance on the top of his mallet. The drawing was a part of Sems book, Tangoville sur la Mer. Perhaps this simple and masculine way of dressing came quite naturally to Chanel. She was looking for comfortable and affordable clothes for her active life. Eventually, however, her style took on a far more calculated and self conscious attitude, which caused many scholars and critics to think of her as a dandy. The dandy, exemplified by Beau Brummell in the early nineteenth-century, dressed in a deceptively simple style. The minimal esthetic required exacting precision to pull off. The result of the demanding toilette of the dandy was an effortless look that suggested superiority over the fussy decadent displays of wealth worn by other men. Chanel style engaged in a similar self-conscious display of sartorial superiority. Her expertly styled minimalism flew in the face of the traditional displays of wealth present in womens fashion at the turn of the century. A 1935 photograph of Chanel taken by Man Ray exhibits this carefully constructed persona.(Figure 21) Valerie Steel explains that the courtesans of the demi-monde, unconstrained by issues of modesty or propriety, perhaps also motivated by hostility towards the established orderpioneered the newest styles.110 Chanel wished to distinguish herself from the gaudily dressed kept women, but also from the wealthy, whom she began to regard with a certain amount of contempt.
110
Steele, "Chanel in Context," 119.
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As a girl who had grown up poor and then existed on the outskirts of society as a kept woman, Chanel grew to despise many of the habits of the very wealthy. She particularly hated their dishonesty, fickleness, and habit of purchasing clothing through a private account that was sometimes only settled yearly.111 It was widely known that Chanel preferred the company of artists and musicians to the rich. In 1931, The New Yorker reported on Chanel: Picasso says she has more sense than any woman in Europe and is almost the only one he can talk to with comfortPicabia, Chirco, Cocteau, Christian Brard, Bakst, Stravinsky [with whom Chanel had an affair], and Diaghileff (sic) are among the important contemporary talents who have been her familiars.112 Biographer Axel Madsen concludes that it was as if deep down she rejected the glittering society that had made her rich.113 She was, however, happy to take men from this society as lovers: Arthur Boy Capel a wealthy (but untitled) polo player, Grand Duke Dmitri Pavlovitch, a grandson of Czar Alexander II who escaped the revolution, and the recently divorced Duke of Westminster, just to name the most famous. Despite a personal ambivalence towards the upper echelons of society and to those who occupied these spheres, Chanel knew that her popularity among the wealthy and titled would guarantee the success of the rest of her business.114
111 112
Madsen, Chanel : A Woman of Her Own, 130, 126. Janet Flanner, "31 Rue Cambon," The New Yorker (14 March 1931), 27-28. 113 Madsen, Chanel : A Woman of Her Own, 146. 114 Her typical origin story was that she was born poor and when her mother died she was raised in the country by an aunt. See for example: Flanner, "31 Rue Cambon," 25.
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Chanels fame was cemented when she introduced simple jersey ensembles in her Deauville shop around 1915. Jersey, a simple machine-knit fabric, had previously only been used for mens underwear and sportswear and was notoriously difficult to work with because of its stretch. Through her celebrity image as a modern woman, and the power that gave to her label, Chanel turned jersey from a poor fabric into one that signified modernity, luxury, and youth. By 1917, Chanels name was synonymous with jersey. While she was not the only designer to use this material, she was the designer whose aesthetic was most associated with it. In 1917, Vogue reported that: Mlle Chanel is still devoted to jersey, which she has rendered as smart as the classic serge in which we have frocked ourselves all our mortal lives.115 A caption for a Chanel ensemble claims that this designer made jersey what it is to-daywe hope she is satisfied.116 Vogue noted that Chanel herself wore these jersey designs.117 Not only did Chanel launch jersey-style, she herself embodied it. One of the origin stories Chanel told for her use of jersey maintains that she took one of Boy Capels old sweaters and cut it down the front so she wouldnt have to pull it over her head. Adding some ribbon trim, a collar, and tying it at the waist, Chanel claimed that she created a sensation among the women in Deauville who demanded to know where she had gotten the dress: My dear, my fortune is built on that old jersey that Id put on because it was
115 116
A.S., "Paris Stays at Home," Vogue (15 May 1917), 48. Ibid 50. 117 idem, "The Fashions of Paris Lead the Simple Life," Vogue (1 August 1917), 31.
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cold in Deauville.118 This story, whether true or not, exemplifies the minimal and androgynous style that got Chanel noticed even before she began to design clothing. Once she extended her millinery business to include sportswear, she became a young woman to watch. But her celebrity was based on very little. Others might be famous by reason of their wealth or their extravagance. When it came to Chanel, however, one simply said: She is like nobody else.119 According to another Chanel legend, she bought a large amount of jersey (which had remained unsold for its intended purpose, mens sportswear, because of the War) at a deep discount from the Rodier fabric manufacturer. In a different version of this origin story, Rodier refused to produce any more jersey for Chanel since he never imagined women would buy dresses made from it. Chanels stubbornness led her to prove him wrong and convince him to produce more jersey for her.120 These stories, however apocryphal, illustrate the ways in which Chanel attached her own personal story to jersey fabric. They portray her as a modern iconoclast flying in the face of conventional fashion, despite the fact that, in reality, fashion was already moving in this direction. According to fashion historian Bonnie English, Chanels working-class background allowed her to respond pragmatically to the shortage of fine textiles by replacing them with pedestrian fabrics. More importantly the material symbolically represented a
118 119
Madsen, Chanel : A Woman of Her Own, 69. Charles-Roux, Chanel and Her World : Friends, Fashion, and Fame , 118. 120 Madsen, Chanel : A Woman of Her Own, 81.
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revolutionaryand at the same time bourgeoisresponse to the previous use of expensive haute couture fabrics.121 A vest sketched by Max Meyer exemplifies Chanels casual and simple jersey style.122 (Figure 22) Many of Chanels early designs were based on this simple low necked shawl collar. In one Max Meyer sketch, a low cut red coat is worn over a dress with the same neckline worn over a blouse. (Figure 23) Similar jersey designs were featured in Les Elegances Parisiennes in March 1917 and Vogue for January 15, 1917. (Figure 24)(Figure 25) These simple designs were popular during the war, a time when women were dressing somewhat more soberly. They had the added benefit of making the wearer look casual and young. Instead of using luxurious fabrics and rich detailing to show off a womans wealth, these garments relied on simple lines and casual style to create a clean, youthful, and sporty aesthetic. Chanels personal style, which reflected her antagonism towards the upper classes, was tailor made for the War years. Her glamorous image gave this style a life after the war, making it signify the youth and modernity that she embodied. Using her own public image as a young glamorous and sporty New Woman, Chanel was able to make simple clothes highly desirable.
121
English, A Cultural History of Fashion in the Twentieth Century: From the Catwalk to the Sidewalk, 2-3. 122 Max Meyer worked for A. Beller and Co., a high-end company that made womens ready-to-wear garments in New York based on the work of designers in Paris. Meyer sketched the work of Paris designers for the company from roughly 1915-1929. Many of these sketches are held in the Fashion Institute of Technologys Special Collections Library.
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Chanel had been in the right place at the right time to start her business. In 1913, she returned to Deauville, and with the help of Capel, opened a shop on the rue Gontaut-Biron. At some point she expanded her business in this shop beyond just hats, to include sportswear. A New York Times article from 1913 described Deauville as a place where new fashions originated: what goes at Deauville is very apt to be considered fashionable until December.123 The article also confirms that the rue Gontaut-Biron had lately become the most fashionable street in Deauville, and mentions Chanel coats as being frequently seen there in the morning. Both pragmatically and symbolically, jersey was a perfect choice for Chanel in building an image of a young and somewhat revolutionary fashion brand. The novelty of using jersey was that it was not a luxury fabric, but Chanel used it like one, selling her jersey garments for high prices, at 3,000 or 7,000 francs in 1915, today the cost of a typical dress would be well over $2,000.124 Chanel knew that to get wealthy women to accept new materials she needed to create a sense of luxury about them with high prices. 125 In early collections she used fur trim to enhance the jersey. (Figure 26) These jersey ensembles led to her famous invention of the little black dress.
123 124
"What Fashionable Folk Are Wearing at Deauville," New York Times, 21 September 1913. Troy, "Chanel's Modernity," 20. 125 Interestingly in 1916 the New York Times reported that many American companies were copying Chanels designs because they were so popular, but were changing the material from jersey to serge, taffeta, or satin: the average woman does not want to pay $100 or more for a coat and skirt of Jersey cloth, because she has the right perception and feeling that this material is not for the city. Bettina Bedwell, "Paris Frees Sports Styles," Chicago Daily Tribune, 30 April 1933, X2.
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Like almost every other innovation with which Chanel was credited, she was not the first designer to create a little black dress. Rather she codified the style of casual dress embodied by the design.126 Chanel, in large part through her personal style, gave meaning to the little back dresses already on the market. The simplicity of the little black dress fit perfectly with Chanels ethos of simple streamlined dressing. It was the polar opposite of the overworked, gaudy ensemble of the generation before. The little black dress closest kin was a maids uniform or a shop-girls dress. Chanels biographers frequently credit the nuns habits Chanel saw in the convent school she attended as the precursor to the style. Others claim that the dress was a result of the death of Boy Capel, her version of mourning clothes.127 Having made a name for herself as an individual with a distinctive style, Chanels name in turn became representative of that style, lending simple garments like a little black dress a new level of cultural currency. Similarly, Duchamps artistic production depended on the many artistic and authorial identities he created. The readymades, such as Belle Helene were createdostensibly with complete aesthetic indifferencewhen Duchamp chose an object, removed it from the context of everyday life and placed it in the context of art through the operations of labeling (as in titles and
126 127
Steele, "Chanel in Context," 125. Alice Mackrell, Coco Chanel, Fashion Designers (New York: Holmes & Meier, 1991), 30. Edmonde Charles-Roux, Chanel: Her Life, Her Worldand the Woman behind the Legend She Herself Created, trans. Nancy Amphoux (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1975), 43.
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inscriptions and/or display)128 The readymade had to be inscribed, or framed artistically by an artist to make it legible as art. As in the infamous case of Fountain (1917) for example, Duchamp turned a urinal into a work of art by inscribing it with the signature of one of his alter-egos, R. Mutt, and placing it on a pedestal in an art exhibition. Even then the status of the readymade was not secure. It still resides in the liminal space between individual art object and mass-produced commodity. Duchamps adoption of multiple artistic alter-egos called attention to the role of the artist as authenticator of the avant-garde masterpiece. Chanels production worked in the same way. It was her label that conferred value on the clothes she designed. Her label marked these clothes as fashionable because they were designed and approved by her. Chanel understood that by creating dresses that were easily reproducible, either by the home sewer or a mass market manufacturer, she would only make her own dresses more valuable. In The New Yorker, Janet Flanner says as much in 1931: Chanel was the only one to find (or at any rate to say) that copyists furnished excellent publicity since they popularized models among people who otherwise could never afford them and in her case, anyhow, demonstrated the vast difference between an imitation and the genuine article.129 In 1926 Vogue published a drawing of what would become one of Chanels famous little black dresses, proclaiming Here is a Ford signed
128
Janine A. Mileaf, Please Touch: Dada and Surrealist Objects after the Readymade (Hanover: Dartmouth College Press, 2010), 26. 129 Flanner, "31 Rue Cambon," 26.
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Chanel.130 (Figure 27) Ford was famous for saying in 1909 that "Any customer can have a car painted any color that he wants so long as it is black"131 Chanels dress functioned in much the same way. Her dictatorial control over the colors in fashion was similar to that of Ford. Ford decided to focus his manufacturing on one single model in 1909, the Model T. He developed mass production techniques that made automobiles affordable for the great multitudes.132 Like Chanel he used simplified, streamlined designs, but unlike Chanel, Ford wanted to make a car that any man making a good salary, would be able to buy.133 Ford wanted the Model T to be ubiquitous. Chanel allowed copyists to make her little black dress ubiquitous, but through her marketing of her own little black dresses she associated the style with herself. This marketing was largely accomplished by dressing the staff of her boutique in little black dresses, and wearing them herself. Buying a Chanel little black dress then ensured true chic and quality. Troy explains that through copying, Chanels little black dress was able to move beyond mere fashion to embody style itself.134 Like Duchamp, it was the act of inscribing the garment, in Chanels case with the house label, which conferred the value of her personal style and celebrity on a simple black jersey dress. The label on the dress transferred the style that Chanel embodied onto the
130 131
Charles-Roux, Chanel and Her World : Friends, Fashion, and Fame , 226. Henry Ford and Samuel Crowther, My Life and Work (Garden City: Doubleday, Page & Company, 1923), 72. 132 Ibid, 73. 133 Ibid, 73. 134 Troy, "Chanel's Modernity," 20.
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wearer of the dress. The presence of copies only made the genuine article more valuable. By the time of Janet Flanners 1931 profile in The New Yorker, Chanel had been firmly established as an iconoclastic designer, who since her first simple sailor dresses has brought the essential items of most of the other humbler trade costumes into fashionable circles. She has put the apaches sweater into the Ritz, utilized the ditch-diggers scarf, made chic the white collars and cuffs of waitresses, and put queens into mechanics tunics By shrewdly sensing the Zeitgeist, Chanel began turning out matrons and debutants on whom unornamented, workmanlike, though expensive, gowns and glass jewelry were exciting, chic, and becoming.135 Flanner praises Chanels subversive style and recognizes that the ways in which Chanels clothes turned traditional displays of wealth on their head. She also notes the way that Chanel used high prices to encourage an air of exclusivity about her clothes. She created a minimal style that was costly and demanded a close attention to detail. While Chanel pioneered the practice of the designer as muse, in the beauty industry Elizabeth Arden and Helena Rubinstein were also building their own public personae as a way of building their brands.136 They were pioneers of public relations and while they would eventually have staffs to promote their public images, these women started out as their own press
135 136
Flanner, "31 Rue Cambon," 25. Annie Turnbo Malone and Madame C.J. Walker were also hugely successful businesswomen making cosmetics for African American women, but are beyond the scope of this project since they do not participate in the world of high fashion in the way that Rubinstein and Arden do. Peiss, Hope in a Jar: The Making of America's Beauty Culture, 61.
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agents.137 Like Chanel, Arden and Rubinstein carefully constructed celebrity identities themselves to market their products, creating mythic pasts to sell lipstick and face cream. Arden had her signature color Arden pink, which was used everywhere in her salons and on her packaging. She had changed her name from Florence Nightingale Graham to Elizabeth Arden.138 Arden tended to create romantic myths about her childhood which, like Chanels, was marked by poverty and the loss of her mother. Both Arden and Chanel loved cheap romance novels and probably picked up some of their talent for spinning dreamy tales of their lives from these books. Arden started a rumor that she was the daughter of a Scottish jockey, and grew up, with a whinny in her ear from the many horses her father kept on their farm in Woodbridge, outside of Toronto.139 This story, which obscured the poverty of her youth, fit in well with Ardens interest in horse racing. She used much of her wealth to buy horses and create the Maine Chance Farm where she bred thoroughbreds. Like Chanel, Arden also told stories about herself that fit perfectly with the zeitgeist. For example, she joined a suffrage march on May 6th, 1912, less for political reasons and more for promotional ones. The beautiful suffragette
137
Arden for example controlled all advertising copy for her products, even when advertisements were being made by outside agencies. Rubinstein traveled across the country in 1916 to scout retail locations to stock her products, and had their staff sent to New York to be trained and outfitted in Rubinstein uniforms. Woodhead, War Paint: Madame Helena Rubinstein and Miss Elizabeth Arden: Their Lives, Their Times, Their Rivalry, 113-118. See also Peiss, Hope in a Jar : The Making of America's Beauty Culture, 79. 138 Rumor has it that Arden changed her name after parting ways with her business partner, Elizabeth Hubbard to avoid changing both the first and last names on her salons sign. 139 Lindy Woodhead writes that Arden must have started this myth herself, feeding it to the press, the quotation is from a New Yorker profile from April 6, 1935. Woodhead, War Paint: Madame Helena Rubinstein and Miss Elizabeth Arden: Their Lives, Their Times, Their Rivalry , 55.
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Inez Milholland led the march on horseback bedecked in bright red lipstick, making it the perfect opportunity for Arden to connect her own business with a famous woman and modern political cause, not to mention the upper class supporters of that cause. After this one march she would always claim to have been at the forefront of the suffrage battle.140 Helena Rubinstein used her exotic image as a Polish woman with a secret recipe for face cream to build her business. Rubinstein claimed that the famous Polish actress Modjeska had shared the recipe for face cream that had come to her from Polish chemists, the Lykusky brothers. Modjeska had moved to the United States in 1870, and was famous enough to have several cinemas named after her.141 In reality, born to a middle class Jewish family in Krakow, Rubinstein didnt meet Modjeska until much later in her career. Her famous cream, which she called Valaze, was more likely a formula handed down through the women in her family; pine bark was probably the secret to this creams power.142 Adding celebrities and scientists to the pedigree of her cream gave it an air of modernity, as opposed to the heirloom quality of a family hand-me-down. Laden with her signature cabochon rubies and black and white pearls, there was no mistaking her wealth. Like Chanel, Rubinstein cultivated friendships with artists, and even more than Chanel, Rubinstein used these artists to lend glamour and a new kind of worldly modernity to
140 141
Ibid, 98. Ibid, 27. 142 Ibid, 25-27.
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herself and her business.143 Her first husband, Edward Titus, was an important publisher of avant-garde books, and her salons were filled with African and Oceanic art, as well as the work of Man Ray, Leger, Brancusi, and Elie Nadelman.144 In 1937, Rubinstein even borrowed Man Rays painting Two Lovers (1932-36 depicting a giant pair of lips floating in a surreal landscape) to use in a window display of lipstick.145 Chanel, Rubinstein, and Arden were just as aspirational as their customers and the readers of Vogue and Harpers Bazaar.146 These women came from humble beginnings and created business empires that brought them the wealth they had sought. All three women sensed a change in popular culture in the early twentieth century. They realized that the public was interested in products endorsed by celebrities. Arden, Rubinstein and Chanel made themselves into the kind of women they wanted to buy their products: wealthy, cultured and elite. Arden and Rubinstein knew that in order to convince shop-girls and stenographers to buy a new face cream or shade of lipstick they had to associate their products with glamour. They used
143
For an excellent overview see, Marie Joann Clifford, "Brand Name Modernism: Helena Rubinstein's Art Collection, Femininity, and the Marketing of Modern Style" (PhD dissertation, University of California, 1999), 179-215, and idem, "Helena Rubinstein's Beauty Salons, Fashion, and Modernist Display," Winterthur Portfolio 38, no. 2/3 2003), 83-108. 144 Rubinstein was a major lender to the important 1935 MoMA exhibition, African Negro Art. Her husband Edward Titus also loaned some of her African pieces to Man Ray to use in photographs, including a famous image of Kiki de Montparnasse with an African mask. Woodhead, War Paint: Madame Helena Rubinstein and Miss Elizabeth Arden: Their Lives, Their Times, Their Rivalry , 16, 134. 145 The painting was borrowed just after it was shown prominently in MoMAs 1936 -27 exhibition, Fantastic Art, Dada, Surrealism. Clifford, "Brand Name Modernism: Helena Rubinstein's Art Collection, Femininity, and the Marketing of Modern Style", 44-45. 146 The aspirational woman is a crucial demographic to consider in studies of fashion and beauty, since it this group of women who help to spread trends beyond the upper classes, and find ways of applying high fashion to their everyday, middle-class lives.
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themselves and their own lives to connect their products to a fantasy of glamour, wealth, and leisure. These women not only marketed products, but also ways of living.147
Rrose Selavy and the Artist as Celebrity in the 1910s and 1920s Duchamps alter ego Rrose Selavy first appeared as the copyright holder on Duchamps work Fresh Window in 1920.148 In early 1921 Man Ray made the first photographic portraits of Rrose. A second sitting later that year produced a second set of portraits of Rrose, which Duchamp used on the bottle for his perfume readymade, Belle Haleine.(Figure 28) This readymade was an empty Rigaud perfume bottle that Duchamp created a new label for with one of Man Rays photographs. The object was photographed by Man Ray and appeared on the cover of the journal New York Dada (April 1921). In the fall of 1921 while in Paris, Man Ray took the final set of images of Rrose Selavy. (Figure 29) All of the photographs of Rrose are clearly based on fashion and beauty images. They show Man Ray in a standard portrait format. The set used on Bell Haleine shows Duchamp looking away from the camera in short wig with a fussy feathered hat and a coat or cape with a ruffled collar. The old fashioned ensemble is finished with a pearl choker and
147
Woodhead, War Paint: Madame Helena Rubinstein and Miss Elizabeth Arden: Their Lives, Their Times, Their Rivalry, 6. 148 At this point her name is spelled Rose. Anne Collins Goodyear and James W. McManus, "Inventing Marcel Duchamp: The Dynamics of Portraiture," in Inventing Marcel Duchamp: The Dynamics of Portraiture, ed. Anne Collins Goodyear and James W. McManus (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2009), 152.
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a brooch. In the last set of photographs, Duchamps ensemble is much more modern, a simple black hat with a printed band of fabric similar to the designs of Sonia Delaunay. He wears a coat with a fur collar pulled up closely around his face. Many scholars have seen Rrose Selavy as a parody of the fashion and cosmetics advertisements that were flooding Europe and the United States in the 1920s. These scholars have often focused on the meanings of Rrose Selavy in the relation to ideas about gender as a masquerade, or as part of Duchamps larger project of questioning authorship. While these interpretations may be accurate, I am interested in looking at these images from a different perspective. I want to move from these more general and theoretical arguments, to one which tends specifically to visual representations of Rrose Selavy in the context of fashion and beauty images in 1920 when they were created. This will illuminate the ways in which Duchamp was specifically engaging with fashion culture in order to negotiate the evolving relationship between art and consumer culture. Amelia Jones writes that, Duchamp specialists are surprised by the femininity of this authorial mark, its difference from the expected signature: Marcel Duchamp.149 If we look at Duchamps creation of Rrose in the context of 1920 consumer culture (in particular fashion), however, the choice of a woman as creator is perfectly clear. Rrose should be aligned with Chanel,
149
Amelia Jones, Postmodernism and the En-Gendering of Marcel Duchamp (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 155.
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as well as Rubinstein, Arden, and other fashion designers and beauty entrepreneurs, significant and famous women who were creators. These women signed their names to productsbe they skin cream, lipstick, or dresseswhose meaning and value was determined by their names. Jones does align Man Rays photographs of Rrose Selavy with advertising images and celebrity photographyprecisely the kind of work Man Ray was also taking on at the time, as we will see in the next chapter. Jones argues that in these photographs, by mimicking the advertising format, [Duchamp] unveils its seductions, while producing new ones based specifically on his identity and the photographs subject and object.150 James McManus also acknowledges the role of advertising images in Duchamp and Man Rays depictions of Rrose. A recent catalog of Duchamp portraits, Inventing Marcel Duchamp: The Dynamics of Portraiture, for example, argues that Belle Haleine, mocks advertising and marketing campaigns aimed at standardizing notions of taste and beauty. Lending her image to the project, Rrose, corporate figurehead (whose gender identity is questionable), appears as Belle Haleine, spoofing celebrity figures (e.g. Coco Chanel) who were transforming their identities into product brand names.151 While it is certainly instructive that McManus chooses Chanel as his example of a 1920s celebrity, this analysis is rather narrow. Both McManus and Jones
150 151
Ibid, 168. James W. McManus, "Rrose Selavy (Recto) and Duchamp Looking through the Brawl at Austerlitz (Verso)," in Inventing Marcel Duchamp: The Dynamics of Portraiture , ed. Anne Collins Goodyear and James W. McManus (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2009), 146. This idea is reiterated in idem, "Not Seen and/or Less Seen," in Inventing Marcel Duchamp: The Dynamics of Portraiture, ed. Anne Collins Goodyear and James W. McManus (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2009), 75.
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connect the images of Rrose to fashion and beauty culture on the level of parody, and without doubt this is a part of the meaning of these images. Yet I want to think about how these images, and their adoption of the tactics of fashion marketing, also reflected changes in the art world, and Duchamps own refiguring of the role of the artist. What Duchamp did with these Rrose Selavy images and his reuse of them, commented on the ways that this personal branding, or what we might today call lifestyle marketing, had taken over the art world as well as the world of consumer culture, with artists as its willing accomplices. It is well established that Marcel Duchamp, Man Ray, and other Dada artists were responding to the horrific mechanization of violence during World War I, a crisis of masculinity, the rapid expansion of mass production, and consumerism.152 With the rise of celebrity culture through an increasingly global (or at least transatlantic) network of media, a new cult of celebrity was developing around certain artists as it was around eccentric women. Duchamp was one such artist. His Nude Descending a Staircase had made such a splash at the 1913 Armory show that he was famous in America even before he arrived. While the painting had created a scandal, and had been mercilessly mocked by the press, Duchamp was treated with respect, if not reverencethese articles inducted Duchamp into a new culture of
152
See: Jones, "Equivocal Masculinity: New York Dada in the Context of World War I," 164. Caroline A. Jones, "The Sex of the Machine: Mechanomorphic Art, New Women, and Francis Picabia's Neurasthenic Cure," in Picturing Science, Producing Art, ed. Caroline A. Jones and Peter Galison (New York: Routledge, 1998), 151. Ring, "New York Dada and the Crisis of Masculinity : Man Ray, Francis Picabia, and Marcel Duchamp in the United States, 1913-1921", 14.
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celebrity.153 Nancy Ring points to Vanity Fair as a key site for the promotion of the artist as celebrity, as did fashion magazines for fashion culture.154 The September 1915 issue ran an article announcing, Marcel Duchamp has arrived in New York! You dont know him? Impossible! Why he painted the Nude Descending a Staircase.155 Vogue and Harpers Bazaar also participated in this phenomenon with regular columns on art that often covered contemporary artists. In 1922 Reginald Marsh depicted the artists and bohemians of Greenwich Village for a Harpers Bazaar spread, "So This is that Greenwich Village Where All Those Queer Artists Live." Duchamp is shown descending the staircase (subway) in the middle of Sheridan Square.156 (Figure 30)(Figure 31) Nancy Ring argues that Duchamp worked to upset the belief among the editorial staff at Vanity Fair that access to the artist, conceived of as an individual at some distance from commercial culture, was the basis for a comprehension of modern art.157 Instead Duchamp willingly inserted himself into New Yorks culture of celebrity, but refused in his early interviews to comply with its many codes for representing artists. Most obviously, he problematizes the idea of the artist as a distinctive individual with a rich interior life and a scandalous character by concealing his thoughts and
153
Ring, "New York Dada and the Crisis of Masculinity: Man Ray, Francis Picabia, and Marcel Duchamp in the United States, 1913-1921", 199-200. 154 Ibid, 206. 155 Marcel Duchamp Visits New York," Vanity Fair (September 1915), 57. 156 So This Is that Greenwich Village Where All Those Queer Artists Live," Harpers Bazaar (October 1922), 152. 157 Ring, "New York Dada and the Crisis of Masculinity: Man Ray, Francis Picabia, and Marcel Duchamp in the United States, 1913-1921", 210.
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emotions and steering away from making definitive pronouncements.158 Many of the short-lived avant-garde magazines of this period also participated in this celebrity culture, though sometimes in jest. New York Dada, which featured Belle Haleine on its cover, had an article titled, Pug Debs Make Society Bow, which engaged with the blending in the 1920s of celebrity and fashion. The article describes a coming-out party planned by Mina Loy to introduce the Marsden Hartleys and the Joseph Stellas to society...everybody who is who will be who-er than ever that night.159 The sarcastic article mimics the language of society pages and fashion reporting, describing what Hartley and Stella will wear to the ball. Unlike Vanity Fair, publications such as New York Dada were meant for a small audience of artists and intellectuals in the Dada circle. New York Dadas anarchic and absurd content employed fashion discourse to mock Dadas own celebrity culture. Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven was also a celebrity among the Greenwich Village crowd, and two portraits of her are included in New York Dada.160 Her unusual ensembles made from found (and sometimes stolen) objects made her a notorious character. Florine Stettheimers paintings of the New York art scene in the 1920s show the luminaries of the period and the important
158 159
Ibid, 210. Pug Debs Make Society Bow," New York Dada (April 1921), n.p. 160 Interestingly, the Baroness remains somewhat of a celebrity. A fictional account of her life has been written, Holy Skirts by Ren Steinke and actress Brittney Murphy posed as the Baroness for a fashion spread in the New York Times Magazine. Ren Steinke, "My Heart Belongs to Dada," New York Times Magazine (Fall 2002), 190-198. Rene Steinke, Holy Skirts (New York: William Morrow, 2005).
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salons. Stettheimers diaries refer to her paintings of Duchamp as advertisements for him.161 While Francis Naumann is baffled by this remark, it seems clear that Stettheimer thought of her paintings as publicizing the avant-garde circle of which she was a part. It is clear from Naumanns confusion that he is uncomfortable blurring the lines between art and advertisement, but in essence this is what Duchamps work was always doing. Nauman is not the only scholar uncomfortable with the relationship between Duchamps art and commerce. As we have seen, when commerce is acknowledged by art historians examining Duchamps work, it is often seen as the object of mockery by the artist. Duchamp comments on advertising and fashion, but these subjects apparently have no bearing on his own work. Janine Mileaf rightly counters this argument, writing that the readymade acknowledges, the close allegiance between art and commerce without giving in to either side of the equation.162 It is precisely this precarious allegiance that is at play in Duchamps work that makes it so difficult for his critics. Duchamp does not solve the problem, but rather leaves both sidesart and commerceexposed for his audience to recognized. Mileaf and Matthew Witkovsky go so far as to identify Dada, in Paris at least, as a brand name, writing that, Of all the Dada cities, it was Paris that most emphatically made Dada into a recognizable brand name. With crowds of thousands and a steady
161 162
Francis M. Naumann, New York Dada, 1915-23 (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1994), 151. Mileaf, Please Touch: Dada and Surrealist Objects after the Readymade, 28.
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stream of press chatter, the movement became en Vogue in Paris more than anywhere else.163 By attending specifically to the marketing strategies of a fashion designer such as Chanel, it is clear the she and Duchamp worked in remarkably similar ways. Chanel and Duchamp created brand identities that they embodied that gave their work currency, both in terms of cultural meaning and monetary value. As we can see from the continued importance of the Chanel label and business and Duchamps continued importance in the art world, the ways in which these two figures embodied modernity are still incredibly powerful.
1921: Belle Haleine and Chanel No. 5 In a 1921 work, Duchamp makes his ultimate comment on artists as celebrities by giving his alter-ego, Rrose Selavy, her own perfume, Belle Haleine (Beautiful Breath). Duchamp created this perfume readymade from an empty bottle of a Rigaud perfume called Un Air Embaum (Scented Air) that had been designed by Julien Viard, a sculptor who was known for creating perfume bottles with figural stoppers. Un Air Embaum was first released in the United States in 1915. Rigaud had already been selling perfumes in the Unites States, including the Grand Opera range, which included perfumes named for famous opera singers. In Mary Garden for
163
Janine Mileaf and Matthew S. Witkovsky, "Paris," in Dada: Zurich, Berlin, Hannover, Cologne, New York, Paris, ed. Leah Dickerman (Washington: National Gallery of Art, 2005), 361.
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example, M. Rigaud has visualized through perfume, for our eternal delight, the very spirit of the great artiste, Mary Garden, and with Carolina White, Rigaud had created a scent as elusive and appealing as the delightful personality of the artiste herself.164 Duchamp may have been referring to these scents when he personified the artiste Rrose Selavy in a perfume. Meanwhile in France, Coco Chanel had also developed her own scent, Chanel No. 5, and launched it in 1921 the same year Duchamp made Belle Haleine.165 This was the first scent to be named for a fashion designer.166 Chanel, of course, was also famous for her style and glamorous life in 1921 and this certainly accounted for the popularity of her new scent. She developed the fragrance with Ernst Beaux, a perfumer who was experimenting with synthetic scents. Chanel wanted to make a perfume abstract and modern.167 She supposedly told Beaux, I dont want hints of roses, of lilies of the valley I want a perfume that is composed. Its a paradox. On a woman a natural flower scent smells artificial. Perhaps a natural perfume must be created artificially.168 The artificiality of the scent was crucial for Chanel.
164 165
Riker and Hegeman Drug Stores Advertisement, Washington Post , 16 Febuary 1913. A few sources give different dates for Chanel No. 5, but most agree on 1921. See for example, De La Haye and Tobin, Chanel : The Couturire at Work, 36. Kenneth E. Silver, "Flacon and Fragrance: The New Math of Chanel No. 5," in Chanel (New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2005), 31. Richard Howard Stamelman, Perfume : Joy, Obsession, Scandal, Sin : A Cultural History of Fragrance from 1750 to the Present (New York: Rizzoli, 2006), 244. 166 Paul Poiret had a line of fragrances, but they were named for his daughters. 167 Silver, "Flacon and Fragrance: The New Math of Chanel No. 5," 31. 168 Madsen, Chanel : A Woman of Her Own, 133.
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Her perfume was the first high end scent to use synthetic aldehydes. 169 Chanel and Beaux used a synthetic scent which, in combination with the scent of real jasmine, created a perfume that lasted much longer than natural scents. Chanel chose a simple flacon for the perfume that looked like a pharmaceutical bottle and gave the scent a number instead of a flowery name. Some say she chose five because it was her favorite number, or because the scent she chose was the fifth sample Beaux created. No matter why she chose the number five, the name Chanel No. 5 certainly played up the modernity and scientific chemical content of the perfume. The Rigaud bottle that Duchamp had chosen for his perfume, while quite simple, was radically different from Chanels geometric one. The Rigaud bottle, an Art Nouveau design, was a bit out of step with new Art Deco trends, exemplified by Chanels minimal bottle. The bottles simple and generic shape provided the ideal platform for him to change the label. According to Richard Howard Stamelman, Rigauds Un Air Embaum was heavily advertised and popular at the time Duchamp made Belle Haleine.170 It would have been a bottle that many women would recognize.171 A 1920 issue of Harpers Bazaar, for example, included an ad for the perfume calling it the
169
Aldehydes are a class of chemicals often described as giving perfume a sparkling, or champagnelike quality. Ernst Beaux also used benzyl acetate in the perfume, a chemical which in combination with jasmine extract creates a longer lasting fragrance. 170 Stamelman, Perfume: Joy, Obsession, Scandal, Sin : A Cultural History of Fragrance from 1750 to the Present, 194. 171 This strikes me as potentially interesting in relation to the Mad Caps, and the idea of maybe a counterpublic for this art, the idea of what women saw when they were looking at this work.
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exclusive perfume with a touch of the Orient.172 (Figure 32) Many Rigaud advertisements used orientalist imagery to market the brand. Duchamp, on the other hand, uses a photograph of himself as Rrose Selavy as a part of the label, which reads: Belle Haleine/Eau de Voilette/RS/New York/Paris. Duchamps use of a modern celebrity name to market his readymade perfume, rather than vague exoticism, falls more in line with Chanels marketing strategy than Rigauds. The image of Rrose Selavy however was not nearly as modern and forward looking as Chanels image in the early 1920s.(Error! Reference source not found.) Shot in New York, Man Rays photograph of Duchamp as Rrose was rather dowdy. Chanel would not have approved of this ensemble with its fussy old fashioned hat. Her hats were much simpler and more modern. For example, she topped a bright orange hat with a similar shape to Rroses hat, not with a gaudy array of plumes, but with a single black feather. (Figure 33) The coat shown with this hat also has a much simpler line than the ruffle that Rrose wears. Rroses sartorial choices in this image make her appear older and out of fashion. It was not until later in 1921 when the two artists arrived in Paris, that Man Ray created the more chic portraits of Rrose.(Error! Reference source not found.) Notably, this was after Man Ray had been taking fashion photographs for Paul Poiret.173 Man Ray, it seems, had learned a few things about fashion, and managed to make Rrose
172 173
Rigaud Perfume Advertisement," Harpers Bazaar (September 1920), 17. McManus, "Not Seen and/or Less Seen," 75.
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into a bit more of a garonne. Man Rays first photographs of Duchamp as Rrose, with no makeup and an old fashioned pearl choker and brooch, call attention to the transvestite performance. The fussy feathered hat and ruffled collar threaten to take over the images, fashion crowds out the face of the celebrity. Man Rays highly focused image reveals Duchamps rough skin, not the soft skin of a beautiful woman. Duchamp and Man Ray created an image that fails to seduce the viewer, calling attention to the function of the advertising image. Chanels advertising images, on the other hand, are highly seductive. She was depicted as young and modern. Caricaturist Sem (George Goursat) made advertising posters for Chanel, using the distinctive square bottle of Chanel No. 5 centrally in the ads. Chanels bottle is often said to look like a mans bottle of cologne, perhaps adapted from one of her lovers bottles.174 Wherever the idea came from, Chanels bottle evoked a sense of masculinity that made her perfume different and sexy. This is apparent in one of Sems posters in which a young woman with a chic garonne haircut and lowwaisted dress throws her head back, looking back longingly to the Chanel No. 5 bottle above her. (Figure 34) Another advertisement shows Chanel in her atelier watching a fitting. (Figure 35) Chanel sits languorously on a couch, cigarette in hand, adorned with a long string of her signature pearls. While she seems to be touching some fabric bolts draped across the couch, this is the
174
"Temptation, Joy & Scandal: Fragrance & Fashion 1900-1950 ", ((Exhibition Pamphlet) New York: The Museum at FIT, 2004) n.p. Edwin T. Morris, Fragrance: The Story of Perfume from Cleopatra to Chanel (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1984), 203.
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only hint of work. To the right, the real work is being done by a seamstress with pins in her mouth, who kneels in front of a glamorous client, pinning her dress. This image projects precisely the image that Chanel was cultivating early on. Chanel famously kept herself out of the public spaces in her shop.175 In order to make her presence more mysterious, she limited the time that she spent in her shop. This added to the idea that Chanel was less a working woman than a woman of leisure who happened to run a fashion house. From the time that Chanel had opened her first maison de couture in Biarritz, she was said to stay at her couture house only until 2 or 3 in the afternoon before retiring to her private drawing room to entertain or prepare for the events of the evening.176 A 1931 New Yorker profile claimed that Chanel remains inviolably invisible. Her friends state that she is shy. This legendary shyness is probably a mixture of diffidence, indifference and perhaps disillusion.177 Constructing an image of mystery and glamour was key to Chanels marketing. Wealthy women wanted to wear the clothing of a woman who was alluring and famous for throwing parties, not running a business. While Chanels persona was carefully and seamlessly constructed, Duchamp called attention to the construction of his alter ego, not least by dressing in drag, but also by creating a woman who was hopelessly out of style. Duchamp admitted that even the name he chose for his alter ego was
175 176
Madsen, Chanel: A Woman of Her Own, 126. De La Haye and Tobin, Chanel: The Couturire at Work, 19-20. 177 Flanner, "31 Rue Cambon," 26.
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out of fashion: Rrose was an awful name in 1920, yet was typical of the kind of words used by cosmetics makers. 178 In addition to flower names, using French words was also a key marketing tactic used by American beauty companies to make their products seem exotic and fashionable.179 For Belle Haleine, Duchamp carefully chose typesetting to mimic that of the original Rigaud perfume. The name of the perfume, Belle Haleine is often noted as a double entendre, sounding in French like both beautiful Helen, and beautiful breath, which Richard Howard Stamelman notes evokes the idea of bad breath, a strange pairing with perfume.180 Belle Hlne evokes the famous mythic beauty Helen of Troy, and almost certainly an operetta by Jacques Offenbach, La Belle Hlne (1864) that enjoyed a successful revival in Paris at the Gaiet in 1920. The show landed on the pages of Vogue in the United States in a spread on fashions in the theater. The revival of the operetta apparently included an updated version of a procession of manikins, featuring some very modern dresses including one illustrated in Vogue. (Figure 36) Duchamps wordplay continues in calling his perfume not eau de toilette, but Eau de Voilette (veil water).181 While Duchamps perfume is named for Belle
178
Janine A. Mileaf, "Bachelorettes," in Inventing Marcel Duchamp: The Dynamics of Portraiture , ed. Anne Collins Goodyear and James W. McManus (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2009), 49. 179 Ring, "New York Dada and the Crisis of Masculinity: Man Ray, Francis Picabia, and Marcel Duchamp in the United States, 1913-1921," 231-232. 180 Stamelman, Perfume : Joy, Obsession, Scandal, Sin : A Cultural History of Fragrance from 1750 to the Present, 196. 181 There is a complex wordplay going on here Duchamp conflates the French words for violet, rape and veil. Stamelman connects Voilette to Duchamps acts of veiling in this work. Veiling his own gender in the photograph as Rrose and veiling the original perfume bottle, giving it a new name and celebrity endorsement. There are a number of readings for this wordplay that go beyond the scope of my particular interest in this object. Ibid, 198
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Haleine, Rrose is still present in her initials on the bottle above the cities of origin for the perfume, New York and Paris.182 These cities are of course the cities of Duchamp and Rrose. As with Duchamps cross-dressing, the use of perfume in this readymade in particular evoked the artificial and self consciously theatrical aspects of the celebrity. While perfume and especially cosmetics had a dubious history, associated with women of loose morals precisely because of their artificiality, by the 1910s and especially 1920s they were gaining widespread acceptance. Duchamps interest in self transformation also made the beauty industry a perfect subject for his work. In addition to the use of makeup by consumers to enact transformation, many of the women who ran beauty businesses, like Chanel, were adept at creating public personae to market their products. Marie Joann Clifford argues that this practice of self promotion, and what I would call self-making was unique to women entrepreneurs particularly in the fashion and beauty industries, because it was one of the only options available to them.183 I would argue that artists in the same period, particularly Duchamp, adopted these tactics as well to market themselves. Duchamp was responding to the way in which the art world was increasingly becoming a world like fashion with its celebrities and tastemakers. Artists were being written about in magazines such as Vanity Fair and The New Yorker. They were also creating their own magazines and
182 183
Ibid, 198. Clifford, "Brand Name Modernism: Helena Rubinstein's Art Collection, Femininity, and the Marketing of Modern Style," 46-47.
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writing about each other. While Duchamp was clearly critiquing the new status of the artist as celebrity, his art also depended on this new structure. The fame Duchamp had achieved through his controversial painting Nude Descending a Staircase conferred avant-garde value on his other works. His readymades depended on his construction of himself as an artist, and his construction of alter-egos in order to be understood as art.
Chanel and the Dandy Likewise, Chanel had to create a structure in which her minimal clothes could be understood as chic, luxurious, and modern as opposed to simple and poor. By creating a striking persona, and wearing her designs herself, Chanel gave her brand name meaning. Her clothes were associated with her persona, allowing her to make simple chic clothes stand not just for wealth, but also good taste. In recent literature, Chanel has often been associated with the dandy, precisely because the stance of the dandy emphasized that wealth often did not guarantee taste.184 The aesthetics of the dandy at the beginning of the 19th century, as championed by Beau Brummel, embraced a restrained masculine elegance.185 A dandy should look perfectly put together and effortless at the same time. They were responding to what they saw as the
184
See for example, Steele, "Chanel in Context," 119. Or Evans and Thornton, Women & Fashion : A New Look, 122-123. 185 The idea of the dandy has taken on many meanings since it was first coined at the turn of the 19 th century. It often simply refers to a man who takes a particular interest in dressing, or who is excessively ornamented. It begins to refer to roughly the same man as the more recent and perhaps unfortunate term metro -sexual. Ive chosen to focus on the early Brummell incarnation of the dandy as it is the most relevant to Chanel.
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over-dressed and over-ornamented man of the turn of the 19th century who was a slave to fashions whims wearing bright colors, and gaudy jewelry. The dandys clothes were ordinary, but the way in which he wore them was anything but ordinary. It required a certain talent, fastidiousness, and plenty of time to dress. Men often came to watch Brummells ritual of dressing, attempting to learn the craft of dressing as a dandy. The same kind of snobbery that is part of Brummells early dandy style is integral to Chanels. Both Brumell and Chanel created minimal styles that looked casual and effortless but were anything but easy to put together. Caroline Evans and Minna Thornton describe Brummels dandy as, at once litist and democratic: democratic because it was relatively ordinary and litist because very few men could get it rightthat depended on the coexistence of money, leisure and, that odd one out, skillBrummells kind of dandyism instigated the idea of a new kind of aristocracy, an aristocracy based on talent.186 Chanels style worked the same way: it seemed ordinary on the surface, but the importance of details, in particular the designer label, was the crux of getting the style right. It took both money and skill to get the Chanel look right, it involved more than just putting on her designs. Like Brummell, Chanel found ways to maintain a system of status even as she streamlined and
186
Evans and Thornton, Women & Fashion : A New Look, 122-3.
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simplified clothing.187 Chanel made perfectly tailored, but casual clothes the epitome of wealth and class. Brummells dandy also emphasizes the construction and artificiality of fashionin particular through the painstaking ritual of dressing. Many of Chanels styles worked in this way, her use of costume jewelry as well as the use of synthetic chemicals in her perfume emphasized the construction of codes of wealth. They also demonstrated the malleability of the signs of wealth and stylishness. Paul Poiret famously called Chanels early style miserabilisme de luxe, meaning deluxe poverty.188 This was an apt name for a style that mimicked the uniforms of maids, shop-girls, and stable boys but through the power of Chanels celebrity came to signify glamour, wealth and luxury.189 One didnt just dress like a maid in a black dress, a woman had to wear the black dress in just the right way, with just the right accessories for the look to be high fashion. Chanel introduced simple clothes that became a uniform for style, but the art came in wearing them perfectly. She was the ultimate model of her clothes, demonstrating how they were to be worn properly, and often making pronouncements in the press about how her clothes ought to be worn. Newspapers often reported the clothes that Chanel herself was wearing, to
187
It is also worth noting that both Brummell and Chanel created styles which resisted the changing whims of fashions. Both believed in a sense of timeless style. Steele, "Chanel in Context," 126. 188 Evans and Thornton, Women & Fashion: A New Look, 125. 189 Paul Poiret claimed that women in the 1920s, nowresemble little undernourished telephone clerks. Ibid, 130.
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parties or in the fashionable resorts.190 In another instance Mary Brush Willams spends over half of her column, The Last Word in Paris Fashion, on October 29, 1922 describing Chanel and wondering what makes her so chic.191 The article also includes an illustration of Chanel in one of her own creations, alongside three other ensembles on unnamed models. Williams description of Chanel certainly fits the profile of the dandy: She has a lot of chicand much of it comes from her look of great indifference, almost of insolencethe gown she wore was almost nothingof course she enwound it with pearlsfor she is rich and jewel loving. Who is not that has succeeded in art?...Her coiffeur was awfully chic and typical of the Parisian hair arrangement of the present. It was done close to her head, and left a little shaggythere was not any sense of carelessness as if that unkemptness had just happened. It had been studied, mapped out, and practiced on in advance.192 Chanel is described as rich and perfectly but simply dressed with every detail done right, but at the same time looking indifferentas if the look came about accidentally. Williams goes on to describe how Chanels deportment teaches women to spend your entire life getting ready, and look as if you never thought about such a thing.193 Chanel had carefully created a look of effortless chic that she was willing to share with customers, for the right price. Chanels public persona, and the way she dressed herself defined this fashion and set her apart from other designers whose clothes were not as closely linked to their personal style or lives.
190 191
Evening Gowns Worn at the Ritz in Paris," Washington Post , 19 March 1922, 59. Mary Brush Williams, "The Last Word in Paris Fashions," Chicago Daily Tribune, 29 October 1922, C1. 192 Ibid C1. 193 Ibid C1.
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Shopping with Duchamp The indifference of Chanels style, the casualness of her taste, has a parallel in Duchamps work too. Duchamp emphasized the idea of indifference or ambivalence in the way he chose the objects for his readymades. Jane Mileaf explains, the readymade was thus intended to oppose what modernist critics have long considered a fundamental component of an artists activitythe exercise of aesthetic taste.194 Mileaf argues that Duchamps indifference is only a posture, fully recognizing the seductive nature of objects, their attraction ad commodities, Duchamp worked against this power while ultimately failing to neutralize its effect.195 Duchamps could never actually achieve aesthetic indifference, but like Chanel and Beau Brummell before her, he could act the part. Just as Chanels looks appeared casually put-together, easy, and nonchalant, but were actually the result of a carefully calculated effort, Duchamps readymades appeared to embrace random chance, but were in fact a result of a very particular kind of taste. Mileaf enticingly describes Duchamps taste as one that, resides in the bodyit is a sensory, habit forming activity that emphasizes the emotive over the intellectual.196 This could easily be a description of the kind of taste exercised in shopping, particularly for clothing, where the sense of touch is
194 195
Mileaf, Please Touch: Dada and Surrealist Objects after the Readymade, 21. Ibid, 25. 196 Ibid, 25.
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particularly central. Of course shopping is central to the creation of the readymade, Duchamp begins with the purchase of an object that is then transformed or inscribed, but it is the purchase that is central to this art making process. Not only does the name readymade connect these objects to fashion, but so does Duchamps method of choosing the specific objects. Through Belle Haleine, Duchamp specifically connected his readymades to fashion, particularly though the integration on Man Rays photograph of Rrose on the bottle. Many scholars who have grappled with Rrose Selavy have chosen to embrace the indeterminacy and slipperiness of the image, accepting Duchamps supposed indifference.197 Amelia Jones focuses on Rrose as pointing to the performativity and slipperiness of gender, drawing on the work of Judith Butler. While David Joselit does point to Rrose Selavy as having to do with the commodification of the self, he makes no attempt to situate this commodification in the context of the 1920s. These writers have thought of Rrose in the abstract sense, as a man posing as a woman and authoring as a woman. Rrose, though is not just any woman. She is clearly a woman of fashion. While I would not go so far as to argue that she was based on Coco Chanel herself, she is certainly based on the kind of fashion celebrity that she models. Taking Man Rays photographs on their own, it is easy to see Rrose as simply as fashionable drag personashe could be any new woman. When we consider the other spaces in which
197
See the introduction to David Joselits book for more on Duchamps plurality, David Joselit, Infinite Regress: Marcel Duchamp, 1910-1941 (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1998), 3-7.
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Rrose appears, however, it becomes clear that she is an author in the same sense that a fashion designer is an author. Rrose signed things, works of art, letters, her photograph. The signature was crucial to fashion designers, many of them such as Poiret and Vionnet used their own signatures on their labels.198 Rrose also copyrighted the 1926 film Anmic Cinma, a collaboration between Duchamp, Man Ray, and Marc Allgret. As Nancy Troy illustrates in Couture Culture, Paul Poiret made it his mission to protect French couturiers by allowing them to copyright their designs.199 Most importantly, perhaps, Rrose lends her face and signature (in the form of initials) to the fake perfume Belle Haleine. Rrose is clearly a fashion author, in precisely the same vein as Chanel. Duchamp chooses to make this alter ego a fashion author because of the tenuous position of fashion on the edge of art and commerce. Troy explains, Haute couture was developed and promoted in the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century by dress designers who regarded the commercial world with disdain. These men and women carefully constructed their personas as great artists, in order to distinguish themselves from the banality of mass culture.200 As mass production began to play a greater role in clothing manufacture, distinctions had to be created between haute couture and readymade clothing. Mass production, and new technologies in photography and filmmaking were challenging old practices of art making.
198 199
Troy, Couture Culture: A Study in Modern Art and Fashion, 323. Ibid, 269-275. 200 Ibid, 193.
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Both Chanel and Duchamp found ways of working on the line between art and commerce, blurring the already fuzzy boundary. Romanov Pearls and Westminster Tweeds Chanel redefined the role of the fashion designer, ushering in a era in which women dominated the industry. She created the model of a female designer as her own muse. She was seen as designing for herself as much or more so than her customers. This is a model that would be used by Elsa Schiaparelli, and would reemerge after World War II with women such as Mary Quant and Betsy Johnson in the 1960s, Diane Von Furstenberg in the 1970s, and Vivienne Westwood in the 1980s. Essential to the success of this model was the way that trends that Chanel advocated were connected to her personal life, and particularly the men she was seeing. For example when she began seeing Grand Duke Dmitri in 1922 he gave her Romanov pearls. She had a fake copy of the pearls made, and began wearing the real and fake pearls as a signature style. Flanner wrote that the only thing shes really interested in wearing is pearls.201 Other stories claim that Chanel got her first string of pearls in exchange for a Cartier tiara that Boy had given her, but which Chanel found too ostentatious. Whether or not Chanel created this look, it came to be associated with her.202 Many American ads touted pearls
201 202
Flanner, "31 Rue Cambon," 28. The famous American costume jewelry designer Miriam Haskell was said to have sold her own jewelry alongside Chanels to attract more business. Deanna Farneti Cera, The Jewels of Miriam Haskell (Woodbridge Suffolk: Antique Collector's Club, 1997), 17.
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in Chanel Pink or Chanels newest pearlsin pastel tints.203 An advertisement for Bullocks in the Los Angeles Times tells readers that all European Marts were searched for fashionable Jewelry Accessories for the costume complete idea that is a present Vogue, and features Many pearls (simulated of course) after those made famous by Chanel in Paris.204 Wanamakers advertised, New pearl necklaces as introduced by Gabrielle Chanel, presented by the Bijoux Shop where Mlle Chanels distinctive jewelry was first introduced to America.. for $25.205 Bettina Bedwell reported in the Chicago Daily Tribune that the Parisienne woman, is often content to wear the simplest of dresses and the plainest of clothes, but she will not forgo that carefully studied trifle of her toilette which is the insignia of individuality. Just now the fancy of the Parisienne is completely held by artificial jewelry and a favorite is the necklace introduced by Chanel, composed of imitation pearls the size of large marbles sparsely strung upon a slender chain and fitted close to the throat.206 The Vogue for fake pearls represented another way in which Chanel mixed high and low, and changed old ideas about displays of wealth. In this case it was not the value of the pearls themselves but the value of the Chanel name that gave the wearer cachet. Chanel found masses of real jewels to be an obscene show of wealth, but masses of fake ones were perfectly stylish.207 Of course Chanel charged lavish prices even for her costume jewelry. Even the
203
Bonwit Teller & Co. advertisement, New York Times 5 October 1924, 5. Best & Co. Advertisement," New York Times 11 September 1924, 4. 204 Bullock's Advertisement, Los Angeles Times 12 October 1924, C33. 205 The John Wanamaker Store News, New York Times 3 April 1924, 7. 206 Bettina Bedwell, "The Last Word in Paris Fashion," Chicago Daily Tribune, 20 July 1924, C4. 207 Evans and Thornton, Women & Fashion : A New Look, 125.
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name of Chanels costume jewelry, vrais bijoux en toc, (real fake jewelry), emphasized the dandiacal sense of artificiality in fashion that she was courting:208 Costume jewelry caught on in Europe and in the United States. In Anita Loos Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, Lorelai Lee reports that quite a lot of the famous girls in Paris had imitations of all their jewelry and put the jewelry in a safe and they really wore the imitations, so they could wear it and have a good time.209 Lorelai naturally cannot see the point, and prefers the real thing. In the mid 1920s, Chanel began to exploit the Vogue in Paris for all things Russian. At the time she was seeing the Grand Duke Dmitri Pavlovitch, a grandson of Czar Alexander II. In this so called Slav period, she also created copies of many other pieces of Russian jewelry, often from the Grand Dukes collection, and adapted lavishly embroidered Russian peasant styles to her collections. (Figure 37) These styles were being used by many designers at the time, in large part due to the influx to Paris of Russian nobility who were fleeing the revolution.210 These aristocrats became a sensation in Paris.211 The Washington Post reported in a headline, Hungry Paris Shop Girls Once Graced Czars Court: Russian exiles in French capital reverse legend of
208 209
Farneti Cera, The Jewels of Miriam Haskell, 13. Anita Loos, "Gentlemen Prefer Blondes": The Illuminating Diary of a Professional Lady (New York: Boni & Liveright, 1925), 97. 210 Eleanor Gunn, "Russia and Her Vivid Colors," Washington Post, 26 April 1922, 8. 211 The vogue for deposed Russian aristocrats in Paris was also reflected in several films, including Roberta (1935), a musical about a former Russian Princess, and couturier whose partner dies leaving her half of the business to her nephew, an American football player. Much like Chanels business Madame Robertas fashion house is also populated by former Russian aristocrats who work as models, doormen, and chauffeurs. Ginger Rodgers plays an American singer posting as Comtesse Scharwenka, telling Huckleberry Haines (Fred Astaire) Youve got to have a title to croon over here.
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Cinderellaprincesses of yesterday do sewing now and once proud Russian general is a carpenter212 Chanel, too, hired well connected Russian expatriates to model and sell her gowns at this time, as it gave an aristocratic air to her business.213 Chanel also hired the Dukes sister and her friends to work on embroidery for her clothes. Vogue showed one midnight-blue georgette crpe frock, with gold and jeweled embroidery forming a necklace, wristlets, and ornaments on each side of a low waist line. The trimming was made for Chanel by the Grand Duchess Marie of Russia at her wonderful establishment for embroideries and the design was taken from a marvelous necklace which belonged to the Romanoff family.214 (Figure 38) While Vogue doesnt mention Grand Duke Demitri, Grand Duchess Marie and the Romanoffs add a sense of authenticity and cachet to the Russian design. Chanels relationship with the Grand Duke was known well enough to appear later in the 1920s in several articles about the Duke of Westminsters marriage to Loelia Mary Ponsonby.215 Chanels most wealthy and famous lover was probably the Duke of Westminster, Hugh Richard Arthur Grosvenors, Bendor to his friends, whom she met in 1923. To the public this was perhaps the most well known of her romances. In 1926 and again in 1928, the New York Times reported that the
212 213
Hungry Paris Shop Girls Once Graced Czars Court," Washington Post, 4 February 1923, 6. Janet Wallach, Chanel: Her Style and Her Life (New York: Doubleday, 1998), 48-49. 214 Perfect Smartness Is the Result of Smart Perfection in Every Detail," Vogue (15 May 1925), 81. 215 La Dauphine, "English Duke Is Member of an Old and Famous Family," Chicago Daily Tribune, 18 March 1928. May Birkhead, "Hear Duke May Wed at French Chateau," New York Times, 9 February 1930, E3.
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Duke was about to wed Chanel.216 The Atlanta Constitution carried a long story on December 25, 1927 speculating that the Duke had sold a famous diamond because Chanel feared its reported curse. (Figure 39) Chanel began to adopt upper class English menswear styles in this period, including tweeds, and three piece suits as well as working class menswear like berets and flared trousers which she saw on the men who ran Bendors yacht, the Flying Cloud. Loose trousers would eventually become a Chanel uniform when she was in the Rivera or on the Flying Cloud, but this simple outfit was always piled with pearls and other jewelry. (Figure 40) She was photographed with her friend Vera Bate in 1928 wearing the Dukes own clothes. (Figure 41) As a way of marketing her clothes to wealthy women in England, Chanel hired Vera Bate in 1925 to wear her clothes.217 Bate was the perfect model since she was already a part of the Prince of Wales inner circle. By 1924 she was being used by American advertisers selling copies of a belted sweater and skirt that she wore while with the Prince of Wales. (Figure 42)(Figure 43)(Figure 44) Chanel can be seen wearing the same style, in jacquard knit with a relaxed jacket inspired by a mens suit in a photograph from 1929. (Figure 45) With her hands casually in her pockets, Chanel is in the fashionable pose that
216
"Mme. Chanel Duke's Guest," New York Times 18 November 1928, 9. "Westminster Soon to Wed, Says Rumor," New York Times, 16 June 1926, 25. 217 Madsen, Chanel : A Woman of Her Own, 142.
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became known as the Chanel slouch.218 This casual pose, like many of Chanels gestures, flew in the face of conventional manners. Evans and Thornton argue that Chanels adoption of mens styles are a part of the upwardly mobile language of the dandy, informed by the attack on individual social restrictions in the interest of self advancement.219 They conclude that her design practice suggests that, for women, dressing for power involves the adoption of a masculine cult of distinction. At once revolutionary and conservative220 Chanel used masculine clothing to build her celebrity persona. Whatever significance her adoption of mens styles had in the realms of gender politics, it was certainly memorable. The clothes that Chanel was making in the 1920s were not nearly as mannish as the clothes she wore. While Chanels designs did follow a rigidly boyish line, they never really verged into the cross-dressing territory that she did in her personal style. (Figure 46) Chanels personal wardrobe paved the way for her designs. For example, when Chanel came to the United States in the early 1930 to work in Hollywood, Janet Flanner reported that her trousseau contains a half-dozen of the little jersey coats-and-skirts for which she is famous and a half-dozen evening gowns, made to look as much as possible like the famous little coatsand-skirts.221 In all of these casesher adoption of Russian motifs, pearls, English tweeds, menswearshe was not creating clothes that were radically
218
Harold Koda and Andrew Bolton, Chanel (New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2005), 201. 219 Evans and Thornton, Women & Fashion : A New Look, 124-126. 220 Ibid, 132. 221 Flanner, "31 Rue Cambon," 28.
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different from her contemporaries. Yet these particular styles became closely associated with her because of her public persona, the men she was seen with, the places where she was vacationing. Chanels lifestyle perfectly fit the clothes that were popular in the 1920s.222 When Chanel arrived in Hollywood in February of 1931, she was already a well known figure in the United States. Vanity Fair nominated her to their Hall of Fame in June. As they wrote, she was the first to apply the principals of modernism to dressmaking; because she numbers among her friends the most famous men of France; because she combines a shrewd business sense with an enormous personal prodigality and a genuine, if erratic enthusiasm for the art; and finally because she came to America to make a laudable attempt to introduce chic to Hollywood.223 Like Duchamp, Chanel had constructed an image of herself as a glamorous woman, who was more like her clients than a typical dress designer. It is clear from the press coverage surrounding her arrival in the United States that, like Duchamp, her reputation preceded her.
The Celebrity Personas of Duchamp and Chanel Duchamp created outlandish personas that were rather detached from himself, and designed to create scandal. Chanels public persona, though highly constructed, was closely coupled with herself and her life. Chanels designs were not detached from her, in the way that the work of her
222 223
Troy, "Chanel's Modernity," 19. We Nominate for the Hall of Fame," Vanity Fair (June 1931), 66.
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contemporaries was. She wore her own clothes. They were in many ways designed for her. She was her own muse, rejecting the model of the male fashion genius, or the invisible work of the dressmaker. Her works were intimately tied to herself and her body. She was seen by the public as designing clothing for herself. Chanels choice to make a break between fashion and art was a conscious and calculated decision at a time when art was making its own radical break with art itself, as embodied by Duchamp. Just as Duchamp was radically experimenting with questions of what counted for art, Chanel attacked the question of what counted for fashion. Both of these figures created work that existed on the boundaries of art and commodity. They used the public personas that they constructed to give their works meaning beyond its value as a commodity. Returning to the two images of Duchamp and Chanel that opened this chapter, it is clear that both figures used similar tactics to shape their personas for the public. In Man Rays 1920-21 photograph of Duchamp as Rrose Selavy, Duchamp poses as an alluring and androgynous woman wearing a fur wrap and a black hat with a printed fabric band.(Error! Reference source not found.) The fabric is not unlike Sonya Delaunays modernist printed fabric. (Figure 47) Here Rrose looks modern, and yet explicitly feminine. Duchamps posture borrowed from fashion models who used the gesture of touching both fabrics and fur to emphasize the materials sensuality. A model at the bottom right of a 1921 Harpers Bazaar spread on
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sportswear is a possible source for Duchamps pose.224 (Figure 48) This photograph certainly aligns Rrose with modern fashion, even if it is a bit down-market. She is certainly no match for the full fledged flapper or garonne of the same period such as the one in a 1920-22 Berley Studios sketch of a Miller Soeurs pleated sheath dress with a modernist asymmetrical cardigan, and a cloche hat over perfectly cropped hair.225 (Error! Reference
source not found.) It is clear that Duchamp is directly appropriating fashion
imagery. He is engaging directly with fashions position in between art and commodity. In a fashion illustration from Harpers Bazaars August 1922 issue, fashion illustrator Drian shows Chanels new silhouette for the season. (Figure 49) This drawing shows the designer herself in her own design. The drawing is labeled simply Mademoiselle Chanel, while the other dress on the page is labeled The Callot Silhouette. (Figure 50) Photographer Baron Adolf de Meyer explains in the captions, Chanel conceives clothes from an entirely different angle: the individuality of the woman predominates, the gown is designed as but a background Although skirts and waists daily grow longer, Mademoiselle Chanel still remains a delightful exception. She clings to her short and narrow styles, which she
224
Or perhaps it was Duchamps friend Grace Ewings inspiration since she lent Duchamp the hat and her hands for this photograph according to Susan Fillin-Yeh, "Dandies, Marginality and Modernism: Georgia O'Keeffe, Marcel Duchamp and Other Cross-Dressers," Oxford Art Journal 18, no. 2 (1995), 33. 225 The Berley Studios was a subscription service for fashion sketches owned by Ethel Rabin. American manufacturers and design rooms subscribed to get sketches of the latest Paris fashions as well as original designs. Sketches are held in the Fashion Institute of Technology Librarys special collections. Miller Soeurs was a small fashion house in Paris which started out making copies of designers clothing and, After they'd copied for a while, they got so they could design well enough themselves so they set up a model house of their own. Hawes, Fashion Is Spinach, 63.
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herself wearshow well, I hardly need say, as everyone knows her, if only by sight. These suit her youthful type, especially as she generally relieves the extreme simplicity and girlishness of her appearance by adding many gorgeous strings of pearls of dazzling luster. Chanel has succeeded in making simplicity, costly simplicity, the keynote of the fashion of the day.226 This drawing reflects the typical and iconic representation of Chanel in the early 1920s. Dressed simply in black with her signature pearls, striking a powerful pose with her hands on her hips, Chanel looks away from the viewer. Her hat in this drawing is quite like that of Rrose, but even simpler, without the modernist patterned band. Standing in her familiar relaxed slouched pose, Chanel is strong and in control, thinking her own thoughts, and denying the viewers gaze. As the caption makes clear, Chanel was famous enough by 1922 that everyone knows her. Chanel created a signature style associated with her own body. This style is clearly connected to Chanel herself in a manner different from that of her contemporaries. She designed clothes that she herself wore, clothes that expressed the youthful and sporty image of herself that she had created. Through this image, Chanel made her jersey clothes desirable because they expressed the youthful and casual lifestyle that she embodied. In an essay originally published in Marie Claire in 1967, Roland Barthes argues that the creations of Chanel challenge the very idea of fashion, because fashion relies on ever changing tastes and trend, while Chanel always works on the same model which she merely varies from year to year The very thing that
226
de Meyer, "Drian Shows the Silhouette from Head to Heels," 51.
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negates fashion, long life, Chanel makes into a precious quality.227 Chanels rebellion against the traditional system of fashion with its cycles, trends, and ephemeral qualities is, according to Barthes, a rejection of the vulgarities of petty bourgeois clothing.228 She was also rejecting the intricate and mannered styles of the upper classes in her use of jersey, fake pearls, and synthetic scents. Returning to Nancy Troys original comparison with which this chapter opened, we can see that both Chanel and Duchamp flourished in the interstices between the unique couture creation [or art object] and the mechanical reproduction designed for the masses.229 Chanels constructed public persona was the key to her success in promoting her style of dressing and her designs. Duchamp and Chanel exploited the celebrity culture of the 1920s to market themselves. Both relied on their images to give their products value. Steele writes that Chanel was typical of the entire modernist movement. To the extent that she stands out, it is because she most successfully synthesized, publicized and epitomized a look that many other people developed.230 Could the same be said of Duchamp? Man Ray, Baroness Elsa von FreytagLoringhoven, and even Picasso were creating sculpture from everyday objects in the same vein as Duchamps readymades, but it is Duchamp who is most closely associated with this practice. More than Chanel, Duchamp was
227
Roland Barthes, "The Contest between Chanel and Courrges," in The Language of Fashion, ed. Andy Stafford and Michael Carter, trans. Andy Stafford (Oxford: Berg, 2006), 106. 228 Ibid, 107. 229 Troy, "Chanel's Modernity," 20. 230 Steele, "Chanel in Context," 122.
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creating a new artistic practice, one which in many ways stemmed from the commercial world that she worked in. Duchamps reference to the world of fashion and beauty culture, his performances as Rrose Selavy and in Belle Haleine, do not simply mock these industries, nor do they critique arts relationship to commerce. Duchamp is explicitly connecting his practice to fashion. He re-imagines the artist as a fashionable tastemaker whose work is made in part though the act of shopping, as in the readymades. Rrose Selavy reveals the important relationship between Duchamps work and the commercial world of fashion. Mileaf describes the readymade [as] a genre that ultimately rejects representation and places the object in an unmediated relationship with its viewer. The readymade speaks of consumption and production as if art, distilled to its elemental functions, were nothing more than yearning, or possibility.231 She argues that through his engagement with mass-produced commercial objects, Duchamp condenses the experience of art into to the experience of desire. I would argue that this is precisely the desire elicited by the fashion image, an image like Drians illustration of Chanel, or even Man Rays photograph of Rrose Selavy. Minna Thornton and Caroline Evans explain that, The [fashion photograph] is not constructed to satisfy hunger but to articulate one. Fashion imagery generates images of women for women that both evoke depth and deny meaning. Does the way in which one animates these images characterize a specifically female desire? In being unable to fulfill its promises, the fashion image replicates an absence or a loss, and
231
Mileaf, Please Touch: Dada and Surrealist Objects after the Readymade, 45-7.
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points towards whatever it is that one doesnt have or cant get, towards desire itself.232 This description applies not only to the fashion photograph, but to any fashion image. It can be applied to the fashionable image Chanel created of herself. Through her style and self presentation, she articulated a desire among women in the 1910s and 1920s to live modern lives dressed in modern clothes. Through her own embodiment of the spirit of the new woman, Chanel connected the modern clothes being made by many designers in the 1910s and 1920s with the new kinds of lives that many women yearned for: glamorous, fast paced, sporty, and independent. Duchamp, in the creation of Rrose Selavy, articulated the ways in which art, like a bottle of perfume or a little black dress, elicits desire in its viewer. Duchamps readymades, and Rrose Selavy suggest that the consumers cravings and the longing to consume art are closely related. By engaging directly with consumer culture, and specifically fashion and beauty culture, Duchamp created a new kind of art that revealed the kinship between these realms. He also created an enigmatic set of personalities and alter-ego that has allowed his work and image to remain central to contemporary art. 233 Chanels image has also had a powerful afterlife. This is evident in her images continued commercial potency both in her couture house now led by Karl Lagerfeld and her perfume business that continues to flourish. Two films
232 233
Evans and Thornton, Women & Fashion: A New Look, 107. This is clear in the recent exhibiton Inventing Mardel Duchamp: The Dynamics of Portraiture at The National Portrait Gallery in Washington, D.C. See Goodyear and McManus, "Inventing Marcel Duchamp: The Dynamics of Portraiture," 12-21.
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about Chanels life were released in 2009, both supported by Lagerfeld and the contemporary House of Chanel. Lagerfeld is well aware that keeping Chanels image as a style icon alive and well is good for business. Chanel and Duchamp set the stage for the developments in art and fashion in the 1930s. As we will see, their self-constructions influenced designers and artists such as Elsa Schiaparelli and Salvador Dal. In the years between the war, in the wake of Duchamps innovative artistic practice the worlds of art and fashion would become interlinked even further. Art exhibitions would begin to look more like fashionable boutiques, and avantgarde designers like Schiaparelli would make their salons into galleries. Schiaparelli, though a bitter rival of Chanel, relied on the model of designer which she had created. Schiaparelli designed with herself in mind as the customer, and as we will see wove glamorous and often surreal tales about her childhood that connected to her aesthetic. Like Duchamp, Salvador Dal tread the path between art and commodity, and even more directly engaged with fashion through his collaborations with Schiaparelli. Duchamp and Chanel renegotiation of the boundaries between art and commodity in their respective fields set the groundwork for all of the artists and designers who would come after in the years between the World Wars.
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Chapter 2
Trompe lOeil Sweaters and Mad Caps: Early Surrealism and Fashion
If texts on Surrealism mention fashion at all, they usually describe it as either passively adopting Surrealist aesthetics, or blatantly stealing them for commercial gain.234 I argue that fashion was not a passive receptacle for Surrealism, nor did it simply appropriate Surrealist imagery for its own profit. Fashionthrough magazine editors, art directors, and designerswas an active participant in the development of Surrealism. In this chapter I will discuss the work of one of these designers, Elsa Schiaparelli, whose work was deeply engaged with the same ideas and themes that the Surrealists were exploring. In her monograph on Schiaparelli, Dilys Blum writes, Schiaparellis influence on the Surrealist community has yet to be fully acknowledged or documented. Her contributions have frequently been dismissed as derivative, and she has even been accused of stealing ideas. Rather her fashions should be understood as another reflection of the zeitgeist of 1930s Paris, a time when a number of Surrealist artists were working in and interacting with the world of fashion and many couturiers were keenly aware of developments in the arts.235 This zeitgeist is clearly evident in Schiaparellis work as well as contemporary fashion magazines, which helped to bring it from Paris to the U.S. and the rest of Europe.
234
Writers such as Dickran Tashjian, Ann Finholt, and Lewis Kachur tend to date these occurrences to the mid to late 1930s. Tashjian, A Boatload of Madmen : Surrealism and the American Avant-Garde, 1920-1950, 67-68. Lewis Kachur, Displaying the Marvelous: Marcel Duchamp, Salvador Dal, and Surrealist Exhibition Installations (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2001), 41. Finholt, "Art in Vogue: De Chirico, Fashion and Surrealism," 85. 235 Dilys E. Blum, Shocking! : The Art and Fashion of Elsa Schiaparelli (New Haven, Conn.: London, 2003), 171.
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This chapter will explore Schiaparellis early connections with the Surrealists, particularly the photographer Man Ray. I will argue that the work of Schiaparelli and indeed fashion as a whole is intimately tied to the psychological principal of the uncanny, one of the central organizing principals of Surrealism.236 Schiaparelli made specific use of the uncanny in her designs by conflating the irreconcilable: fabric and flesh, inside and outside, skirts and trousers, and using trompe loeil techniques similar to Surrealists such as Max Ernst and Salvador Dal. By the early 1930s, she was producing clothing that was a radical response to the garonne look of the 1920s and, through this engagement with the uncanny, created a new look for women in the 1930s, which I will be calling Strange Glamour. I will be discussing this particular aesthetic, its reworking of gender and sexuality, and its intersections with the philosophical underpinnings of Surrealism, which are especially apparent in Man Rays photographs of Schiaparelli and her designs. These photographs visualize this argument, making clear the Surrealist presence of the uncanny in Schiaparellis strange glamour.
The Uncanny In Compulsive Beauty Hal Foster argues that the uncanny is the unifying concept of Surrealism, defining it as: events in which repressed material returns in ways that disrupt unitary identity, aesthetic norms, and
236
See Foster, Compulsive Beauty, xvii.
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social order.237 Foster then goes on to demonstrate that Bretons concept of the marvelous is actually the uncanny.238 Both the mannequin, which conflates the human and non-human, and the ruin, which conflates the natural and the historical, confuse the animate and the inanimate, a hallmark of the uncannys reminder of the immanence of death in life.239 Foster notes three effects of the uncanny, (1) an indistinction between the real and the imagined, which is the basic aim of surrealism as defined in both manifestos of Breton; (2) a confusion between the animate and inanimate, as exemplified in wax figures, dolls, mannequins, and automatons, all crucial images in the surrealist repertoire; and (3) a usurpation of the referent by the sign or of physical reality by psychic reality, and here again the surreal is often experienced, especially by Breton and Dal, as an eclipse of the referential by the symbolic, or as an enthrallment of a subject to a sign or a symptom, and its effect is often that of the uncanny: anxiety. 240 This description also resonates with Bretons examples of the marvelous: the mannequin, the ruin, or a glove.241 Foster argues that the Surrealists, through their work with the marvelous attempt to master the traumatic events represented by the uncanny and to aestheticize them, to transform the anxious into the aesthetic, the uncanny into the marvelous.242
237 238
Ibid, xvii. Ibid, 20. 239 Ibid, 21. 240 Ibid, 7. 241 For example Nadjas glove in Bretons novel of the same name, becomes a simulacrum for Nadja herself, ultimately more interesting and important than the woman herself. See Ibid, 33. 242 Ibid, 48.
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Fashion, as we have seen in the previous chapter, constantly disrupts the social order and therefore often engages with the uncanny.243 In addition, on a structural level, fashion is connected to the marvelous because of its relationship to the repetition compulsion and the death drive. Fashion endlessly cycles through changes, every season demanding something new and depending on the death of old styles in order to create new ones. Caroline Evans has linked fashions cycles to the psychological notion of the return of the repressed, examining the haunting of contemporary fashion by images from the past. The past, however, is present in fashion throughout the twentieth century, and even before. Trends and fashion come into Vogue in particular periods and then fall out of favor, and often eventually come back into fashion, returning like the repressed in Fosters formulation of the uncanny. Fashion also enacts the death drive, because for a new fashion death is always immanentjust as quickly as something comes into Vogue, it has gone out again.244 Walter Benjamin, a contemporary of Schiaparelli and the Surrealists, pushed fashions connection to the death drive beyond the structural. Benjamin saw fashion as existing on the thin barrier between the subject and
243
Caroline Evans describes how at the end of the 20th century repressed issues of mortality and the abject bubble up in fashion. The uncanny and the return of the repressed is a consistent theme in fashion, at least since the 1930s. On the return of the repressed see: Caroline Evans, "Yesterday's Emblems and Tommorow's Commodities: The Return of the Repressed in Fashion Imagery Today," in Fashion Cultures: Theories, Explorations, and Analysis, ed. Stella Bruzzi and Pamela Church Gibson (London ; New York: Routledge, 2000), 93-113. On the uncanny and deathliness see: idem, Fashion at the Edge: Spectacle, Modernity, and Deathliness (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003), 163190. 244 I am drawing this understanding of the uncanny and the repetition compulsion from Fosters first chapter, Beyond the Pleasure Principal, Foster, Compulsive Beauty, 1-17.
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object, the boundaries between life and death. He writes that fashion is the dialectical switching station between woman and commoditydesire and the dead body.245 The presence of fashion at the boundary between living woman and manufactured (deathly) commodity is precisely what makes it appealing to the Surrealists. This explains the presence of shoes, gloves, hats and other articles of fashion in the work of artists and writers such as Breton, Tzara, Ernst, and Dal. As we will see in this chapter and in chapter 4, Schiaparelli engaged with fashion as a kind of liminal space between body and commodity, literally on the boundary of the body, the boundary of life. She exploited this in designs that mimicked and reshaped the body. Schiaparelli was creating fashion that toyed with the boundaries between subject and object, just as the Surrealists were creating art and literature that blurred the boundaries between the conscious and the unconscious mind to affect, the liberation of the mind.246
Trompe lOeil in Surrealism One method of visually bringing together the conscious and unconscious worlds was to use the old academic style of trompe loeil, which
245
Im quoting Susan Buck-Morss translation of this line which for me is more evocative of fashions position as a boundary between life and death. In Eiland and McLaughlins translat ion the line reads: Here fashion has opened the business of dialectical exchange between woman and warebetween carnal pleasure and the corpse. Susan Buck-Morss, The Dialectics of Seeing: Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project, Paperback ed. (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1991), 101. Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin (Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1999), 62. 246 Andr Breton, "What Is Surrealism?," in What Is Surrealism, trans. David Gascoyne (New York: Haskell House Publishers, 1974), 48. Originally published in 1936.
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literally means trick of the eye, referring to art that represents its subject so realistically that on first glance the subject looks real. Dal wrote in his 1935 text Conquest of the Irrational, My whole ambition in the pictorial domain is to materialize the images of my concrete irrationality with the most imperialist fury of precision.In order that the world of the imagination and of concrete irrationality may be as objectively evident, of the same consistency, of the same durability, of the same persuasive, cogoscitive and communicable thickness as that of the exterior world of phenomenal realityThe illusionism of the most arrivisteart, the usual paralyzing tricks of trompeloeil, the mostdiscredited academism, can all transmute into sublime hierarchies of thought247 Dal therefore turned academic methods of painting and rational perspective on their heads to depict the bizarre and often disturbing images of his unconscious. For him, trompe loeil is crucial in creating surreal worlds or dreamscapes that are so vivid, viewers feel they can step into them. He argues that he transforms the cold, technical, and academic qualities of trompe loeil painting into the sublime, the marvelous. For the Surrealists, then, trompe loeil was a way to create convincing images of dreams from the unconscious. In his 1966 catalogue for the Museum of Modern Art show, Dada, Surrealism, and their Heritage, William Rubin defines two poles of Surrealism: Automatism (the draftsmanly counterpart of verbal free association) led to the abstract Surrealism of Mir and Masson, who worked improvisationally with primarily biomorphic shapes in a shallow, Cubist-derived space. The
247
Dal quoted in William Stanley Rubin et al., Dada, Surrealism, and Their Heritage (New York: Museum of Modern Art; distributed by New York Graphic Society, Greenwich, 1968), 111.
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fixing of dream-inspired images influenced the more academic illusionism of Magritte, Tanguy, and Dal.248 In the pole that Rubin terms oneiric illusionism, the realism of trompe loeil was used to fix the dreamscapes of the Surrealists making them believable. These were the two poles that Breton identified in his 1941 essay, Artistic Genesis and Perspective of Surrealism. Breton, however, cautioned those painters who chose the path of trompe loeil: the stabilizing of dream images in the kind of still-life deception known as trompe-loeil (and the very word deception betrays the weakness of the process), has been proved by experience to be far less reliable and even presents very real risks of the traveler losing his way all together.249 Despite Bretons cautionary remarks, many Surrealists chose this path, even pointing to the techniques classical and academic past. The most famous practitioners of trompe loeil in the classical world mythically created works that were so convincing that they fooled birds into pecking at painted grapes, partridges into calling to painted partridges, and an artist into mistaking a painted curtain for a real one that could be drawn.250 Later artists often repeated the motifs of grapes, curtains, and partridges (though often as dead game birds) to recall the mastery of these artists and suggest that their works demonstrated a similar virtuosity.
248 249
Ibid, 64. Andr Breton, "Artistic Genesis and Perspective of Surrealism," in Surrealism and Painting, trans. Simon Watson Taylor (Boston: MFA Publications, 2002; reprint, 1972), 70. 250 For a more detailed account, see: Sybille Ebert-Schifferer, "Trompe l'Oeil: The Underestimated Trick," in Deceptions and Illusions : Five Centuries of Trompe L'oeil Painting (Washington: National Gallery of Art, 2002), 19-20.
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The Surrealists themselves often repeated these motifs. Elizabeth Legge, in her essay on Max Ernsts photogravure portfolio Histoire Naturelle (1925), points out the many ways in which Ernst references that tradition of trompe loeil. This series of prints began with drawings created through a technique called frottage. Ernst rubbed his pencil over different textured surfaces including his wood floor and would then interpret these chance images to produce the final drawing.(Figure 51) Ernst used the rubbings to create images of leaves, feathers, and wood in Histoire Naturelle. He chose subjects that were popular with 19th century academic painters who worked in a trompe loeil style: game birds strung up on a wood board, sheets of paper, and leaves.(Figure 52) While Ernst used the chance technique of frottage that suggested trompe loeil images to him, other Surrealistsincluding Rene Magritte, Pierre Roy and Salvador Dalused trompe loeil as a means to represent images and ideas from their subconscious. Sybille Ebert-Schifferer argues that: trompe loeil was a dangerously subversive art form thatby compelling us to contemplate its object-ness, the conditions of its making, and the mechanics of human perceptionprofoundly shattered our faith in our ability to recognize truths.251 The way that trompe loeil plays with a viewers perception of reality is key to this style of Surrealist painting. Using academic techniques of illusionism, Surrealists were able to subvert the expectations of the viewer; instead of providing an exact representation of the real,
251
Ibid, 18.
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surrealist artists provided a convincing representation of the unconscious. The technique of academic trompe loeil allowed viewers to experience the uncanny: something familiar, which is made unfamiliar. The viewer experiences an uncanny vacillation between the real and the unrealthe paint on the canvas and the illusion of the subconscious world it createsin Surrealist paintings. There is an anxious quality about these images. These paintings, however, lacked the kind of spontaneity that Breton advocated. They were carefully calculated illusionistic images, windows onto the subconscious, rather than a visual record of the subconscious at work. Breton claimed that Dals undertaking [was] spoilt by an ultra-retrograde technique.252 No matter how radical their content may have been these paintings were using some of the most academic and conventional stylistic techniques possible. While these painting destabilized the materiality of the canvas, creating uncanny images, they did not engage with the chance practices that Breton advocated. Breton explained, I will concede that it is possible for automatism to enter into the composition of a painting or a poem with a certain degree of premeditation. But the converse holds true that any form of expression in which automatism does not at least advance under cover runs a grave risk of moving out of the Surrealist orbit.253 According to Breton, artists such as Salvador Dal rationalized the irrational images filling their subconscious with trompe loeil. Through
252 253
Breton, "Artistic Genesis and Perspective of Surrealism," 76. Ibid, 70.
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academic techniques, Dal made ideas from his subconscious into concrete images on canvas. In her inaugural design, Elsa Schiaparelli also adopted trompe loeil to meld the decorative and the practical. I will argue that in Schiaparellis hands, however, trompe loeil lived up to its subversive potential. As we will see, by applying trompe loeil to clothing, Schiaparelli found a way to enhance the uncanny effects of this technique. The novelty of her designs, and the fact that they are on sweaters, not a canvas, manages to override the academicism of trompe loeil, making the viewer question what is real and what is not.
The Bowknot Sweater As early as her very first sportswear collection in 1927 Elsa Schiaparelli worked in a Surrealist vein. The first garment that truly made Schiaparelli a name in fashion was her Bowknot Sweater.(Figure 53) Schiaparelli tells the story of this garments genesis in her autobiography Shocking Life. She met an American friend who was wearing a chic and unusual sweater. Schiaparelli asked her about it and found out that it was made by a unique method of knitting practiced by Armenian women, in which two layers are created by knitting two stands of yarn together. Schiaparelli tracked down the knitter, Aroosiag Mikalian (Mike) and asked her if she could possibly knit up a pattern into one of her sweaters. Schiaparelli devised a simple black and white pattern of a knot made to look like a white scarf tied around the
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wearers neck. After a few failed prototypes Schiaparelli and Mike hit upon the right look. The pattern was formed by knitting together a strand of black yarn with one of white yarn. This created a pleasing heathery, tweed-like background to the sweater. Schiaparelli felt that the Armenian technique created a fabric that held its shape with a bit of give, but did not stretch out of shape like regular knits. The pattern and knitting technique resulted in a sturdy garment with a light flecked look and the advantage of having an accessory, the scarf, knit right into the fabric. This garment was practical for sport since the wearer did not need to add any bulky accessories to it. Schiaparelli writes: Trying courageously not to feel self conscious, convinced deep within me that I was nearly glamorous, I wore it at a smart lunchand created a furor. [sic] Women at this time were very sweater-minded. Chanel had, for quite a few years, made machine-knitted dresses and jumpers. This was different. All the women wanted one, immediately. 254 A buyer for Strauss in New York ordered the first forty sweaters, and also wanted forty skirts. Schiaparelli and Mike scoured Paris for other Armenian knitters to make the sweaters. Schiaparelli and her personal seamstress made skirts out of bargain material simply and slightly below the fashionable knee length hemline. The bowknot sweater was so popular that by April of 1928 Macys was advertising imported hand-knit copies of Schiaparellis bowknot sweater for $15.75. Macys claimed that similar sweaters sold for $59.50 to $55.00: In
254
Schiaparelli, Shocking Life: The Autobiography of Elsa Schiaparelli , 43.
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the smartest resorts from the Lido to Palm Beach the hand-knitted sweater was recognized as the important new note in sportswear for the year. And no hand-knit sweaters are smarter than those made in Paris by Schiaparelli. Macys was also offering Schiaparellis imported perfume especially for sportswear. 255 Gimbel Bros sold copies of the sweater, showing them in a window display with golfing equipment.(Figure 54) Glenna Collett, a famous US. Womens golf champion wore the sweater to receive a trophy in 1929.(Figure 55) November 1928 Ladys Home Journal offered a pattern for the home knitter to make her own version. The pattern included a method for catching the lighter thread on every 3rd stitch to create the heathery look of the Schiaparelli original. The business of copying the original designs of couturiers was an inevitable part of the business at this time, but also attested to the popularity and wearability of a design. Nancy Troy claims, in order for [a] model to become an established fashion, it must first be circulated in the form of multiple copies.256 Troy describes the contradiction inherent in the haute couture business for designers, who wanted on the one hand to keep their couture business exclusive, yet sought to take advantage of the mass market and generate revenue by licensing copies. In order to achieve fame and status, designers had to negotiate the mass market that includes
255 256
Macys Advertisement, New York Times April 30, 1928, 7. Troy, Couture Culture: A Study in Modern Art and Fashion, 259.
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unlicensed copies. According to Troy, these copies gave the designers name and label the aura of an artists signature.257 As is evident by the Macys and Gimbels knockoffs, Schiaparelli was no exception to this; her sweaters were copied, and her name was often used in advertising for these copies. It was important for advertisers to identify these sweaters with Schiaparelli herself, in order to authenticate them in some way. Her many subsequent patterns were also copied in Europe and the United States: A large bow was followed by gay handkerchiefs woven round the throat, by mens ties in gay colors, by handkerchiefs round the hips. Anita Loos, at the height of her career with Gentleman Prefer Blondes, was my first private customer, and I was boosted, with her help, to fame. Soon the restaurant of the Paris Ritz was filled with women from all over the world in black-andwhite sweaters.258 Schiaparelli and the Artistic Legacy of the 1920s Unlike Chanelwho was linked socially, but not stylistically to artists Schiaparelli was associated by the press directly to contemporary artistic movements. Schiaparellis bowknot sweater burst onto the scene at a time when Cubism, Constructivism, and Modernist abstraction were the prevailing artistic themes in fashion: at no time in history since David designed the costumes for Napoleons coronation was the current vernacular of the art world so familiar in fashionable circles.259 Many spreads in Vogue and
257 258
See especially the conclusion Ibid, 26 and 327-337. Schiaparelli, Shocking Life: The Autobiography of Elsa Schiaparelli , 44. 259 Garland, "The Twenties: Sport and Art," 87.
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Harpers Bazaar called such patterns modernistic or geometric.260(Figure 56) Though the bowknot sweater was engaged with developments in modern art, its design was entirely different from the streamlined aesthetic of cubistinspired sweaters. Schiaparellis pattern was explicitly feminine and decorative, but in a way that drew attention to the presence of a useless feminine detail in a utilitarian sportswear garment. In a column in Vogue, Viola Paris Comes Back to Town, the sweater is described as a triumph of colour blending, in which the black and white are so interwoven as to become an artistic masterpiece.261 The sweater is compared to a work of art because of its use of color and the fact that it is hand knit. In the preceding years, Chanel and many other designers had made machine knits, such as jersey, the standard. Schiaparelli was intentionally bringing back the hand knit, which had not been popular for at least a decade. This hand-made quality separates Schiaparellis work from the machine aesthetics of Chanels jersey knits, aligning Schiaparelli with the fine arts. It is worth noting that this is not the only instance in this article in which the language of fine art is used as a metaphor to elevate fashion. Vogues first lady of fashion, Viola Paris, is described as a collector of modern art, and asks and who of those who have learned to look at picturescan help being conscious that the quality which distinguished good art from indifferent
260
For example: Smart English Sweaters," Vogue (15 April 1927), 118. Modernistic Designs Predominate," Harpers Bazaar (December 1928), 81. 261 Viola Paris Comes Back to Town," Vogue 70, no. 12 (15 December 1927), 45.
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will also, in its own way, distinguish good from merely expensive clothing?262 According to Vogue, art and fashion can be judged by the same criteria. This comparison between art and fashion is ever-present in magazines of this period, which often speak of Schiaparelli using artistic discourse. A New Yorker profile in 1932 claimed that in Paris, a frock from Schiaparelli ranks like a modern canvas in boudoirs determined to be la page.263 That same year Fortune reported that Schiaparelli was often called a geniusshe is the last word in modernism. She is to dressmaking what Lger is to painting or Le Corbusier is to architecture.264 Chanel, on the other hand is usually spoken about in business-like terms, her little black dress famously being called in 1926 fashions Ford, by Vogue.265 From the very beginning, Schiaparelli was considered an artist and her sweater a work of art by the editors of Vogueand a novel one at that.266 There is no doubt about the popularity of this particular sweater and the fact that fashion writers connected it to modernist painting. Very little has been written of this sweaters relation to trends in Surrealism. Schiaparelli herself acknowledged the way that her sweaters fit in neatly with trends in the art world:
262 263
Ibid 43. Janet Flanner, "Comet," The New Yorker (18 June 1932), 20. 264 The Dressmakers of France," Fortune 6, no. 2 (August 1932), 76. 265 Blum, Shocking!: The Art and Fashion of Elsa Schiaparelli , 293. See also The Dressmakers of France," 75. 266 While geometric cubistic designs had been a staple of sportswear in the 192 0s, Schiaparellis trompe loeil designs were completely new. Palmer White, 54.
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It was the time when abstract Dadaism and Futurism were the talk of the world, the time when chairs looked like tables, and tables like footstools, when it was not done to ask what a painting represented or what a poem meant, when trifles of fantasy were more taboo and only the initiated knew about the Paris Flea Market.267 With this quote, Schiaparelli reveals her awareness of the Surrealist tradition, referencing the readymade with the Paris Flea Market, but also the tradition of trompe loeil, and the tricks it played on viewers. Like the Surrealists who melded the real and unreal in trompe loeil, Schiaparelli was melding the practical and the decorative and the whimsical. In her first forays into trompe loeil, Schiaparelli used the visual tactic to create playful yet eminently wearable sportswear. The wearer need not be restrained by wearing a scarf or a tie to accessorize her outfit, as it is built right in. These sweaters tease the eye, inviting a viewer to get closer and look more carefully, andeven more provocativelyto touch the material. The fact that this sweater was hand knit, rather than machine made, was unusual and added to this sense of touch. M.L. dOtrange Mastai writes that illusionism is make-believe, very like a theatrical spectacle. It invariably requires of the viewer a willing participation, amounting to complicity with the artist.268 Schiaparelli uses trompe loeil to make her sweaters theatrical and in some ways interactive, more than simply practical. The viewer is engaged in the trickery, looking carefully and perhaps touching the material
267 268
Schiaparelli, Shocking Life: The Autobiography of Elsa Schiaparelli , 44-5. Marie-Louise d'Otrange Mastai, Illusion in Art : Trompe l'Oeil, a History of Pictorial Illusionism (New York: Abaris Books, 1975), 11.
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to see if the bow or scarf is real or not. An uncanny feeling is elicited in the viewer, who cannot tell whether the scarf her or she sees is real or an illusion. As we will see Schiaparelli will evoke the uncanny in far more provocative ways in her next designs.
Tattoos, X-rays, and Divided Skirts Schiaparelli continued to experiment with the sweater in her next collections, moving away from the traditional modernist designs that had dominated the market: to the sweaters she added Negro-like designs of her own, and strange scrawls from the Congo. One was tattooed like a sailors chest with pierced hearts and snakes.269 (Figure 57)(Figure 58) She also adapted these novel designs to knitted swimwear. According to Marjorie Howard writing for Harpers Bazaar in 1929, Schiaparelli had the amusing idea of using real tattoo designs which she collected from a master of this art, on tricot bathing suits. One may have any conceit one fancies, or choose one of the classic patterns that have been sacred to deep-sea sailors until now.270 A blouse with an anchor appliqu illustrated with Howards articles may be related to the tattoo group.(Figure 59) The tattooed sweaters and bathing suits clearly demonstrate how Schiaparellis designs were moving from the whimsical into a slightly more erotic vein, here conflating skin with cloth and male with female. These sweaters created the uncanny effect of turning the
269 270
Schiaparelli, Shocking Life: The Autobiography of Elsa Schiaparelli , 46. Marjorie Howard, "High Lights on the Paris Collections," Harpers Bazaar (April 1929), 96.
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hand-knitted fabric into skin, and the skin of a tattooed man at that. Schiaparelli had a keen understanding of the uncanny potential of clothing to shift from body to commodity, alive to deathly. She used the slipperiness between fashion and the body to heighten the shock value of these designs. Exploiting the way in which a bathing suit or even a sweater can be a second skin, Schiaparelli tattooed the flesh of her glamorous customers with the bold tattoos of a sailor. The bowknot sweater led the way for Schiaparelli to take trompe loeil off of the canvas and to apply it to the body. Her designs took the 1920s conventions of mens wear as womens wear to the extreme. Playing off the sailor suit, and naval-inspired womens clothing, the tattoo sweaters and swimsuits allowed women to wear mens skins, to transform their bodies as opposed to just masquerading in a sailor suit. Schiaparelli did offer more traditional naval options in this same collection: a Brittany fishermans blouse, and a culottesfinished in an attached scarf of scarlet jersey that twists twice round the waist, like a French workmans sash.271 Schiaparelli is clearly being inspired by menswear: not that of the upper class man in his tailored suit, but the lower class sailor and workman. Chanel was also inspired by working-class menswear, but Schiaparelli used this influence in a different way. By knitting these designs into the fabric of her sweaters and swimsuits, she allowed them to mesh with the body of the wearer, since it was that body that gave shape to the largely unstructured sweater. These early designs hint at the way Schiaparelli will
271
Ibid 194.
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treat the gendered and sexed body as fully connected with gendered clothing. Her designs mercilessly blurred the boundaries between clothing and skin, fashion and body. The tattoo knitwear makes womens clothing look like a mans body. These garments confront viewers in an entirely different way than the androgynous looks of the garonnes and flappers.272 Schiaparellis clothes did not make women blend in with men, as did the boyish shapes of Chanels clothes and the popular short haircuts of the 1920s.273 Instead her clothes confronted the viewer with mens clothing and adornment in a female form, and mens bodies worn by womenfeminine figures sporting sailors tattoos. Schiaparelli insists on showing the curves of the female form though the use of knitwear, while simultaneously borrowing from mens styles of dress and adornment. In this way her conflation of masculine and feminine does not have the kind of stability of the androgynous flapper, but rather an anxious and uncanny vacillation between female body and male clothing or adornment. Her collections in the early 1930s would continue this trend creating looks that were not androgynous, but that confronted the viewer with the uncanny conflation of the male and female.274
272
Flappers represent a somewhat more feminine aesthetic than the garonne, but still favored the same boyish androgynous figure. 273 For a discussion of gender confusion in 1920s fashion see: Roberts, "Sampson and Delilah Revisited: The Politics of Fashion in 1920s France," 72-75. Roberts gives examples of popular stories of mistaken identity in post-war France, and the anxieties around women dressing as men or disguising themselves as men. 274 I hesitate to use Judith Halberstams tern female masculinity because I think that it tends to cover over the uncanny vacillation between genders which I am interested in. I think that this term would be
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The most provocative of Schiaparellis sweaters, at least by her own account, was a skeleton sweater that shocked the bourgeois but hit the newspapers, which then took little notice of fashion. White lines on the sweater followed the design of the ribs so that women wearing it gave the appearance of being seen through an X-ray.275 This sweater, which may be one pictured in a fashion column from the Chicago Daily Tribune and in Harpers Bazaar also confrontationally confuses outer with inner and shockingly suggests clothing that reveals the body as opposed to hiding it.276(Figure 60)(Error! Reference source not found.) This design is another example of Schiaparellis insistence on the uncanny relation between clothing and the body. Schiaparelli continued this theme of transparency in several designs using a new material called Rhodophane, a transparent synthetic fabric.(Figure 61) Harpers Bazaar included a spread on transparent garments that used new synthetic materials in a September 1933 spread, An X-Ray of Fashion.(Figure 62) Readers could see straight through the dresses to the undergarments beneath. These garments questioned the function of clothing and fabric to hide the body. They engage directly with the sexual fantasy of being able to see though clothing. The skeleton sweater however teases viewers, providing the illusion of being able to see not only through
better applied perhaps to the flapper and garonne. Judith Halberstam, Female Masculinity (Durham: Duke University Press, 1998), 1-9. 275 Schiaparelli, Shocking Life: The Autobiography of Elsa Schiaparelli , 46-7. 276 It seems to coincide with Dals own interest in this subject, and his 1938 collaboration with Schiaparelli on a black Skeleton evening gown. The gown would have paired nicely with Merit Oppenheims Skeleton-Hand Gloves (1936) and bone choker (1934-36).
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clothing but also through skin, missing the flesh entirely. Man Ray explored a similar fantasy in his a photograph Anatomies, though in this case much more explicit. A nude female torso is wrapped in reflective transparent fabric or dress. The womans flesh is both revealed by the transparency, and concealed by the reflection of light off the material.277 Man Rays photograph is typical of Surrealists objectification of the female body. He cuts off the womans head and focuses on her anonymous torso. In contrast, Schiaparellis transparent designs put the control in the hands of the woman wearing the garment. The x-ray sweater frustrates the male viewers fantasy. Engaging with the uncanny, all of these garments confused the outside and inside. Concealing and revealing, toying with viewers expectations. The female wearer has the ultimate control over what viewers see and do not see. Schiaparelli also employed trompe loeil in several other designs such as the divided skirt. Divided skirts, which had been popular since the mid 1920s, became even more visible in the late 1920s, especially at sporting events. The divided skirt was usually disguised in some wayby a panel over it, a wraparound skirt, or pleats. In 1931 Schiaparelli herself caused a sensation wearing one of her own models that was not disguised.278(Figure 63) Spanish tennis player Lili de Alvarez also wore a Schiaparelli divided skirt
277
This photograph appears in a small book on Schiaparelli: Franois Baudot, Elsa Schiaparelli (New York: Universe/Vendme, 1997), 79. In this book the photograph is credited to Man Ray but as a photograph of Schiaparellis work. I have not come across it in any other books on Schiaparelli, but it could very well be her design. It is unclear whether the garment is a dress or fabric which the model holds in place. I am continuing to research this particular photograph and garment. 278 Blum, Shocking!: The Art and Fashion of Elsa Schiaparelli , 15.
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in white with a matching tunic to some of her tennis matches including the ultra-correct Wimbledon.(Figure 64) For some, the divided skirt was cause for alarm: the Daily Sketch saw de Alvarezs trousered tennis frock as yet more evidence that women had a masculine fixation Whether we like it or not, girls will be boys.279 Despite womens adoption of bifurcated garments since the 1910s--when Poiret was popularizing his harem trousers, and women drafted into the workforce during World War I were choosing pants trousers still had gendered connotations. Some critics continued to be concerned with women trying to look too much like men. Schiaparellis divided skirt played off of this controversy, as a more positive report of divided skirts at Wimbledon in the News Chronicle reveals, nothing to get excited about. In fact trousers are so like a skirt that bets were made as to what exactly they were!280 Schiaparellis trousers thus participated in the same trompe loeil games that her sweaters did. From afar they appeared to be a normal tennis skirt, but as de Alvarez demonstrates in a photograph taken at Highbury in 1931, the skirt is in fact trousers.(Error! Reference source not found.) This transformation is also apparent in a 1931 drawing by Dorothy Dulin in the Chicago Tribune that shows two views of the trouser skirt, worn by a golfer. Bettina Bedwell notes Lili de Alvarezs adoption of the style in the accompanying article.281(Figure 65)
279 280
Cited in Horwood, "Dressing Like a Champion: Women's Tennis Wear in Interwar England," 54. Cited in Ibid, 54. 281 Bedwell Bettina, "Knitted Sports Suits Have Gone Bi-Colored," Chicago Daily Tribune, 20 June 1931, 16.
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Schiaparelli continued to use the divided skirt in her collections for several years, as a practical alternative to a regular skirt or dress. Bettina Bedwell noted that Schiaparellis divided skirts are kind to the unshorn hipline that goes with a soul yearning for trousers.282(Figure 66) The divided skirt is another example of Schiaparellis use of the uncanny to combine the practicality demanded by sportswear and decorative feminine touches. Mary Louise Roberts argues that Schiaparellis designs represent a regression to femininity and romanticism, in effect a reactionary response to the garonne style.283 I argue that rather than being reactionary these clothes respond to the need for practical yet flattering clothing. Schiaparelli adapts the mens trouser to the curves of a female body. She also favored the pajama in the early 1930s as an alternative to a gown for entertaining in the home, or as beachwear. One of her cleverest early designs was a dress for the beach or resort that was actually two half dresses that wrapped around the body and tied at the side.(Figure 67) She made the half dresses in four colors of silk, so that a woman could create several permutations of the same dress. The wrap style also helped to achieve a better fit in a mass produced garment. In the early 1930s, Schiaparelli would bring this wrap style into eveningwear and sweaters as well.284 While more feminine in tailoring, Schiaparellis clothes emphasized practicality and versatility.
282 283
Bedwell, "Paris Frees Sports Styles," D1. Roberts, "Sampson and Delilah Revisited: The Politics of Fashion in 1920s France," 84. 284 Blum, Shocking!: The Art and Fashion of Elsa Schiaparelli , 31.
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Schiaparellis divided skirt created the femininity of a skirt with the practicality of trousers. Like the bowknot sweater this design uses the uncanny to mesh feminine decorative qualities with masculine practicality. For both Schiaparelli and the Surrealists, trompe loeil was a way to create convincing fantasies: trompe loeil, then, is devoted not to trickery but to the representation of pure visual experience with utmost objectivityunder ideal conditions the result is one of totally convincing visual delusion. The differentiation between [art that tricked the viewer and art that did not] is meaningful, for it coincided with the important defiant assertion of the artist as personal creator instead of as recorder or at best interpreter, however genial.285 The risk for the creator of tromp loeil is always of disappearing behind the technical qualities of the work. Tromp loeil is not in line with the tenets of modernism outlined by the impressionists at the end of the nineteenth century who placed a premium on the artists subjective vision. Instead it privileges an objective means of representing the world. As we saw in the last chapter however, Duchamp virtually eliminated the need for the artists handseven eyes if we are to believe that his choices were made with aesthetic indifference. Using mass-produced objects as readymade art, Duchamp refigured the role of the artist, eliminating the role of craft and technique. Trompe loeil stands in a unique space between the modernism envisioned by the impressionists and Duchamp. The technical prowess of the
285
Mastai, Illusion in Art: Trompe lOeil, a History of Pictorial Illusionism , 15.
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artist is of the utmost importance and yet this skill is in danger of overtaking the individuality of the artist himself.
Schiaparelli and the Feminine Masquerade As we have seen, Chanel modeled herself as a celebrity and businesswoman, while Schiaparelli fashioned herself as an artist. She aligned herself with art early on, and described herself as an artist, writing dress designing, incidentally, to me is not a profession but an art.286 Schiaparelli responded to the many different movements in art and fashion that emerged after the First World War. While Duchamp was experimenting with the readymade in the wake of World War I, other artists such as Emelie Ozanfant and Picasso were returning to a more classical style of image making that had more in common with the impressionists than the Surrealists. Their works emphasized universalism, classicism, order, and beauty. This kind of classicism and return to order was also present in fashion, and Schiaparelli responded to it in another of her trompe-loeil designs. In this gown from 1931 Schiaparelli used trompe-loeil drapery hand-painted by Jean Dunand. The gown poked fun at both the regressive turn of classicism and the sleek modern surfaces of art deco. Man Ray took a series of photographs of Schiaparelli in the gown, which from afar, evokes a very popular style of Greco-roman drapery from the later 1920s and early 1930s.(Figure 68)(Figure 69) Up close, however, the gown mocks the style, creating the same look in a
286
Schiaparelli, Shocking Life: The Autobiography of Elsa Schiaparelli , 42.
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modern streamlined way, eliminating the extra yards of fabric necessary to create the look. On the other hand, this gown also trumps the sleek and minimal modernist aesthetic by employing decorative painting to adorn the fabric. Like the Surrealists, Schiaparelli used trompe-loeil to play with ideas of visuality and reality. Her trompe loeil gown deconstructs the idea of a traditional gown, creating the visual impression of an elegantly draped silk dress, while actually being a streamlined modern shape. By engaging with the decorative, Schiaparellis use of trompe loeil in this classical gown, and in her bowknot sweater both expose the masquerade of femininity. Schiaparelli uses trompe loeil to create clothing with a sleek and simple silhouette, but adds a handmade or painted decorative element. Unlike Chanel, who cut out any extraneous decoration and made the simplest garments out of the finest material, Schiaparelli found ways to create simple and wearable clothing, and reintroduced feminine detailing and decoration in a practical and distinctly handmade way.287 Schiaparelli also used trompe loeil to create playful garments that looked different from different distances, and provocatively encouraged touch to determine the reality of these garments. Schiaparelli used an academic technique in a uniquely modern way by applying it to the body. Fashion critics Caroline Evans and Minna Thornton, in a feminist analysis of Schiaparellis oeuvre, argue that her approach to dress centers around an understanding of how it acts
287
Chanel created the poor look, the sweaters, jersey dresses and little suits that subverted the whole idea of fashion as displaythe aim was to make the rich girl look like the girl in the street. Wilson, Adorned in Dreams: Fashion and Modernity, 40-41.
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simultaneously to repress the body and bring it to into the realm of languagethe symbolic.288 The masquerade and spectacle that Schiaparelli embraces in her designs allows a woman [to put] a distance between herself and her observers, a space in which to maneuver and to determine the meanings of the show. She takes control of the mask, the disguise, that is femininity.289 Schiaparellis trompe loeil makes the masquerade of gender overt. As with the x-ray sweater these trompe loeil effects make the viewer aware of his or her own viewing. These garments allow the wearer to turn the gaze back onto the viewer. Schiaparelli used the Surrealist technique of trompe loeil and evocation of the uncanny for her own ends. While the Surrealists often used these tools to enact their own masculine, and sometimes misogynist fantasies, Schiaparelli used them to intervene in and disrupt the terms of the feminine masquerade. This becomes clear when we look at her in the context of her contemporaries such as Chanel. Schiaparelli employed both masculine and feminine motifs in her sweater designs, representing feminine scarves, as well as the masculine imagery of sailors including tattoos, a French sailors middy, and a necktie.(Figure 70)(Figure 71) Early on, Schiaparelli was deploying trompe loeil, like the Surrealists, to create provocative images and strange juxtapositions such as tattoos and skeletons on womens sweaters. These
288 289
Evans and Thornton, "Fashion, Representation, Femininity," 55. Ibid, 55.
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garments use trompe loeil the same way Surrealists did, to create uncanny unsettling images, which in the case of Schiaparelli, could only truly be resolved through touch. Was that woman actually wearing a tie? Is that tattooed flesh or fabric? These provocative garments resisted the aesthetic impulse of Chanel and other designers in the 1920s, to make women look so much like men that they blended right in, or to create simple styles that were only differentiated through the use of fine fabrics. Schiaparellis style was confrontational, engaging, and often teasing the viewer with a distinctly Surrealist point of view. She was engaging directly with Bretons conception of the marvelous or the uncanny. This is clear if we use Fosters three elements of the marvelous to analize Schiaparellis early designs. In this work Schiaparelli 1) created clothes that refuse to distinguish between the real and the fantasy, the sweater printed with bones and the ability to see through clothing 2) confused the animate and inanimate, clothing and skin, and 3) allowed the physical reality, a painted dress, to de usurped by the psychic reality of pleated drapery, the painted sign for pleating usurps actual pleating.290 Examining her designs in the context of Man Rays photographs of them for Minotaure can help to tease out this more complex understanding of Schiaparellis designs. It will also reveal the way in which Schiaparelli moves beyond a play with gender that makes gender masquerade explicit, to engage directly with the sexed body.
290
Here I am referring to the explanation I quoted on page 3. Foster, Compulsive Beauty, 7.
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Mad Caps in Minotaure Three of Elsa Schiaparellis hats appear in a 1933 spread in Minotaure, a Surrealist magazine. The photographs are credited to Man Ray, but the designs in them are not credited to Schiaparelli. Earlier in the same issue Man Ray used a photograph of Schiaparelli standing behind a headless torso in one of her notorious lacquered wigs by the famous French hairdresser, Antoine. In this October-December 1933 issue of Minotaure, Schiaparellis presence is an important and yet completely unaccredited one. Schiaparelli had met Man Ray in 1920, before he moved to Paris, and was one of his first models in his photographic studio in New York. Schiaparelli moved to New York in 1916 with her then husband Wendt de Kerlor. On the boat to from Paris, Schiaparelli met Gabrielle Picabia, the wife of Dada artist Francis Picabia. She became a good friend, introducing Schiaparelli to Man Ray and his circle. Schiaparellis husband even regularly played chess in New York with Duchamp.291 Schiaparelli was well ensconced in the Greenwich Village community of artists in 1920 and 1921.292 She moved back to Paris in 1922 and lived with Gabrielle Picabia briefly. She also reconnected with Man Ray. By 1930, after Schiaparelli had had some success in fashion, Man Ray was photographing her and her clothing regularly.
291
This is according to an interview with Gogo, Schiaparellis daughte r: Nuala Boylan, "The Schiaparelli Dynasty," Harpers Bazaar (August 1993), 132. 292 For more on Greenwich Village in this period see, Andrea Barnet, All-Night Party: The Women of Bohemian Greenwich Village and Harlem, 1913-1930 (Chapel Hill: Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill, 2004). Man Ray, Self Portrait : Man Ray (Boston: Bulfinch Press, 1998). Christine Stansell, American Moderns: Bohemian New York and the Creation of a New Century (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2000). Ross Wetzsteon, Republic of Dreams: Greenwich Village the American Bohemia, 1910-1960 (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2002).
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Minotaure was founded by publisher Albert Skira in 1933 with the support of Andre Breton, just as Bretons own Surrealist journal La Rvolution Surraliste was folding. Skira promised Breton the most luxurious art and literary review the Surrealists had seen, featuring a slick format with many color illustrations[covering] poetry, philosophy, archaeology, psychoanalysis, and cinema.293 From 1933-1939, the journal published fourteen issues and featured the work of many artists including Dal, Man Ray, Picasso, Max Ernst, Giacometti, and Hans Bellmer, as well as the writing of these artists and Andre Breton, Paul Eluard, Jacques Lacan, and others. Rosalind Krauss argues that the magazines, more than anything else are the true objects produced by surrealism, since they merged art and text.294 These magazines published photographs, like those of Man Ray, which purported to document the appearance of the surreal in everyday life. Andre Breton privileges vision in his theorization of Surrealism as unmediated, with the capability of perpetual automism, in contrast with, the premeditated reflexive gait of thought.295 A camera becomes a mechanical eye, it purports to show an unmediated image of the world, no matter how artfully constructed or framed, photographs cling to the stubborn myth of the medium as representing unmediated and transparent reflections
293
Irene E. Hofmann, "Documents of Dada and Surrealism: Dada and Surrealist Journals in the Mary Reynolds Collection," Art Institute of Chicago Museum Studies 22, no. 2 1996), 146. 294 Krauss, The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths, 101. 295 Ibid, 93-94.
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of reality.296 Surrealist photographs reveal the ways in which the subconscious and the uncanny breakthrough into everyday reality. At the same time, Surrealist photography, most notably Man Rays work, was also appearing in fashion magazines. Vogues art director, Mehemed Fehmy Agha, was revolutionizing the look of all of the Cond Nast publications including Vogue, House and Garden, and Vanity Fair, bringing Modernism and Constructivism to their pages. He instituted changes to the magazine in a wide range of areas including the introduction of sans serif typefaces, photographs that bled all the way to the edge of the page, and dynamic layouts.297 Agha brought to Cond Nast artists and photographers such as Cecil Beaton, Horst P. Horst, Louise Dahl-Wolfe, Miguel Covarrubias, and Marcel Verts, many of whom worked in both commercial and independent artistic contexts, thereby incorporating a new modernist aesthetic to the magazine. In 1934 Alexey Brodovitch began to make similar changes at Harpers Bazaar. Brodovitch revolutionized the look of Harpers Bazaar, employing expressive typography and layout styles. Like Agah, he employed white space in daring new ways. Yet his changes had a slightly more avant-garde, and notably Surrealist edge. Along with its editor Carmel Snow, Brodovitch
296
Wendy Grossman, Man Ray, African Art, and the Modernist Lens (Washington: International Arts & Artists, 2009), 47. 297 Agha also introduced new photographic and printing processes including the first color photographs in April 1932. In the area of design he used diagonals, for example to create exciting layouts, he banished the use of italic types, changed the shape of headlines, and made greater use of white space. R. Roger Remington and Barbara J. Hodik, Nine Pioneers in American Graphic Design (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1989), 15-16.
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brought many European artists into the pages of the magazine during his years as art director: Leonor Fini, Raoul Dufy, Salvador Dal, A.M. Cassandre, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Brassa, Jean Cocteau, Martin Munkacsi, and later Richard Avedon. He also signed Man Ray on to an exclusive contract. His work had already appeared in Harpers Bazaar, as well as in Vogue since 1925 and Vanity Fair where some of his first rayographs and other photographs were published as early as 1922.(Figure 72) Man Rays muse at the time, Lee Miller, had also been contributing to Vogue: her first photograph was published in 1930, and Brodovitch used her as an occasional contributor to Harpers Bazaar. Man Ray figures prominently in Brodovitchs first issue of Harpers Bazaar, September 1934, leading off several pages on the Paris openings. The article featured a new technique for the fashion magazine of sending images through short wave radio (basically an early fax system), which had been traditionally used for news photographs. Harpers Bazaar began using the technique to instantly transmit fashion illustrations and photographs from the latest Paris collections to New York. Man Rays created a rayograph, which used a cutout silhouette of a dress and a piece of fabric to create a photographic image without the use of a camera.298 The rayograph was sent over the short wave radio system, and Man Ray took advantage of the way that the radio process distorted the photograph by choosing an abstracted and Surrealist image to send. The resulting image created an impression of a new
298
Rowlands, A Dash of Daring : The Life of Carmel Snow, 183.
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fashion coming over the short waves.299 The image bleeds off two sides, making the figure seem to float off the corner of the page. Brodovitch lays out the text at the bottom in the form of a wave, mimicking the appearance of Man Rays photograph. Man Ray was using the same surrealist techniques no matter what the purpose of his photography. Man Rays Fashion Photography Until recently, Man Rays photographic oeuvre has received uneven attention, with those photographs that represent his supposedly autonomous artistic expression more well known than those that are work for hire and thus not worthy of attention.300 In her stellar catalogue, Man Ray, African Art, and the Modernist Lens, Wendy Grossman argues that the claim that Man Rays so-called commercial work is irrelevant to his artistic output is an unsupportable claim, given the blurry lines between Man Rays commercial and artistic endeavors and the important role his photographs played in the various contexts in which they circulated.301 Grossman demonstrates these blurry boundaries, tracing the way in which many of Man Rays photographs, such as Noire et Blanche, appeared not only in gallery exhibitions, art journals and books, but also in popular magazines such as French Vogue. Man Rays commissioned works were also an important proving ground for much of his innovative experimentation with
299 300
Un-credited caption in Harpers Bazaar (September 1934) 45. Grossman, Man Ray, African Art, and the Modernist Lens, 4. 301 Ibid, 4.
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photographic techniques such as solarization and rayographs. It is essential to consider all of Man Rays photographs as part of his oeuvre. The ambivalence Man Ray expresses in the development of his photographic technique speaks to the automatism and chance occurrences that so intrigued the Surrealists. Man Rays description of how he created his celebrated portrait of Marquise Casati is a perfect example.(Figure 73) He writes that he took several photographs of her, but was forced to use a long exposure since the fuses in her hotel suite could not handle the lights that he had brought. Man Ray wrote that the lady acted as if I was doing a movie of her.302 As a result, the photographs looked like double exposures once they were developed, creating a bizarre and uncanny image of the Marquise. He put them aside and considered the sitting a failure.303 But when the Marquise finally demanded to see them, she loved them. Man Ray often described his most memorable Surrealist techniques as accidents. He reports that the photograph of the Marquise was widely seen throughout Paris and brought in many people from the upper echelons of society who hoped for similarly uncanny portraits. This fits neatly in with the Surrealist demand to find the bizarre and marvelous lying dormant in the world of the everyday and the mundane.
302 303
Ray, Self Portrait: Man Ray, 131. Ibid, 131.
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Schiaparelli in Minotaure Man Rays photographs of Schiaparelli and her designs, however, are anything but images of the mundane. Schiaparelli herself must be considered a collaborator in the context of these photographs. She brought the clothes to Man Rays studio, and in several of these photographs she appears as the model. It is not a stretch to assume that Schiaparelli had some hand in styling the photographs. Though it is not clear who instigated these photographic sessions and who chose the garments to be photographed, I argue that the status of Schiaparellis garments as designed objects must be taken into account in these photographs. Schiaparelli is not identified within Minotaure, nor is she given credit for her designs, as an artist would have been for a work of art that Man Ray might have photographed. This is a critical omission that reveals the gendered hierarchy at work in the Surrealist circle and the art world at large in this period. Schiaparellis presence was erased both because she was a woman and a fashion designer, not a man or an artist. Insisting on Schiaparellis presence in Minotaure will enable more complex and interesting readings of Man Rays photographs. The first image of Schiaparelli in Minotaure appears in Man Rays essay LAge de la Lumire, a general introduction to Man Rays ideas about art and photography. In the article, Man Ray describes how his images, which were reproduced in Minotaure, represent his efforts at automatism: Its in the spirit of an experience and not of experiment that the following autobiographical images are presented. Seized in
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moments of visual detachment during periods of emotional contact, these images are the oxidized residue, fixed by light and chemical elements, of living organisms.304 Man Ray describes his work as indexical traces of his own experiences that connect to the viewers subconscious through strangeness and reality. Thus, it is both the verisimilitude of the photograph, its clear visual relationship to the real world, but also the way the photograph makes the real world appear strange, which connected to the viewers subconscious. He is describing the creation of an uncanny image, or an image of the marvelous (in Bretons terms) one that is at once real and unreal. Photography was a democratic medium, according to Man Ray, appealing and connecting with a wide range of people: painting for me was a very personal, intimate affair, photography was for everyone.305 Four of his photographs, including the photograph of Schiaparelli, illustrated these sentiments, along with four Nadar photographs on the facing page.(Figure 74) The image of Schiaparelli seems to decapitate her, replacing her body with a bright white plaster sculpture, a conventional classical female torso with arms cut off just below the shoulder.(Figure 75) The photograph also plays on Schiaparellis status as a couturire who dresses mannequins like the one that poses as her body. The combination of her head and a mannequin body would have read as a joke to anyone who knew her identity as a couturire.
304
Man Ray, "L'age de la Lumire," in The Autobiography of Surrealism, trans. Marcel Jean (New York: Viking Press, 1980), 333. 305 Ibid, 333.
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Schiaparellis face takes on the serene expression of a classical sculpture and her sculptural lacquered wig by Antoine mirrors the severity of sculpted marble or plaster.306 The photograph may be related to the image of Lee Miller in Jean Cocteaus film, Le Sang dun Pote (1930), in which she is transformed into a Greek statue with broken arms.307 The composition of the photograph demonstrates that it could just as easily be an illustration for an article on Antoines new hairstyles in Vogue as an illustration for Man Rays essay. The photograph as a whole, like Schiaparellis trompe loeil dress, playfully mimics the popular classical styles of dress from designers such as Madeline Vionnet. George Hoyningen-Huen created the look of classical sculpture in his photograph of Vionnet gowns for the November 15th issue of Vogue in 1931.(Error! Reference source not found.) Man Rays photograph takes the aesthetic of a photograph like Hoyningen-Huens to the extreme, turning the woman into a classical sculpture, thereby creating an uncanny image of a woman who is at once flesh and plaster. Schiaparellis wig also pokes fun at the classical aesthetic returning to fashion. The wig was one of her signature accessories; she had two made to wear while vacationing in Saint-Moritz in 1931a blonde one for skiing and a silver one for evenings. The blonde wig was worn with a ski suit with buttons shaped like dollar signs, perhaps a humorous nod to her rising wealth and
306
Crawford reads the plaster cast as a dressmakers mannequin, but for me the classical reference seems more apt. Hannah Crawforth, "Surrealism and the Fashion Magazine," American Periodicals: A Journal of History, Criticism, and Bibliography 14, no. 2 2004), 222. 307 See: Mark Haworth-Booth, The Art of Lee Miller (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007), 3335, pl. 18.
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fame. The wigs were described at the time by the New Yorker: She has, for St. Moritz, a waterproofed wig for winter sports, at which she is truly capable; and another, black and shiny for night wear, that looks like a wrought-iron fern.308 The French fashion magazine, LOfficiel de la Couture de la Mode published photographs of Schiaparellis day and night looks in February 1932 describing the evening wig as silver. Any reader of LOfficiel would recognize Schiaparelli and her wig. Thus I contend that Man Rays photograph records Schiaparellis Surrealist performance. The real subject and author of this photograph are not as clear as they might seem. Photographing Schiaparelli wearing the wig in the form of a classical sculpture underlines the way that these wigs mock modern classicism, as did Schiaparellis dress with the trompe loeil pleats. Man Rays photograph provide evidence for the meaning of Schiaparellis Surrealist performance on the slope of St. Moritz. Her classical wig juxtaposed with the modernity of her ski suit and the fast paced sport creates a classic images of Surrealist contrast. Man Rays photograph appears in Minotaure with three other Man Ray photographs of women in various states of dress and undress. On the facing page are four photographs by Nadar of women also in various states of dress. All wear corsets emphasizing the wasp waists of the late nineteenth century when they were taken. The fashion, in particular the silhouette of these
308
Flanner, "Comet," 23.
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women, allows the viewer to at once understand that the images on the two pages are not contemporary.309 In her essay Surrealism and the Fashion Magazine, Hannah Crawforth argues that Man Rays photographs serve as a metaphor by which one can comprehend the Nadar photographs as works of surrealist art: they can lift the pictures out of their previous context.310 This lifting of images out of their previous context is something that regularly occurred not only in Minotaure, but also on the pages of Vogue and Harpers Bazaar311. In April 1930 a drawing by A.E. Marly ran in Harpers Bazaar. It illustrates ensembles designed by Suzanne Talbot and Paul Poiret titled, In the Manner of Kate Greenaway.(Figure 76) The Poiret and Talbot dresses were in the Empire style--roughly the period of Napoleon Is first empire regime, 18041814with high waists and long straight neoclassical skirts. While Kate Greenaway was an illustrator from the later nineteenth century, she illustrated childrens books in a nostalgic style, often employing the style of the Empire period. Thus the illustration represents a complex relay of several time periods and styles: early nineteenth century styles of clothing adapted by a designer in 1930, illustrated by an artist working in the style of a nineteenth century illustrator who herself worked in the nostalgic style of the early nineteenth century.
309 310
Crawforth, "Surrealism and the Fashion Magazine," 224. Ibid 224. 311 This is a practice which will be explored in greater depth in chapter 4 in the context of Surrealism, fashion, and fashion magazines.
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Man Rays spread in Minotaure also created such a historic relay between his own contemporary images and Nadars nineteenth century ones. Man Ray used the magazine layout to claim Nadars images as Surrealist, in the same way that the Bazaar spread uses the Kate Greenaway style to evoke the historical pedigree of contemporary fashion. The photographs in Man Rays spread play with the notion of voyeurism in their engagement with male heterosexual fantasy representing the caged or captive woman, women on display, or the sculpture that comes to life, the classic Pygmalion myth. In just one of his photographs, and in only one of Nadars, does the woman look directly at the viewer. Schiaparelli does not acknowledge viewers in her photograph. Her downcast gaze allows viewers to look freely at the uncanny image of flesh and stone. Man Rays photograph illuminates the way in which Schiaparelli deconstructs classicism in her designs, such as her gown painted by Jean Dunand.(Figure 77) In both cases Schiaparelli reveals the static quality of classical forms in the context of the dynamic modern world, exposing the regression inherent in the classicizing impulse of the post war period. This deconstruction of classicism is also apparent in the lacquered wig itself, which references the sculptural curls of the hair of classical sculpture. Schiaparellis use of the wig as a ski helmet heightens the uncanny anxiety between hat and hair, hair and lacquer, soft and hard. By inserting the plaster torso, Man Rays photograph amplifies the uncanny version of classicism that Antoine and Schiaparelli created.
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The second appearance of Schiaparelli in Minotaure is in photographs accompanying an essay by Tristan Tzara titled Dun Certain Automatisme du Got (Regarding a Certain Automatism of Taste), in the same issue. Tzaras essay discusses several objects in everyday life that resemble female genitalia including architecture and womens hats. Three Man Ray photographs of hats from Schiaparellis winter 1933-34 collection (one worn by Schiaparelli herself) illustrate the article, along with a sketch by Man Ray of several other hats. Tzara talks about how these hats at first were made to resemble mens hats, but began to take on the look of female genitalia because of the slits in their design. The first photograph, and arguably the most well known is of the Savile Row, a hat inspired by a mans fedora, and aptly named after the famous street in London where the most fashionable mens suits were tailored. Man Ray photographed the hat from above, prominently displaying what Tzara sees as the labial folds of its crown. Schiaparelli creates a provocative version of the fedora for a woman, making the hat close fitting. In a Bloomingdales ad from 1933 for copies of Schiaparelli Mad Caps, one of the caps included is the Savile Row, which is worn more like its male counterpart, high on the head. (Figure 78) The photograph in the ad shows the range of possibilities for actually wearing Schiaparellis hats. In contrast to the advertising photograph (a standard portrait style) Man Ray angles his camera so that the womens face cannot be seen at all, the disembodied hat heightening the uncanny presence of the
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vulva. In Man Rays image of the Savile Row the familiar fedora is suddenly made strange by the presence of the vulva. The hat seems to take on a life of its own, swallowing the womans head below behind its brim. Man Rays framing also heightens the androgyny of the hat, giving the figure the anonymous quality of the man-on-the-street, seen from above as part of the teeming masses of the city. Rosalind Krauss argues that this androgynous quality is heightened by the fact that the hat is pulled down so far, firmly rounded, aggressive, the crown of the hat rises up towards its viewer like the tip of the male organ, swelling with so much phallic presence.312 The genital androgyny of this photograph gives it indeterminate, and therefore, uncanny presence. Krauss considers how this hat fits into Freuds notion of the fetish, an object or image that is associated with the revelation, for a boy, that his mother lacks a phallus: In the logic of the fetish the paradigm male/female collapses in an adamant refusal to admit distinction, to accept the facts of sexual difference. The fetish is not the replacement of the female genitals with a surrogate, coded /female/; it is a substitute that will allow perverse continuation in a belief that the woman (mother) isbeyond all apparent evidence phallic.313 While the fetish is often understood a surrogate for the penis, Krauss argues that, as in this hat, the fetish allows for the collapse of gender distinction. She goes on to describe her reading of Freuds case history of a man whose fetish
312 313
Rosalind E. Krauss, The Optical Unconscious (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1993), 162. Ibid, 164-5.
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was ein Glanz auf die Nase, which Krauss translates as a glance at the nose, as opposed to a shine on the nose. She concludes that this creates the fusion of looking at and looked at, subject and object, seer and seen, a fusion that reenacts the defense that the fetish itself will stage as the misperceived blurring of male and female organs.314 Thus Krauss complicates the notion of the fetish, making it not a replacement for the phallus, but the merging of the male and female; Man Rays photograph of the Savile Row, is a paradigmatic example of this. This argument can be taken a step further and applied to Schiaparellis garments themselves. Her hats from the early 1930s had both phallic and labial qualities.(Figure 79)(Error! Reference source not found.) Another hat pictured in a Bloomingdales ad, The Mike, has an even more overtly labial look, with three large folds of fabric coming up from the center. This hat also appears in a Schiaparelli house sketch from 1933, and in the front view it has an unmistakable phallic shape. It is surprising that Tzara and Man Ray did not choose to include this hat, but perhaps it was too overt for their taste. The article and photographs do not credit Schiaparelli as the designer of these hats, though Tzara does suggest that the designers of these hats has a certain amount of agency in their creation. Tzara claims that they added masculine details intentionally to mitigate the presence of female genitalia in their
314
Ibid, 165.
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hats.315 This argument maintains, however, the sense that the presence of female genitalia is in some ways beyond the control of the designers and that they have attempted to mask it. Tzara is in large part concerned with the unconscious sexuality that lies just under the surface of everyday life. Subsequent writing on these photographs also rarely credits Schiaparelli.316 Acknowledging the designer and her more overtly sexual designs would require Tzara and Man Ray to recognize that Schiaparelli intentionally makes reference to the vagina in her hats as a way of provoking viewers. While the taste for this kind of hat may still be seen as an expression of the unconscious, as Tzara argues, the initial design certainly cannot be. This uncanny fusion of male and female can be seen in several other popular Schiaparelli hats from the period. She often used folds of fabric to adorn the crowns of hats or created unusual flourishes such as what Bloomingdales call an Aztec tepee, atop the Yak.317 (Error! Reference source
not found.)
315
Her Helmet hat with its Keiser Wilhelm-like point at the top is a
This is based on my translation of the essay. Tzara describes a hat which has what he sees as a mans collar and tie adorning it. He argues that this detail is not an accident al addition by the designer but an intentional addition to mitigate the explicit female sexuality of the hat: Dans la manire meme dont ces deux attributs, les plus marquants du costume masculin, le tire-chaussettes tendu faisant appel une image de la virilit et la cravat dont le rle symbolique est connu, dans la manire meme dont ils entourent la reproduction de ce sexe feminine que les femmes portent sur la tte, il faut tre aveugle pour ne pas voir, non pas uniquement un effet de la fantaisie qui, elle, ne joue que le role dingnieuse entremetteuse, mais une relle force de justification que les cratrices de ces modles ont donne leurs oeuvres. Tristan Tzara, "Dun Certain Automatisme Du Got," Minotaure, no. 3-4 (1933, reprint: Rizzoli, 1980), 82. 316 Dilys Blums Shocking and Hanna Crawforth are some of the only exception to this: Blum, Shocking!: The Art and Fashion of Elsa Schiaparelli, 127. Crawforth, "Surrealism and the Fashion Magazine," 240. On the other hand, photographs of art work, such as Oppenheims Objet: Djeuner en Fourrure (1936) is treated as such even in photographs of the object by Dora Maar and Man Ray where it surrealist effect is understood as being enhanced by the work of the photographer. Fer, Batchelor, and Wood, Realism, Rationalism, Surrealism: Art between the Wars, 175-176. 317 Ad for Bloomingdale's, New York Times, 4 September 1933.
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particularly good example of her phallic designs.(Figure 80) These hats from the early 1930s share a particularly tactile quality, since they are all knit (the Yak) or crocheted out of straw (the Helmet) and are therefore soft and flexible. Through their shapes and textures they evoked both male and female body parts, such as the penis, labia, and breasts. Schiaparelli was not creating an androgynous look by dressing women in mens clothing. Instead she was creating a look that brought sexuality to the surface. Moving away from the androgyny of the flapper, Schiaparelli confronted viewers with the wearers sexuality as opposed to simply her gender. Schiaparelli resisted the flaccid look of the flapper with an erect strong silhouette that confronted viewers and created a kind of armor for the wearer. Schiaparelli was clearly interested in a complex play of gender in her designs. She was not simply dressing women in mens clothing, but creating uncanny conflations of the masculine and feminine. Her tattoo bathing suits conflated the knit fabric of a womans bathing suit with the skin of a virile male sailor. Her divided skirts seemed to change form as the wearer moved, looking alternately like a skirt and pants. Schiaparelli was therefore making a concerted design choice to confound viewers with clothing that oscillated between male and female attributes. In The Psychology of Clothes, J.C. Flgel argues that one of the most important distinction between mens clothes and womens clothes derives from the fact that in women the whole body is sexualized, in men the libido is
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more definitely concentrated upon the genital zone.318 Schiaparellis clothing embodies this psychological principal. As opposed to being a modest covering for the head, Schiaparellis hats visually sexualize the head through reference to both male and female genitalia. Flgel, a contemporary of Schiaparelli, provides insight into the ways in which her combinations of masculine and feminine resisted the androgyny of the flapper. In his 1930 book The Psychology of Clothing Flgel describes the place of phallic symbolism in mens clothing: Both stiffness and tightness are, however, likely to be overdetermined by phallic symbolism. The stiff collar, for example, which is the sign of duty is also the sign of the erect phallus, and in general those male garments that are most associated with seriousness and correctness are also the most saturated with a subtle phallicism.319 Thus it is not unreasonable to read Schiaparellis use of broad shoulders and smaller waists as a phallic gesturea style that was erect, in response to the flaccid look of the 1920s. The streamlined androgonous looks of the 1920s sought to blend in rather than stand out, and therefore did not seek to confront viewers. Schiaparellis style of the early 1930s is best exemplified in a page from Harpers Bazaar in April 1933 whose headline reads: It is Conventional to be Extreme. A Schiaparelli suit with high rounded shoulders is paired with a peaked, cone-shaped hat, and photographed to create a striking shadow of
318
J. C. Flugel, The Psychology of Clothes (London: Leonard & Virginia Woolf at the Hogarth Press, and the Institute of Psychoanalysis, 1930), 107. 319 Ibid, 77.
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this intimidating silhouette.(Figure 81) The text on the page informs readers that while last year it took courage to wear the daring hats and padded shoulders of the most daring designers, this year everyone is wearing them.320 A Bloomingdales ad from March of the same year, which proclaims Schiaparellithe daringthe original! Schiaparelli whose broad shoulders make your figure slim, whose high hats make you inches taller! Schiaparelli who gives you the sharp straight lines of youth!321 Schiaparellis designs are sold as giving women the power to manipulate their appearance, to give themselves a taller, more commanding presence. These styles used both masculine and feminine attributes to create a look radically different from the boyish silhouette of the 1920s. Schiaparelli brought back a feminine waistline, but combined it with a strong shoulder, often using military detailing such as epaulettes and metal clips instead of buttons. Hats capped off these defiant looks with a flourish. The women wearing these ensembles wanted to be noticed, making themselves taller with high hats that revealed the face, as opposed to shading it as did the cloche hats of the 1920s. These hats were exuberant and, as Man Ray made clear, were sexually suggestive. They confronted the viewer with bizarre shapes and forms, allowing the wearer to see the response of those looking at her. Schiaparellis customers could become seer and seen, subject and object. The confrontational sexuality inherent in these hats turns the traditional
320 321
It Is Conventional to Be Extreme " Harpers Bazaar (April 1933), 33. Ad for Bloomingdale's, New York Times, 19 March 1933.
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voyeuristic masculine gaze back towards the male viewer. Most of Schiaparellis clothing works on this provocative level. Schiaparellis silhouette of the early 1930s is in sharp contrast with classic flapper and garonne silhouettes of the late 1920s that emphasized a straight slim line with waistbands, if there was one, falling at the hips.(Figure 82) These designs seem droopy in comparison to Schiaparellis tall slim style. One of Schiaparellis early designs from 1929, a boucle knit coat with a tall fur collar worn with a close fitting cloche hat exemplifies this silhouette.(Figure 83) The cloche hat was often worn low, covering the forehead and eyes, emphasizing a downward line.(Figure 84) Schiaparellis hats of the early 1930s, on the other hand, are tilted away from the face, and with their decorative flourishes, cap off an upward axis. While many designers in the early 1930 were using broad shoulders and nipped-in waists, no one was making hats quite like Schiaparelli. In a 1933 Dorothy Dulin illustration for the Chicago Daily Tribune, a pointed hat, tops off a divided skirt that flares at the bottom, and broad-shouldered jacket that nips in at the waist creates a strong tall silhouette. The hat gives the look its final rising flourish. Building upon Krauss analysis of Man Rays photographs, we can see Schiaparellis silhouette as phallic and provocative gesture, with her hat completing what amounts to an erect silhouette. The 1920s streamlined look, topped with a cloche looks limp in comparison, particularly as epitomized by the Chanel slouch as we saw in the last chapter. Schiaparellis 1929 boucle
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coat is a perfect example. The coats tall fur collar envelops the wearers neck creating what amounts to a continuous tube down the bottom of the coat. Her coats in 1931, on the other hand, shape the body in an entirely different way, adopting the broad shoulders of mens garments and nipping in at the natural waist. Vogue described this new style as: Schiaparellis wooden-soldier silhouetteIt transforms you completely: wide padded epaulet shoulders, high, double breasted closing, flat, chesty chest, lines carved sharply from under the arms to the waist, and a straight column from there down. Schiaparelli the dress carpenter, gets this effect in redingotes, suits, and short fur jackets to wear with usually heavy woolen skirts.322 This new silhouette, though it emphasized the feminine curves of the waist and chest, is still gendered as masculine, wooden-soldiers made by a dress carpenter. These terms are used again in the next issue to describe two of Schiaparellis coats illustrated in the magazine.(Figure 85) These coats use masculine styling, not to hide feminine curves, but to play them up in a distinctly aggressive and phallic manner, as Flgel describes. Schiaparellis look is novel, because not only does it conform to the waist and hips, as did much of the clothing in this period, but her hats emphasized an erect and aggressive style. (Figure 86) She combined feminine curves with aggressive masculine tailoring creating an uncanny look that was meant to stand out: It is Conventional to be Extreme. The Mad Cap, Schiaparellis most popular hat, was certainly a part of this new aesthetic. It was photographed by Man Ray and appeared on the
322
Vogue Goes to the Collections," Vogue (1 October 1931), 42.
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third page of the essay along with a photograph of Schiaparelli herself in the Crazy Coxcomb. Originally designed in 1930, it was a hand knitted tube whose two corners could easily be manipulated by the wearer to create different peaked styles. Many Hollywood stars famously sported the Mad Cap, including Ina Claire who wears a two-pointed model in a photograph from 1932, and Katherine Hepburn, who wears a more tailored version in an undated photograph.(Figure 87)(Figure 88) Schiaparelli credits Ina Claire with popularizing the hat.323 The Mad Cap may be the hat referred to in a 1933 article in Harpers Bazaar that comments on a makeover given to Hepburn by her studio RKO and American designer Elizabeth Hawes, to deter her from the Schiaparelli monkey caps she likes and the faint aura of the Bryn Mawr she denies ever having attended.324 It is apparent from this comment that the Mad Cap, like the Savile Row, was clearly linked in the popular press to androgyny. Early in her career, Hepburn had been criticized for her rather masculine way of dressing, and the reference to Bryn Mawr, a womens college that Hepburn did indeed graduate from in 1928, clearly refers to Hepburns outspoken and often manly habits. Andrew Britton quotes a 1933 article on Hepburn in Picturegoer that describes Hepburn as looking like a schoolgirl, her sandy hair was tucked carelessly under a blueknitted cap. The cap preserved her reputation for funny hats.325 While this
323 324
Schiaparelli, Shocking Life: The Autobiography of Elsa Schiaparelli , 49. Movietone," Harpers Bazaar (February 1933), 65. 325 Andrew Britton, Katharine Hepburn: Star as Feminist (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984; reprint, 2003), 17.
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cap was evidently not one of Schiaparellis creations, it is certainly likely that Hepburns reputation for funny hats was built by wearing many of Schiaparellis. The designer herself recalled giving Hepburn a makeover at her Paris salon very early in her career.326 This identification with the young Hepburn suggests that Schiaparellis clothes were associated with a certain kind of androgyny exemplified by Hepburn in the early 1930s, both in crossdressing film roles and off screen by her unconventional mannish garb.327 This mannish garb was often the same type of working class menswear referenced by Schiaparelli in her early designs.328 The Mad Cap was so popular that Schiaparelli began seeing copies of it made everywhere. In her autobiography she claims that she ordered all of the remaining hats in her stock destroyed after seeing the Mad Cap on a baby in a stroller: from all the shop windows, including the five- and ten-cent stores, at the corner of every street, from every bus, in town and in the country, the naughty hat obsessed her, until one day it winked at her from the bald head of a baby on a pram. That day she gave the order to her salesgirls to destroy every single one in stock.329 Anyone who followed fashion would have easily recognized the cap in Man Rays photograph. His photographs isolate Schiaparellis designs and put them to work illustrating Tzaras thesis that unconscious images of sexuality
326 327
Schiaparelli, Shocking Life: The Autobiography of Elsa Schiaparelli , 52. Britton, Katharine Hepburn : Star as Feminist, 32. See Brittons chapter 2 Publicity, for accounts of Hepburns clothing in contemporary journalism and chapter 4 Gender and Bisexuality, for more on Hepburns androgyny. 328 For example Hepburn is described as wearing dungarees with a fur coat in a beat up truck. Ibid, 32. 329 Schiaparelli, Shocking Life: The Autobiography of Elsa Schiaparelli, 49-50.
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are being constantly produced, in cultural realms as diverse as architecture and hats. Rosalind Krauss argues that the power of photography within Surrealism is to find and isolate what we could call the worlds constant production of erotic symbols, its ceaseless automatic writing.330 She demonstrates that the techniques of framing and doubling in photography signify signification, alerting the viewer to semiotic value of the image: in cutting into the body of the world, stopping it, framing it, spacing it, photography reveals that world as written.331 These Man Ray photographs, particularly the one of the Savile Row, are a perfect example of the use of framing by removing the figure entirely from the fashion photograph. Man Rays photographs provide insight into the new kind of confrontational sexuality created by Schiaparelli in the 1930s. In Man Rays photograph, the Savile Row oscillates between masculine and feminine, phallic and vaginal, just as the coats and suits Schiaparelli designed to be worn with it. Man Rays photographs of Schiaparellis hats point to the ways in which Schiaparelli responded to the androgyny of the garonne and flapper aesthetic, with her own more provocative style of uncanny sexuality. Schiaparelli not only adopted the styles of menswear, but she used them in a distinctly sexualized manner. While the flapper silhouette had clearly been shocking when first introduced in the 1920s, by the end of the decade it was stale and conventional. Schiaparelli found new ways to challenge traditional
330
Rosalind E. Krauss, "Corpus Delicti," in L'amour Fou : Photography & Surrealism (Washington: Corcoran Gallery of Art, 1985), 40. 331 Ibid, 31, 40.
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modes of feminine dress. She adopted working class styles or mens dress and adornment such as tattoos and sailor shirts. Using these styles with trompe loeil techniques, she created uncanny conflations not only of male and female, but also of skin and fabric. Reading Schiaparellis trompe loeil clothing in the context of Surrealism creates a more complex understanding of how it engages with Bretons notion of the marvelous, or the uncanny. Schiaparellis designs are more than simply whimsical and clever. From the very beginning she was dealing with complex questions at the heart of fashion, gender, sexuality, fantasy, and concealing and revealing. Her trompe loeil garments teased viewers and engaged with touch as well as sight, making the wearer no longer simply an object, but also an agent of the illusion. Her new silhouette in the early 1930 completed this translation, making women stand out by bringing back feminine curves, along with strong male tailoring. Examining Man Rays photographs, it becomes clear that the hat and other garments of the early 1930 engage in far more sexualized gender play than did the androgyny of the 1920s. Schiaparelli referenced genitalia in her hats in ways that gave wearers an erect and phallic presence, albeit with an uncanny presence of femininity and the female body. Reading Schiaparellis clothing along with the art of the Surrealists allows for a more complex understanding of the adoption of menswear for women, the use of illusionism in dress, and the ways in which she was responding to trends in both art and fashion in the late 1920s and early 1930s. Schiaparellis shock tactics work to
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move their wearers away from being looked at as objects to forcing viewers to acknowledge the fact that they are looking. Using mens clothing to make women more physically free and mobile was not Schiaparellis goal: she was working on a more complex semiological level. Her goal was not only to make visible the masquerade of femininity, but through the uncanny conflation of masculine and feminine in her phallic silhouettes, to question the stability and power of masculinity. In this chapter we have seen the role of fashion in the work of Man Ray and in Minotaure. Through Man Rays photographs we can see the ways that Schiaparelli used the uncanny in her work. Schiaparellis early designs engaged with gender and sexuality in a Surrealist manner. By moving away from androgyny towards a more sexualized expression, Schiaparelli created styles that exuded strange glamour. Her clothes confronted viewers in a new way, giving the women who wore them a position of agency, the ability to look back at those who looked at them. In chapter four we will see how Schiaparelli continued to create designs that confronted viewers, and delved deeper into a Surrealist exploration of the body. In the next chapter we will examine another aspect of strange glamour related to exoticism. We will see how designers used Surrealist tactics to blend images from Africa with European styles to create jarring juxtapositions. This chapter will explore another aspect of Strange Glamour that allowed women to engage in the kinds of colonialist fantasies that Surrealist men were enacting in their work.
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Chapter 3
The Colonels Lady and African Sadie are Sisters Under their Hats332
In May of 1931 the French milliner Madame Agns appeared on the cover of LOfficiel de la Couture, de le Mode in a drawing by Jean Dunand. (Figure 89) She is described as wearing "a charming evening gown, knickers skirt, of coarse white silk crpon created especially for her by the Maison Schiaparelli on the occasion of the Paris Colonial Exhibition of that year. Her coiffeur, 'A.O.F.,' one of her latest creations, consists of a crin foundation embroidered in artificial silk."333 In Dunands evocative illustration, Agns looks less like a milliner, and more like an exotic dancer from the Colonial Exposition her gown was made for. Her graceful pose recalls a dancer, not a mannequin. Dunand portrays her in a contour drawing focusing on the gold details of the gown, jewelry and headdress. In the background of the drawing, a silhouetted profile creates a large block of black and a smaller one of blue. Most of Agns body and gown are black, creating an image that is rife with striking racial connotations. Schiaparellis gown and Agns hat allow her to embody a racial other. In two photographs of her inside the magazine she is clearly white, her face framed by the white background and her shiny light colored silk straw hat. (Figure 90) Here she looks far more conventional, and while the pages copy touts the Colonial Manifestation Chez Agns, the hat is
332
"B. Altman & Company Window Display of Agns Hats," in B. Altman Window Display Photographs (New York: Gladys Marcus Library, Fashion Institute of Technology, c. 1931). 333 Lgende Da La Page De Couverture," L'Officiel de la Couture de la Mode, no. 117 (May 1931), 3.
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one of her more abstract interpretations of the colonial theme. This is particularly true when compared with one of her hats that appears in a photograph two pages later, with its painted hand-knit crown topped with coral bead embroidery and a black satin band.334 (Figure 91) A Marshall Field & Company advertisement for Agns hats from April 1931 proclaimed, Africa Speaks in Millinery. But what exactly is Africa saying? What does it mean for a white woman to wear an African, or colonial hat? A 1931 display of Agns hats in the window of B. Altman & Co. in New York begins to reveal the complex story of the global turn of 1930s fashion with a card reading: The Colonels Lady and African Sadie are Sisters Under their Hats.335 Clearly these hats were related to the history of colonialism as well as to a long history of Orientalism in western fashion. The 1930s were a decade in which global influences of all kinds flowered in fashion, inspired by the many Worlds Fairs and Colonial Expositions of the period. African hats, Indian saris, sombreros, Mandarin caps, Hindu turbans, and coolie caps covered the pages of fashion magazines, appeared on the heads of movie stars, and filled the shelves of department stores. These trends in 1930s fashion were a part of what I call an aesthetic of Strange Glamour that developed in this period. Strange glamour is built on contradictions and contrasts. As we saw in the last chapter, fashion in the 1930s was moving away from the conformity of the 1920s flapper and towards
334 335
Colonial Manifestation Chez Agns," L'Officiel de la Couture de la Mode, no. 117 (May 1931), 22. "B. Altman & Company Window Display of Agns Hats."
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an emphasis on bold and brash looks for daysometimes referred to as hard chicand slinky bias cut sex appeal in the evening. Global influences paired with traditional European styles created dynamic ensembles, which were an important part of this new strange glamour. Surrealists are, of course, well known for their interest in the visual culture of the colonized world. Wendy A. Grossman has detailed the important role that photography played in the dispersal of images of African art.336 She also demonstrates the ways that photographs of African art, which have often been understood as objective documentary representations, reflected instead the complex relationship of American and European artists to African art. Moreover, such photographs have mediated the reception of this art. The interest in so-called primitive artwhat Grossman and others term Modernist Primitivismis often attributed to dissatisfaction with the progress of the modern world in the wake of the rapid industrialization of the nineteenth-century and, in particular, the horrors of World War I made possible by the mechanization of war.337 For some American and European artists, the art of Africa and Oceania, in particular, represented a simpler, unchanging way of life more connected with spirituality. This view reflects deep-seated beliefs about race, power, and progress, which were institutionalized through colonial expansion.
336
See Wendy Grossman, "Modernist Gambits and Primitivist Discourses : Reframing Man Ray's Photographs of African and Oceanic Art" (PhD dissertation, University of Maryland, College Park, 2002), and Grossman, Man Ray, African Art, and the Modernist Lens. 337 Louise Tythacott, Surrealism and the Exotic (New York: Routledge, 2003), 1. Grossman, Man Ray, African Art, and the Modernist Lens, 2.
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Many scholars have dealt extensively with the issues surrounding Modernist Primitivism, and, in particular, Surrealisms engagement with the primitive.338 I do not wish to make an attempt to resolve these debates, important as they are. I choose instead to focus on what I will term Fashionable Primitivismthe way that primitive influences played out in fashion in the 1930s. Examining these influences can reveal the unique relationship that women have with colonization. Though global cultures have long influenced European fashion, I argue that these influences were used in a unique way in the 1930s. Fashionable Primitivism and the Surrealists brand of Modernist Primitivism spoke to each other during this period. I will trace this dialogue from the 1931 Colonial Exposition to the 1937 La Mode au Congo exhibition at the Charles Ratton Gallery in Paris, an exhibition of a group of hats from the Belgian Congo purchased by the milliner Lilly Dach. This chapters focus is on the Africanist aesthetic in fashion because these influences are plentiful and rich. Moreover, more than any other continent in the 1930s, Africa was radically other for Europeans and Americans. It was also a continent that had a lush life in the imaginations of Europeans and Americans, as we will see.339 Comparing Agns hats with Dachs will reveal the development of Fashionable Primitivism from an abstract use of
338
See for example: William Stanley Rubin, ed. "Primitivism" In 20th Century Art : Affinity of the Tribal and the Modern, 2 vols. (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1984). James Clifford, The Predicament of Culture : Twentieth-Century Ethnography, Literature, and Art (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1988). Tythacott, Surrealism and the Exotic. 339 It is worth noting that fashion in the 1930s and indeed, contemporary fashion, freely adopts, appropriates and adapts from a wide variety of global sources, mixing and matching as it sees fit. Thus, to a certain extent singling out Africanist fashion is a matter of narrowing down an enormous wealth of material to a manageable portion.
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African motifs, to a collage aesthetic which is related to the Surrealists use of African objects. In the 1930s Man Ray and Andre Breton deployed African objects in their work through photography. Using the photographic process as a means of collecting, both artists associated African objects with their own artistic practices. Man Ray used these objects as props in his photographs. Andre Breton used them to illustrate his books, Nadja (1928) and Mad Love (1937). According to Krzysztof Fijalkowski, the collecting practices of the Surrealists suggested a fervor for accumulation that was partly a sacred quest to save and shelter the precious piece from its banal rationalized context, but also suggested a compulsion to buy and possess, whichfar from representing a rejection of consumer economyarguably amounted to an unexpectedly rich celebration of its profusion.340 At the same time, many women employed African accessories in their wardrobes. Nancy Cunard, for example, was known for her unique personal style. She adorned her arms with signature stacks of African ivory bracelets from her prodigious collection. How do the practices of women like Eluard and Cunard relate the compulsive collecting of surrealist men? While these men claimed to despise the consumer economy and resist capitalism in their artistic practice, they enthusiastically participated in these systems through their art collecting, and their habitual trolling of the Paris Flea Market. At the same time that the Surrealists were organizing their anti-colonial exhibition to expose the abuses of the colonial
340
Fijalkowski, "Black Materialism: Surrealism Faces the Commercial World," 109.
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system, which underlined the 1931 Paris Colonial Exhibition, they were participating in the obsession with colonial possession through their own collecting practices. Breton was not wearing his flea market finds, or his African objects, but was instead using them to decorate his domestic space and illustrate his books. While some Surrealists did don their masks for costume balls or mugging for the camera, these items were not part of their daily wear on the street. Is there a difference, then, in Cunards relation to her bracelets and their meaning, and Bretons relationship to his collection, particularly since Breton and other Surrealists often used these collections as a means to raise cash when funds ran short?341 This chapter will use James Cliffords description of Ethnographic Surrealism as a springboard to understand the way that fashion designers deployed African influences to achieve the aesthetic of strange glamour. A brief overview of the status of colonialism in France in the 1930s will provide a backdrop for thinking about how the idea of Africa existed in European and American imaginations. Throughout the chapter I will trace what I see as a development in fashionable primitivism, moving from abstract references to Africabangle bracelets, raffia, and strawto more concrete references to specific hairstyles, headdresses and hats. Examining the ways in which the Surrealists Man Ray and Andre Breton used African objects in their works will illuminate the meanings of fashionable primitivism, and will give a new perspective on these artists practices. I will compare Andre Bretons
341
Tythacott, Surrealism and the Exotic, 95-6.
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collecting practices to those of women in the fashion industry such as Helena Rubinstein and Lilly Dach. All of these figures used their collections as a form of self-promotion in their homes and commercial spaces. Looking at them together we can see that Breton is part of a larger group of artists and fashion entrepreneurs who used their domestic spaces as a space to advertise their modern aesthetic sensibilities. An examination of Man Rays photographs of women with African objects will demonstrate the important links made by artists and, by extension, white Americans and Europeans between primitivism and sexuality. I argue that Mme Agns, Lilly Dach, and other designers used this link between exoticism and eroticism to create fashions with a different kind of sex appeal than the short skirts and low necklines of the flapper. These fashions used the evocation of primitive sexuality to create an alluring image. These clothes also clearly engaged with masquerade, which displaced the sexuality of the look onto clothes as opposed to the wearer. The woman who wore these clothes was masquerading as an African Sadie, but could just as easily change back into the Colonels Lady, by changing her clothes. Womens fashion practices in this period reveal the unique relationship that they had with colonialism. While white men were encouraged to look at colonial women with a sexualized gaze, white women were set apart from this dynamic since colonial men were not deemed appropriate romance partners. Fashion was an arena in which white women could carve out a space for
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themselves in this colonial fantasy. By masquerading as colonial women, they could engage with the colonial imagination, particularly with regard to sexuality.
Ethnographic Surrealism and Fashion In his foundational essay On Ethnographic Surrealism, James Clifford explores the relationship between anthropology and Surrealism in the 1920s and 1930s. 342 He argues that the new practice of ethnography and Surrealism both strove to make the familiar strange, to de-familiarize the everyday by juxtaposing it with the foreign, the other. Clifford argues that the concept of collage is common to both ethnography and Surrealism. In Surrealism the umbrella and sewing machine meet on the dissecting table, while in anthropology moments are produced in which distinct cultural realities are cut from their contexts and forced into jarring proximity.343 Clifford explains that Surrealism is always present in ethnographies, but is often smoothed over. It is most visible when the cuts and sutures of the research process are left visibleTo write ethnographies on the model of collage would be to avoid the portrayal of cultures as organic wholes or as unified, realistic worlds subject to a continuous explanatory discourse. 344
342
James Clifford, "On Ethnographic Surrealism," in The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth-Century Ethnography, Literature, and Art (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1988), 117. 343 Ibid, 146. 344 Ibid, 146.
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Cliffords description of Ethnographic Surrealism is indebted to Walter Benjamins description of dialectical images. According to Benjamin, the past does not illuminate the present, but rather the interaction between the past and the present can create a unique and fleeting meaning, which has the potential to transform our understanding of both the past and present. Clifford thinks about such dialectical images in the context of ethnographies. Ethnographic accounts put together the familiar and the strange to create metaphoric descriptions of cultures. Clifford emphasizes the usefulness of the Surrealist collage technique because it does not fool us into believing that we really fully understand the culture being studied, but rather helps lead us to think harder about our own culture. In his essay, Surrealism: The Last Snapshot of the European Intelligentsia, Benjamin explains that we penetrate the mystery only to the degree that we recognize it in the everyday world, by virtue of a dialectical optic that perceives the everyday as impenetrable, the inpenetrable as the everyday.345 Benjamin urges us to use dialectical optics, or what Clifford might describe as a collage aethetic, to acknowledge what we dont understand about our everyday lives. Collage makes the familiar strange, transforming our understanding of the everyday world. The everyday world of fashion was full of these dialectical images. I argue that we can see the development of this collage practice from the
345
Walter Benjamin, "Surrealism: The Last Snapshot of the European Intelligentsia," in Reflections : Essays, Aphorisms, Autobiographical Writings, ed. Peter Demetz, trans. Edmund Jephcott (New York: Schocken Books, 2007), 190.
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abstract uses of African style in the work of Madame Agns, to the exuberant appropriations of Lilly Dach, as well as the personal style of many individual women in the 1930s.346 While Breton was using his collection to juxtapose objects that questioned the idea of a universal aesthetic, designers such as Schiaparelli, Agns, and Dach were using a juxtaposition to interrupt conventional standards of beauty though their designs. For these designers, these chance encounters were embodied; they occurred on the body of a fashionable woman: Nancy Cunards African ivory bracelets and her bias cut gown or Nusch Eluard wearing Schiaparellis sari and carrying fan made of transparent rodophane. (Figure 4)(Figure 5)
Colonial Background In order to examine the ways that African objects and images of Africa influenced fashionable women and Surrealists, we must briefly review the state of colonialism in the 1930s. For the purposes of this investigation, I will be focusing on Frances relationship to its colonies as an exemplar of the state of colonialism in the 1930s.347 World War I had re-shuffled the colonial map for the major European powers. During the years between the World Wars, France wasgeographically at leastat the height of its colonial power.
346
This is not something I can pinpoint as starting in the 1930s, but I it reaches a kind of zenith then; while it still has a presence in fashion, it has faded from the forefront. 347 Most of artists and designers I will be discussing were living and working in France, and most of the images and objects they were exposed to were a result of French colonialism. Though she lived in the United States, Dach was French. I think that her relationship to Africa is better understood in that context. Race in the US would also inform this research, but awaits a future project.
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According to historian Martin Thomas, despite the geographic breadth of the French empire, there was a profound ambivalence in France about colonialism after the First World War348 Thomas argues that while there was a public interest in the exoticism of the colonies, there was very little public will or interest in colonial expansion or even maintenance. The French public in the metropole were far more concerned with what was going on within the borders of France itself. Many were concerned that funding colonial projects or the defense of the colonies was seen as taking much needed money out of France. At the same time, the French Empire was barely being held together: Put simply, in much of the inter-war empire, French colonialism was barely tolerated. Authority was generally imposed through coercion, whether actual or implied.349 Scholar Elizabeth Ezra defines what she calls the colonial unconscious as the images of its colonial enterprise that France presented to itself and to the world. In interwar France, these images were everywhere, and they were inescapable.350 Such images were circulated in the Paris expositions, films, newspapers, magazines, books (including childrens books featuring Babar and Tintin), on food packages, and, as we will see, in fashion.351 At the heart of all of these images is exoticizationthe use of an
348
Martin Thomas, The French Empire between the Wars: Imperialism, Politics and Society (New York: Manchester University Press, 2005), 1-12. 349 Ibid, 2-3, 5. 350 Elizabeth Ezra, The Colonial Unconscious: Race and Culture in Interwar France (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2000), 2. 351 Ibid, 2-3, 21.
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other to define the self.352 Elizabeth Ezra employs the terms of Orientalist and Africanist discourse as a framework for thinking about eroticization and the way in which artists and fashion designers responded to objects from the colonies. She discusses these two positions not in terms of the particular parts of the world they examine, but rather how they examine them. Orientalism is concerned with rational study and classification of objects, whereas Africanist discourse is positioned against the rational; it searches, but not for any particular meaning.353 The Surrealists, and the fashion designers I will discuss, approached objects and images from a broad range of countries through Africanist discourse, reveling in the mystery and indeterminacy of them. The Surrealists were deeply engaged with an exoticism that venerated African, Oceanic, and Native North American objects and cultures as uninhibited and extraordinary. Louise Tythacott explains that the Surrealists were, on the one hand, progressive and radical, on the other, fixed within the world-view of their timeWhile disavowing the discourses of evolutionism and aesthetic primitivism they constructed in their place equally problematic discourses of the fantastic, the magical and the mystical.354 The Surrealists treated non-western art, not as a series of motifs to be appropriated, but as discrete objects that were linked to spirituality and the primitive
352
For an extended definition see: Brett A. Berliner, Ambivalent Desire: The Exotic Black Other in Jazz-Age France (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2002), 4-6. 353 Ezra, The Colonial Unconscious: Race and Culture in Interwar France , 12. 354 Tythacott, Surrealism and the Exotic, 14.
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subconscious. Cubists and other early Modernists along with Art Deco designers had appropriated design motifs and aesthetics from African and other non-western objects. Inspiration from the exotic colonies was crucial in the development of Art Deco design. Ghislaine Wood writes that: reality for many people in the 1930s was permeated by the exotic. From the moment they turned on their mini ziggurat radios in the morning, to the moment they left their Egyptianstyle cinema at night, Art Deco exoticism surrounded them. Every aspect of modern living was given an exotic veneer, from faades of factories and cinemas to the packaging of perfumes and chocolates.355 Where design motifs and themes had dominated the adaptations of Cubists and Art Deco designers, Surrealists were interested in the meaning behind such exotic objects. The Surrealists acknowledged that the objects they collected had aesthetic value, meaning and potentially a function outside of an aesthetic one in their original context, but they were not necessarily interested in understanding that purpose in any serious way. African, Oceanic, and Native American art was interesting to the Surrealists because they thought it had a deeper and more primary relation to the makers and users subconscious than did European art.356 This belief was tied to racist ideas about the backwardness of the people who made such objects.357 As Tythacott
355
Ghislaine Wood, "The Exotic," in Art Deco 1910-1939, ed. Charlotte Benton, Tim Benton, and Ghislaine Wood (London: V&A Publications, 2003), 125. 356 Louise Tythacott explains that The Surrealists frequently aligned the primitive, the mad, and the child within their supposedly subversive system of belief, conceptualizing the art forms of all three as direct expressions of inner life. Tythacott, Surrealism and the Exotic, 55. 357 See Tythacotts chapter Fantasy, theory, Surrealist ideology, which goes through the different psychological, philosophical and evolutionary theories which influenced the Surrealists notion of the primitive, in Ibid, 55, 49-84.
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points out, despite the fact that the Surrealists were more sensitive to colonial oppression and the idea that the objects they sometimes obsessively collected belonged to living traditions, they were still a product of the attitudes of the colonialist cultures in which they lived. The tension between the impulse to classify the other, and the desire to create mysterious fantasies about the other, is reflected in a well known photograph of a Mangbetu woman named Nobosodrou, who was the wife of the Mangbetu King Touba, taken by George Specht. (Figure 92) The photograph was by far the most famous image that emerged from La Croisire Noire (The Black Crossing), an expedition across the Sahara sponsored by Citron. The journey spawned a film La Croisire Noire (1926), which documented the trip from Algeria to Madagascar between October 1924 and June 1925. Brett Berliner calls the expedition, perhaps, the first multimedia extravaganza in France. It generated numerous short ethnographic movies, and it became the subject of a feature-length film including original music and African songs arranged for orchestra. It was the subject of numerous journal articles, one major book, and an art exhibition. Finally, artifacts collected during the expedition were displayed in ethnographic and zoological museum and exhibitions.358 The photograph of Nobosodrou circulated in a diverse array of media throughout the 1920s and 1930s: books, postcards, posters, sculpture, and most curiously fashion. In books, the photograph was used as evidence of what many European explorers had identified as the Mangbetu peoples
358
Berliner, Ambivalent Desire: The Exotic Black Other in Jazz-Age France, 189-190
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advanced and hierarchical society.359 The photograph of the dignified and elegant profile of a woman whose skull had been carefully shaped when she was a child through binding was emblematic of the aesthetics of the Mangbetu, which were often linked to Ancient Egypt.360 The photograph served as a classification tool, evidence for constructing a hierarchy of African societies along with the other photographs from La Croisire Noire.361 The photograph was also used as a representation of the exotic mysteries of Africa. Enid Schildkrout explains that, by the 1930s, the image of the long-headed Mangbetu woman was virtually a logo for Belgian colonialism, feature in images at the 1931 and 1937 French expositions and on postcards, posters, guidebooks, and in art galleries. This image was simultaneously exotic, erotic, and easily aestheticized.362 The Mangbetu woman became the de facto logo for the expedition and film, used on posters, and even, curiously, on a hood ornament for a Citron. In these contexts she represented all of Africa, as an exotic and mysterious other. The eroticism of this image is key to its adoption as a symbol of the expedition and Africa. 363
359
The photograph first appeared in the book published by expedition leaders Georges-Marie Haardt and Louis Audouin-Dubreuil in 1927, La Croisire Noire, expedition Citron Centre-Afrique. 360 Enid Schildkrout, "Les Parisiens d'Afrique: Mangbetu Women as Works of Art," in Black Womanhood: Images, Icons, and Ideologies of the African Body , ed. Barbara Thompson (Hanover: Hood Museum of Art, Dartmouth College, 2008), 71-73. 361 The photograph was also used in the context of classification by American artist Malvina Hoffman, when she was commissioned by the Field Museum in Chicago to create a large group of sculptures to illustrate the Races of Man for the Hall of Man. What is fascinating about Hoffmans sculptures is that she traveled extensively in Africa, and yet clearly relies on Spechts photographs in her sculpture. 362 Schildkrout, "Les Parisiens d'Afrique: Mangbetu Women as Works of Art," 81. 363 The fact the Aaron Douglas made Nobosodrou the subject of the cover of Opportunity, an AfricanAmerican magazine, in May 1927, reflects the images status in both Europe and America as a representation of Africa.
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Brett A. Berliner rightly points out that, integral to exoticism is ethno-eroticism, the state of sexual arousal and desire for a specific people solely because of their racial or ethnic identity.364 Ethno-eroticism is at the heart of the Africanist discourse that Ezra defines. We can see this kind of exoticism and eroticism in the designs of the French milliner, Agns. A series elongated turbans appeared in LOfficiel in August 1926. (Figure 93) They do not have the elegance of Nobosodrous hairstyle, but merely approximate the style.365 Notably, one of these hats is modeled by Josephine Baker, cementing the connection between the hats and two of the most famous icons of black beauty at the time: Baker and Nobosodrou. Bakers status as an ethno-erotic sex symbol underlines the sexuality evoked through the reference to Africa. This gendered use of exoticism, which is inextricably tied to eroticism, is central to my examination of Primitivism in both fashion and Surrealism. The gendering of exoticism is clear in the way in which intermarriage was treated in France in the 1930s. Colonized men were not considered proper husbands for French women, but on the other hand colonized women were seen as potential partners from French men. By the time of the 1937 Exposition, assimilationist rhetoric was more prominent in colonial discourse. The children of colonial unions, particularly girls, couldrhetorically, at
364 365
Berliner, Ambivalent Desire: The Exotic Black Other in Jazz-Age France, 4. In the 19th century designations commonly applied to the Mangbetu were artistes, and the Parisians of Africa, les lgants, and les jouisseurs. The Mangbetu were a natural sour ce for European milliners to draw from with their interest in adornment and stunning headwear. Enid Schildkrout and Curtis A. Keim, African Reflections: Art from Northeastern Zaire (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1990), 30.
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leastbecome a productive part of bolstering the French population.366 By the late 1930s, marriages between white French men and mtisses were officially encouraged.367 French women however were left out of this equation. While French culture encouraged men to look at colonial women with an ethno-erotic gaze, colonial men were not suitable objects for French womens fantasies, at least not their public fantasies. Through fashions, such as Agnss turbans, French women could temporarily take on the ethno-erotic through masquerade.
Surreal Collecting The Surrealist men did not engage with Africa, Oceania, or Native North America through masquerade, as many women did, but rather through collecting. Surrealists such as Breton often used these collections as a form of social critique. Breton used objects from Africa and Oceania to question the values of bourgeois culture. His collection included: stuffed birds, cases of tropical butterflies, coins, minerals, crystals, glass bottles, objects made by psychiatric patients, books, paintings by Henri Rousseau, prints by Edvard Munch, drawings by Seurat and Adolf Wlfi, sculptures by Giacometti, objets trouves, masks, sculptures and exotic artifacts from Africa, Oceania and the Americas.368
366 367
Ezra, The Colonial Unconscious: Race and Culture in Interwar France, 16. Thomas, The French Empire between the Wars: Imperialism, Politics and Society , 167. 368 Tythacott, Surrealism and the Exotic, 43.
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Freely mixing high art, objects from the natural world, and those made by primitive cultures, Breton questioned the hierarchies of bourgeois taste and drew parallels between these objects. James Cliffords description of Bretons Ethnographic Surrealism works hard to erase the feminized practices of shopping and interior decoration that are central to Bretons practice as a collector. Like most collectors of his time, Breton did not travel to Africa or Oceania where his objects came from; he bought them in the markets of Paris, made possible by colonialism.369 No matter how much they despised colonialism and the capitalism that fueled it, Surrealists were actively and enthusiastically involved in these systems through their collecting practices.370 It is also worth remembering that Bretons collection served as a form of capital for him, not only cultural capital, but financial. He sold a large portion of his extensive collection of African and Oceanic art in 1931 in the wake of the Wall Street crash and his own financial problems.371 He and Paul Eluard joined forces for an auction at the Htel Drouot, which raised an incredible 285,000 francs. Breton is often described as an explorer, discovering objects at the flea market, but his activity is no differerent from that of the women shopping for antiques there.
369
He did travel to Mexico, the U.S., Canada and the Caribbean. Most of the objects in his collection were acquired in france, England, Holland, and leter the United States. 370 Tythacott, Surrealism and the Exotic, 96. Janine A. Mileaf, Please Touch: Dada and Surrealist Objects after the Readymade (Hanover: Dartmouth College Press, 2010), 133. 371 It is also worth noting that Breton acquired a collection of contemporary European, African, Chinese, Japanese, and Native American art for the couturier Jacques Doucets studio. This work not only ties Bretons collection practices to fashion, but also turns his work as a collector into professional employment.
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Bretons shelves and walls crowded with artifacts might have been anathema to the sleek modern sensibility of the bourgeois home that he detested, but he was using his artifacts to similar ends. They were intended to demonstrate that Breton was worldly and part of the avant-garde, that he understood the mysteries of these non-western objects, and that he could see their beauty. For Breton, the domestic space became an expression of the surreal, a glimpse into the images floating around his own subconscious. Breton was deeply engaged with interior decoration and design, and yet no scholars seem willing to associate his practice with this feminized activity. Comparing Bretons use of his collection in interior design with cosmetics mogul Helena Rubinstein will make this clear. On his trips through the Paris Flea Market, Breton looked for objects that had some kind of psychic value to him.372 Some of these objects were from Africa, Oceania, or Native North America, while others were vernacular objects whose uses were obscured by the passage of time. Breton used the objects in a number of ways. As discussed above, he decorated his apartment with them in arrangements that created surreal juxtapositions between modernist paintings and sculpture, African masks, Oceanic carvings, and objects from the natural world. His juxtaposition of Cubist paintings, African masks, and shadow boxes of butterflies challenges the viewer to connect the objects, but gives no answers about the way they are related. (Figure 94) The
372
For more on Breton and the Flea Market, see: chapter 3, Andr Breton at the Flea Market of Saint Ouen: The Tactile Flneur, in Mileaf, Please Touch: Dada and Surrealist Objects after the Readymade, 85-118.
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connection between African forms and Cubism are undercut by the unlikely presence of the butterflies. He used photographs of the objects to illustrate his books. In his book Nadja, for example, a long passage describes Nadjas interactions with the objects and paintings in Bretons apartment. The book, which lies somewhere between novel and Surreal memoir, traces Bretons relationship with Nadja, a mysterious woman with tenuous finances and an even more tenuous grip on her sanity. Her vulnerability was precisely what drew Breton to her. He described her as, a free genius, something like one of those spirits of the air which certain magical practices momentarily permit us to entertain but which we can never overcome.373 Bretons loving description of Nadjas readings of his objects is a demonstration of how he expected visitors to encounter his collection. Nadja recognized the horns that she used in many of her drawings in one of Bretons sculptures from Guinea. She stumbles on the same form that obsessed her in her own work, precisely the kind of surreal recognition that interested Breton most. Nadjas drawings are reproduced, though the mask is not. The passage goes on to describe Nadjas responses to painting by Georges Braque, Max Ernst, and Giorgio de Chirco, as well as a mask from New Britain and a figure from Easter Island. Nadja is able to intuitively read Ernsts painting, and the Easter Island figure speaks to her saying, I love you, I love you.374 This uninhibited interaction with Bretons
373 374
Andr Breton, Nadja (New York: Grove Weidenfeld, 1988), 111. Ibid, 129.
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collection can also be enacted by the reader, as Breton provides illustrations of all of these objects. As we will see, Breton also created a space for seeing and reading a group of diverse objects in the Surrealist Exhibition of Objects in 1936. The photographs in Nadja constitute their own kind of curatorial project for Breton. The book was another space in which Breton could combine, high and low, natural and man made, and European art and Oceanic sculpture. He continued this kind of curatorial practice in Mad Love, mixing images of mineral formations and coral reefs, strange objects he found at the flea market, and works of art by his friends Man Ray and Giacometti. Helena Rubinstein, the American cosmetics mogul, had her own unique collection of objects that she displayed in her New York salon and apartment. Though her collecting practices have often been marginalized as mere shopping by contemporary scholars, her collection and display practices had much common with Breton.375 Rubinstein was interested in the same kinds of juxtapositions as Breton. Her African objects, were contrasted in her salons with her contemporary painting and sculpture collection as well the fashionable patrons of the salon.376 As with Bretons atelier, her salon and apartment
375
In a recent documentary gallerist David Nash for the Michell-Innes & Nash Gallery describes her as more of an accumulatorthis was a lady who responded to works of art and living with them. She bought what she liked and she liked a lot of things. Ann Carol Grossman and Arnie Reisman, "The Powder and the Glory," (USA: PBS, 2007). 376 Man Ray has often been mistakenly identified as an important collector of African art, and particularly as the owner of Rubinsteins Bangwa Queen because of his famous photographs of the
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were used frequently as backdrops for photographs. The extraordinary works of art art in her New York apartment were ideal accessories for fashion shoots.377 Vogue described Rubinsteins home as a Collectors Fantasy, calling Rubinstein an adventurous soul who deviates from established routes, describing the way she paired modern and antique furniture, European paintings and sculptures with African sculptures to create an assemblage.378 These juxtapositions are fascinating in the context of a space so focused on beauty. Rubinsteins mixing of Cubist, Surrealist, and African art created juxtapositions that suggested multiple ideas of beauty.379 We can see the way the Rubinstein herself promoted this idea in George Maillard-Kessles 1935 publicity photograph of her holding an African mask. The fashionable modern suit and Chanel gloves she wears contrast with the perceived timelessness of the mask.(Figure 95) This image was meant to coincide with the Museum of Modern Arts exhibition African Negro Art, which included several of Rubinsteins pieces. The accompanying press release describes Rubinsteins collection:
sculpture. Wendy Grossman has revealed that he never owned more than a handful of small African objects. The persistence of this narrative is telling in that it reveals the close association of Surrealists with the collecting of non-western art, and the privileging of the artists eye in these collections. It also reveals the way in which the act of photographing an object can confer ownership on the photographer. Grossman cites one scholars attribution of a record -breaking auction price to the fact that the famous Bangwa Queen belonged to Man Ray and was photographed by him, giving it an added Surrealist aura and authenticity. Grossman, Man Ray, African Art, and the Modernist Lens, 76. 377 Spanish Triumphs by Balenciaga the Spaniard," Harpers Bazaar (15 September 1939), 64-5. 378 Collector's Fantasy," Vogue (15 August 1938), 120. 379 The Brooklyn museum often staged exhibitions which made use of this ethnographic-collage aesthetic, for example a 1939 exhibitions, Mask: Barbaric and Civilized, in which masks from many different periods and cultures were displayed, among them masks used for beauty treatments at Elizabeth Ardens salons.
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[The] collection of these weird objects which appeal to this beauty expert because of their "strange charm and beauty of expression," was gathered by Helena Rubinstein with infinite pains during the past fifteen years of her traveling about the world in search of new ingredients and formulas for her wellknown beauty products.... They have a strange beauty all their own. Such well known modern artists as Picasso, Matisse, Modigliani, Epstein, Zadkine, and others owe an admitted debt to the newly discovered sculpture of darkest Africa, having been inspired by the original arrangement of lines, masses, colors, light and shades to be found in these carvings of bygone eras380 Rubinsteins collection is clearly linked to modernist art, but also to her own role in the beauty business and her personal pursuit of beauty, whether through new tonics and lotions or through art. While her cosmetic formulas may have come from the old countryPoland is hinted at in her signature braided coiffeurshe was still a forward-looking modernist, aligned with the likes of Picasso and Modigliani. Rubinstein used her collection, as we can see in this photograph and press release, to demonstrate her worldliness and progressive tastes. Like Breton, her collection worked to undermine stable ideas about aesthetics and beauty, a savvy message for a beauty mogul trying to appeal to the widest variety of customers possible. In my argument here, I dont seek simply to read Breton as a shopper or interior decorator, nor do I wish to argue that Rubinstein was an Ethnographic Surrealist. Rather, I want to trouble the boundaries between these heavily gendered activities, and insist that neither be privileged over the other. Both Rubinstein and Breton used their collections as capital, both
380
Typescript of undated press release (ca. 1935) in the archives of the Helena Rubinstein Foundation, New York. Cited in: Clifford, "Helena Rubinstein's Beauty Salons, Fashion, and Modernist Display," 104.
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cultural and monetary. These collections were a form of self-promotion for both figures, but were also a form of personal expression.
Primitivism in Fashion The use of primitive sources in fashion functions somewhat differently from the collections of Rubinstein and Breton since fashion interacts with a body. The use of so-called primitive and orientalist styles in fashion has a long history. Like Breton and Rubinsteins collections, these styles connected their wearers with modernity and the avant-garde. Harold Koda and Richard Martin argue that fashion was an ideal place for unfamiliar aesthetics to emerge since, the foreignness of the exotic is more easily forgiven in clothing, perhaps because we tend to think of clothing as a less fixed to place and less calibrated to long life. Portability and ephemerality promote investigation, at the very least.381 What Koda and Martin do not mention is the important role of ethno-eroticism in the adoption of African and Asian styles in womens dress. Since the early eighteenth-century, Middle Eastern, North African, and Indian garments have provided a wealth of alternative forms to enrich western wardrobes: Zouave trousers, banyan robes, and caftans, to name just a few. In the 1910s and 1920s, Paul Poiret and Mario Fortuny used eastern motifs to popularize new and sometimes radical styles in womens clothing.
381
Richard Martin and Harold Koda, Orientalism: Visions of the East in Western Dress (New York: Metropolitain Museum of Art, 1994), 11.
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Fortuny, inspired by his home in the trading mecca of Venice, combined classical references, such as his Delphos gown, and shapes and patterns from the Middle East, North Africa, and China. These influences helped provide an exotic context for his largely untailored designs. Poiret was famous for incorporating Middle Eastern themes into his designs, popularizing harem trousers, the lampshade tunic, and other exotic costumes inspired by his elaborate Thousand and Second Night Party in 1911.382 These costumes exploited fantasies about the Orient as strange and exotic, and its women as possessing a potent erotic charge. Poiret used Orientalist themed fancy dress parties in a calculating manner to associate his avant-garde pants and simple corset-less gowns with fantasies about harems and far away pleasure palaces. (Figure 96) Poiret emphasized the exoticism of bifurcated garments for women, moving them away from the practical clothes of the dress reformer Amelia Bloomer and connecting them instead to an imagined world of sultans and slaves. Poiret dressed as a sultan for his lavish 1911 party, and dressed his wife in a lampshade tunic, placing her in a golden cage surrounded by attendants that was opened at the start of the party. Poiret used the exotic sensuality of the imagined orient to give his radically modern clothes a familiar and appealing context.
382
Poirets use of Orientalist mo tifs is also connected to visual culture entering Paris through the Diagalevs Ballet Russe, and the 1899 publication of a new translation of The Thousand and One Nights by Dr. J.C. Mardrus a friend of Poirets. See, Peter Wollen, "Fashion/Orientalism/the Body," New Formations, no. 1 (Spring 1987), 8.
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These styles, though, were best situated to Poirets costume parties or an avant-garde salon in Greenwich Village. By the 1930s styles from Africa, South America, and India covered the pages of fashion magazines and were worn by the chicest of women. The idea of Africa, in particular, was becoming increasingly important in fashion. Such Africanist fashions did not derive from what people wore in Africa, but rather from images of Africa in the popular culture of Europe and America. Key, of course, to the rise of Africanist fashion was the popularity of Jazz music and its association with Africa, and it most famous ambassador, Josephine Baker. Bakers life, work, and influence has been detailed in many excellent studies, and I do not wish to rehash that material here.383 What is important about Baker, however, is that for her white audiences, she embodied both chic modernismdressed by the best couturiersas well as primitive sexuality. 384 Bakers fashionable status is confirmed by her appearance on the pages of French fashion magazines, and her role as a model for Reard bathing suits and knitwear, appearing in advertisements in LOfficiel de la Couture. A
383
See for example: Bennetta Jules-Rosette, Josephine Baker in Art and Life: The Icon and the Image (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2007). Petrine Archer Straw, Negrophilia : Avant-Garde Paris and Black Culture in the 1920s (New York: Thames & Hudson, 2000). Tyler Edward Stovall, Paris Noire: African Americans in the City of Light (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1996). Berliner, Ambivalent Desire: The Exotic Black Other in Jazz-Age France. 384 On Baartmann see, Clifton Crais and Pamela Scully, Sara Baartman and the Hottentot Venus: A Ghost Story and a Biography (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008), , Sander Gilman, "The Hottentot and the Prostitute: Toward an Iconography of Female Sexuality," in Race-Ing Art History: Critical Readings in Race and Art History, ed. Kymberly N. Pinder (New York: Routledge, 2002), 119-38, Rachel Holmes, African Queen: The Real Life of the Hottentot Venus (New York: Random House, 2007), and Zoe Strother, "Display of the Body Hottentot," in Africans on Stage : Studies in Ethnological Show Business, ed. Bernth Lindfors (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999), 1-61.
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number of texts credit her with starting the Vogue for tanning.385 In the years after World War I there was a shift from tan skin signifying the outdoor labor of the lower class to the leisure time of the upper-class spent on exotic beaches. This occurred for a number of complex reasons, however, Josephine Baker as a striking icon of tanned beauty is particularly interesting in relationship to African-inspired fashions. Baker herself recalled that the French all went to the beaches to get dark like Josephine Bakerthe French got sick trying to get blackcaf au laityou werent anything unless you were caf au lait.386 Bronzers and new colors such as suntan became popular at the end of the 1920s. Famous white women like Coco Chanel and Joan Crawford helped to popularize sun worshiping.387 Tan skin clearly still had a symbolic connection to people of color at the same time that it came to stand for exotic tourism. Joan Crawford, for example, was scolded by the studio for her tanning because she looked like a lineal descendent of Sheba."388 The fear of racial slippage and indeterminacy was prominent in this period, at the same time that ethnic beauty was becoming more popular in Hollywood.
385
Lois G. Gordon, Nancy Cunard: Heiress, Muse, Political Idealist (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007), 98. Jules-Rosette, Josephine Baker in Art and Life: The Icon and the Image, 63. 386 Henry Louis Gates, "An Interview with Josephine Baker and James Baldwin," The Southern Review 21 (July 1985), 597. 387 By 1935 beauty stories on tanning were regular features of the resort issues of Vogue and Harpers Bazaar. 388 Sarah Berry, Screen Style: Fashion and Femininity in 1930s Hollywood (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000), 109.
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In the 1930s, standards of beauty were widening, in large part because of the marketing strategies of cosmetic corporations. In her analysis of fashion in films in the 1930s, Sarah Berry discusses, Hollywood's "spectacle of difference"its creation of ethnicity as a consumable pleasure. One of the primary products of this spectacle, the image of exotic beauty, was indispensable to the recuperation of cosmetics. The frequent use of exotic female stars as endorsers of women's beauty products was thus at odds with nativist norms of beauty, just as women's obsession with Rudolph Valentino, Ramon Novarro, and Charles Boyer's passionate sexuality was seen as a rejection of culturally approved but boring WASP masculinity.389 Berry argues that cosmetic companies relied on an ever-widening spectrum of beauty types and new looks to promote new products. The commodification of ethnicity allowed for new kinds of marketing for cosmetics beyond the idea of the pale natural white beauty.390 Berry specifically examines such trends in the United States where national identity is made increasingly complex in the early twentieth-century by the arrival of immigrants from an increasingly diverse group of countries. Spectacles of difference were an important part of visual culture in the 1930s in both Europe and the United States. Creating a spectacle of differencewhether through Hollywood film, jazz music, worlds fairs, or fashionwas a way to normalize, contain and manage non-European cultures through the very process of creating them as spectacle.391 Difference was made into a commodity through spectacle; it could be consumed, and
389 390
Ibid, 98. Ibid, 95. 391 Evans, Fashion at the Edge : Spectacle, Modernity, and Deathliness , 31.
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thus assimilated into the everyday life of white Europeans and Americans. At the heart of the spectacle of difference is sexuality. Berry argues that primitive constructions of femininity emphasize an edenic sexuality that is libidinal but innocent, providing a mediation of Western split femininity392 Exotic women provide a middle ground in the traditional understanding of the split definition of western women as Madonna and whore. Berry argues that this mediation offered by primitivist and Orientalist ideas of ethnic sexuality allowed cosmetic companies to market their products not as the deceptive tools of the whore, but instead as the products that held the potential for any woman to become beautiful: Orientalist beauty was offered to Western women as a means of transgressing the strictures of split femininity: by temporarily adopting signs of exotic sensuality via makeup and clothing, Western women could present themselves as a combination of (white) virtue and (nonwhite) sexuality.393 As we will see, the temporary and contingent nature of fashion and cosmetics is precisely what makes these areas ripe for the expression of fantasy and experimentation with sexual expression.
392 393
Berry, Screen Style: Fashion and Femininity in 1930s Hollywood , 127. Ibid, 133.
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Photography and Primitive Sexuality Orientalist and Africanist images have a long history of being linked to sexuality.394 Wendy Grossman chronicled the ways that African objects were associated to female sexuality in Modernist photography. Looking at the ethno-eroticism in these photographs illuminates the prevalence of ideas about primitive sexuality in the 1920s and 1930s, which, as we will see, extended into the world of fashion. Grossman examines the ways that artists such as Alfred Stieglitz and Man Ray pair African objects with female models, often nude. These photographs not only reinforce the link between primitivism and nudity, but also the notion of women as inherently primitive in contrast to men. Grossman explains that these photographs, [posit] a female/male dichotomy in which women are the primitive foil for the civilized male viewer. In this paradigm, the female body of all races symbolizes womens supposedly unbridled sexuality in its natural state, engendering erotic notions upon which male fantasies could be projected. 395 We can see this idea in Man Rays oeuvre, which is littered with such images of women and non-western objects. Most famous perhaps is Noire et Blanche (1926) in which Man Rays model Kikis smooth ovoid face with closed eyes
394
See, Linda Nochlin, "The Imaginary Orient," and , Gilman "The Hottentot and the Prostitute: Toward an Iconography of Female Sexuality," in Race-Ing Art History: Critical Readings in Race and Art History, ed. Kymberly N. Pinder (New York: Routledge, 2002). Susan L. Hannel, "The Influence of American Jazz on Fashion," in Twentieth-Century American Fashion, ed. Linda Welters and Patricia A. Cunningham (New York: Berg, 2005). Berliner, Ambivalent Desire: The Exotic Black Other in Jazz-Age France. 395 Grossman, Man Ray, African Art, and the Modernist Lens, 38.
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and slicked hair seems to mimic the contours of the Baule mask she holds. (Error! Reference source not found.) The photomontages of German Dada artist Hannah Hch demonstrate the pervasiveness of the formulaic conflation of women with the primitive other. The photomontages in the series, From an Ethnographic Museum from the 1920s and early 1930s, combine images of ethnographic objects with images of women. Hch scholar Maude Lavin describes these as mixing images connoting the display of the New Womanin department-store windows, magazines, and filmand the offering of ethnographic objects in ethnographic museums.396 Lavin understands these images as a general critique of the commodification of the New Woman and primitivism, representing Hchs ambivalence about the performance of self that the commodification of culture necessitates. Wendy Grossman, on the other hand, sees Hchs work as a parody of the conflation of women and primitive others. She understands Hochs work as specifically commenting on a prevalent trope of the Primitivist narrative in which women and non-westerners are conflated as primal others, perceived as possessing more elemental nave, and childlike instincts. While certainly inflected with biases of the times Hchs parodies of the popular representation of women and purportedly primitive cultures offer a perceptive analysis and rare critique of insidious attitudes then pervading society.397 Whatever Hchs artistic intention, the From an Ethnographic Museum series reveals the popular tangling of women and ethnographic others, in a
396 397
Maud Lavin, "From an Ethnographic Museum," Grand Street, no. 58 (Autumn 1996), 128. Grossman, Man Ray, African Art, and the Modernist Lens, 85.
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kind of generalized category of the Primitive. Her work reflects the formulaic use of ethnographic objects and female bodies in modernist compositions. Man Rays photographs of Simone Kahn (Bretons then wife) with African sculptures represent a Surrealist version of this modernist genre. In the first photograph from 1921, Kahn seems to be lost in her subconscious at the bottom of the frame.(Figure 97) Her hair is not slicked back like Kikis, but looks slightly unkempt as she stares off indistinctly. A Fang mask hangs in the background with Kahns large dark shadow looming over it. The mask is not in focus and has a mysterious and vaguely threatening countenance, with a highlight falling on a ridge that appears to be an eyebrow on the lefthand side. A viewer might construct a number of narratives looking at this image. Is the mask a reflection of Kahns disturbed unconscious? Or perhaps Kahns white beauty is being held under the spell of the threatening African face? In another of Man Rays photographs of Kahn from 1927, she lays back across a couch or chair, holding a Vanuatu male figure from the South Pacific up on her lap. (Figure 98) Here, the eroticism of the photograph is much more explicit. Kahn stares at the viewer through kohl framed eyes, her hair falls down wildly toward the bottom of the frame. The male figure, too, stares out at us through deep triangular eye sockets and menacing eyebrows. He seems to rise, phallic-like out of Khans recumbent body. Here, again, the tribal figure seems to hold Kahn under his spell in a more distinctly sexual
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manner. It is also possible to read the image as an expression of a phallic dimension to Kahns sexuality; an expression of her primitive and more masculine erotic power. However we chose to read these images, it is clear that they are fraught with primitive erotics, conflating female sexuality and primitivism. In these photographs, the female body was manipulated as an object of desire and fetishization in the Surrealist visual vocabulary. This formula, as it resurfaces in numerous manifestations of Man Rays and others photographs of non-Western art throughout the 1920s and 30s reflects the Surrealists vision of woman as muse and their equation of unleashed female sexuality with notions of the primitive and its attendant tropes.398 Even more explicit were Man Rays photographs of nudes with African and Oceanic sculptures. In 1934, for example, he photographed a nude model with Helena Rubinsteins Bangwa Queen sculpture. (Figure 99)(Figure 100) The photographs were probably taken before or just after the sculpture was sold to Rubinstein when it was still in Charles Rattons gallery.399 In these photographs, the nude sports a fashionable Marcel Wave hairstyle, bangle bracelets, a ring and earrings. The nude is not the classical and timeless one of Man Rays solarized photographs. Wendy Grossman has noted how the models racial ambiguityshe is often mistaken for Caribbean model Adrienne Fidelinhas both troubled and attracted viewers because the photograph cannot be firmly placed within a dichotomous racial discourse
398 399
Ibid, 98. Ibid, 135.
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that tends to be the norm.400 This nude is modern, and yet through her nudity is still connected with the Bangwa Queen. In both photographs her arm is draped over the pedestal of the sculpture between the legs of the figure. In one version, the model leans back and gazes at the figure contemplating her form. In another, the model is cut off just below the bust as she leans in close to the figure and looks directly at the camera. Her bracelet, visible at the left edge of the frame, mimics the anklets and bracelets of the figure as well as her high collar. This repetition of form in the Bangwa figure is part of the compelling rhythm of the sculpture. The models jewelry connects her to the sculpture, directly linking the primitive and the modern. The nude models jewelry is not inconsequential to the photograph as it becomes a signifier for her connection to the primitive. As we will see jewelry plays an important role as a signifier of the primitive, both in the photographs of Man Ray and in fashions of the 1920s and 1930s.
Africanist Fashion in the 1920s Nancy Cunards famous collection of African bracelets serves as an important bridge between the photographic and collecting practices of the Surrealists, and the fashion practices of women in Europe and America. Cunards collection of ivory bracelets was legendary, and forms a central part of most of her portraits. In a 1924 painting by Oscar Kokoschka, for example, she appears with a small collection of bracelets on one arm. In a photograph
400
Ibid, 135.
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by Man Ray, c. 1936, as well as a series of photographs by Cecil Beaton from 1930 both of Cunards arms are covered in bangles.401 (Figure 101) In Man Rays portrait, the bangled arms become columns supporting Cunards fashionably coiffed and made-up head, her leopard print dress completes the African style of the look. The collection of bracelets itself was the subject of several photographs by Raoul Ubac and Man Ray.402 Cunard was a writer, publisher and political activist. She used her jewelry to express her allegiance to avant-garde literature, art and fashion. Her eccentric look set her apart from other women, and her use of African objects as a part of her look connected her to other modernists interested in Africa. Cunard was fascinated not only with Africa, but also with African Americans and Jazz. In the 1920s all three were heavily conflated. My interest here is not in examining Cunards politics. Nor do I want to examine her attempts to promote what we would now call civil rights in her monumental publication, Negro (1934).403 What is relevant in this context is the way that Cunard used her African jewelry to express what she saw as progressive racial politics, her love of jazz and her connection to the avantgarde. According to Wendy Grossman, Cunards bracelets acted as signifiers for a new kind of modernity, presenting her as a trendy arbiter of taste
401 402
The Beaton photographs are reproduced in: Ibid, cat. 104-107. Interestingly, Man Ray uses a Navajo rug to cover the surface on which the bracelets are piled like the spoils of conquest, or perhaps items for sale at the Paris Flea Market. The Navajo rug is sucked up into the pile of African objects and their root in a distant culture is lost. This photograph also emphasizes the way that diverse cultures were often tangled together by artists and fashion designers. For reproductions of these photographs see: Ibid, 108-9, 111-112. 403 For more on Cunard and these issues see Gordon, Nancy Cunard: Heiress, Muse, Political Idealist, 156-195.
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through her association with African artifacts.404 By the time Man Rays photograph of Cunard appeared in British Vogue, the new fashion for African Chic had virtually become her own.405 (Error! Reference source not
found.)
Nancy Cunards somewhat eccentric adoption of African bracelets as her signature accessory certainly influenced other women to adopt them. Susan L. Hannels excellent essay The Influence of American jazz on Fashion, traces the connection of such bracelets to popular dances in the 1920s, such as the Charleston and the Black Bottom. She demonstrates that even bangle bracelets were strongly associated with Africa and jazz in the 1920s and 30s. These are precisely the kind of bracelets worn by the model in Man Rays photographs of the Bangwa Queen sculpture.(Error! Reference source
not found.) Kiki de Montparnasse wears a small set of bangles in the variation
of Noire et Blanche, and Man Ray is attentive to them in a contour sketch of the photograph. (Figure 102)(Figure 103) Man Ray associated these bracelets with African art. By the 1930s, bracelets worn in large qualities were clearly de rigueur to create an exotic look. Elizabeth Harvey declared in the Washington Post in 1931: Seven is the lucky number of bracelets to wear when your accessories go native.406 A short Washington Post article in 1928 proclaimed that the
404 405
Grossman, Man Ray, African Art, and the Modernist Lens, 137. Ibid, 137. 406 Elisabeth Harvey, "Algerian Motifs Inspire Jewelry and Accessories," The Washington Post, 1 March 1931, A1.
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Art of Congo Jungle is Fashtion in Paris [sic], reporting that there is a Paris rage for Congo sculpture and painting. It has an echo in slave bracelets and ring necklaces, both inspired by primitive African costumesor lack of costumes.407 These African bangles, made of metal, wood, or plastic, abstracted the bracelets in Cunards collection. Aesthetically, they had no concrete referent in African jewelry, but were clearly connected in the popular imagination to Africa and jazz. The example of the bangles demonstrates how appealing African style was in the 1920s and 1930s. It also shows the tenuous ties such fashion had to anything genuinely African. Just as Surrealist artists conflated the art of Oceania, Africa, and Native North America, fashion designers freely mixed styles from a range of countries and ethnic groups. As we have seen, early on the cachet of these designs lay not in their authenticity, but rather in the ways that they were commercially linked to exotic cultures.
Africa Speaks in Millinery408 As we saw in her Mangbetu hats, the milliner Agns created some designs that were tied to specific images of Africa, but by and large her designs evokes a more generalized form of fashionable primitivism. It is clear that Agns associates herself promotionally with this style in her appearance on the cover of LOfficiel. She had appeared on the magazines cover in 1926
407 408
"Art of Congo Jungle Is Fashtion in Paris [Sic]," The Washington Post, 12 January 1928, 3. Marshall Field & Company Advertisement," Chicago Daily Tribune, 20 April 1931, 17.
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and 1927 and in both photographs wears metal cuff and bangles made for her by Jean Dunand. (Figure 104)(Figure 105) On the May 1927 cover, she appears in an incredible Art Deco sweater and hat in white jersey painted by Dunand. The cubistic design is capped off with the same bracelets as in the 1926 cover and an additional group of metal necklaces cascading around her neck. Dunand, a famous art deco designer, was well known for his use of African motifs. His jewelry included African-style necklaces, slave collars and bracelets to be worn about the dainty neck and wrists of exotic beauties such as Josephine Baker, who was introduced to Dunand by Agns.409 The bracelets that appear in these photographs must have been signature pieces, which the milliner wore often and thought important enough to wear for these cover photographs. For Agns, these bracelets encapsulated her connection to modern and African style. By the time of the 1931 Colonial Exposition, Agns ensemble on the cover of LOfficiel would have been clearly legible to readers. (Error! Reference
source not found.) Agns piled bangles on her wrist and upper arm. Her neck is
adorned with a slave collar style choker and gold earrings cascade from her ears. The Schiaparelli designed "evening gown, knickers skirt, of coarse white silk crpon [sic] is covered with an apron of gold and red.410 The knickers echo Paul Poirets harem trousers, but in a sleeker, more modern silhouette. (Error! Reference source not found.) Her ensemble is related to the Orientalist
409 410
Flix Marcilhac, Jean Dunand: His Life and Works (New York: Thames and Hudson, 1991), 188. Lgende Da La Page De Couverture," 3.
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tradition in fashion, and her pose in the Dunand drawing links her to the many groups of dancers from all over the world who were performing in Paris as a part of the exposition. (Figure 106) Her dress seems derived from an amalgamation of the styles of both the Asian and African dancers. The French magazine LIllustration devoted six pages to the dances at the colonial exposition in its August 22, 1931 issue. Bracelets like the ones worn by Agns appear on dancers from the Ivory Coast, Bali, and Cambodia. Her richly ornamented dress refers to the opulent fabric of the costumes for the Balinese and Cambodian dancers featured in the magazine, but pared down to a more streamlined aesthetic. The bareness of Agns shoulders and arms connects her with the dancers from Senegal and the Ivory Coast who wear jewelry and hats but little else. Agns hair ornament is perhaps inspired by Mme. Nyota Inyokas head wrap. (Figure 107) Inyoka was a famous dancer in the 1920s and 30s. LIllustration calls her Hindu, but in other articles she is said to be Egyptian or Persian.411 Inyoka, the daughter of an Indian father and a French mother, grew up in Paris, fascinated with Indian and Egyptian culture. She successfully drew on these cultures in her dancing and performed in New York and Paris in the 1920s. According to The Chicago Defender, Inyoka, the little dark skinned dancer, had been a part of the Ziegfeld Follies, was fired when it was generally rumored she was a Race girl, that is Black.412 Despite her talent, Inyokas mysterious heritage was enough to create rumors.
411
"Gives Eastern Dances," New York Times, 25 February 1924, 13. John Martin "The Dance: Busy Times," New York Times 19 December 1937, 156. 412 "Nyota Dances," The Chicago Defender 28 March 1925, 6.
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Her performances remained popular, and she was one of the main attractions at the Colonial Exposition, dancing to Indian and Egyptian music in an entirely constructed Orientalist mode in lavish Indian costumes.413 In Dunands illustration Agns headdress mimics Inyokas elaborately jeweled hairstyles. Just as Inyoka mixed cultures in her performances, Agns dress on the cover of LOfficiel draws from a number of the different dancers costumes from the Colonial exposition, as well as the chic pajama costumes of the early 1930s. One of the most interesting illustrations that accompanies the article on the Colonial Expositions dances is a drawing of La Fte Sngalaise des fanaux, dans la vues du village indigene de lExposition.414 This is the only illustration where the dancers audience is visible. A group of well dressed men and women in evening clothes stands on the right side watching the dancers politely, the man closest to us with his hands sedately clasped behind his back. In contrast to their vertical posture, the Senegalese dancers move at dynamic angles, their legs and bodies bent, and arms akimbo. Agns posture in Dunands drawing is not nearly as dynamic, it is perhaps closer to the graceful posture of the Balinese dances, but she is clearly associating herself with the colonial visitors to the exposition.
413
Ibid, 6. Jacqueline Robinson, Modern Dance in France: An Adventure 1920-1970 (Amsterdam: Harwood Academic Publishers, 1997), 92-93. 414 The Senegalese celebration of lights, in view of the native village at the Exposition. [my translation] Paul-mile Cadilhac, "L'heure De Ballet," L'Illustration, no. 4616 (22 August 1931), n.p.
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Through her dress on the cover of LOfficiel, Agns is attempting to be a part of the exotic world of the exposition. She is not a member of the wellmannered and well-groomed audience for the Senegalese dance, but takes on the role of a performer. Using posture and fashion, Agns and Dunand create an image in which Agns is able to masquerade as an exotic colonial woman from a distant imagined world. Through her costume and pose, she links herself to the petite Nyota Inyoka who with her childlike native grace and baby smile, strangely consorted with rapt moods of the East. Her cherubic but elastic torso, whirlwind arms and gyrating legs, even the upturned footpalms of the Buddha, were in the manner of Oriental art.415 Agns associates herself with the naive sensuality of Inyoka, but also to the more direct and primitive style of the African dancers, whose bodies are on display for the sophisticated metropolitan audience. Agns hat designs inspired by the exposition allowed other women to masquerade as exotic colonial subjects. Harpers Bazaar describes her 1931 collection as a most important spring opening, and distinctly French Colonial. All of the colonies, Morocco, Indo-China, Martinique, et cetera, are represented in colour, material, or form.416 A Marshall Field and Company ad for the hats declared, Africa Speaks in Millinery. The tremendous interest in the Paris Colonial Exposition inspired Agns to make this beguiling
415 416
"Gives Eastern Dances," 13. Marjorie Howard, "Paris Hats," Harpers Bazaar (May 1931), 138.
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Algerian Hat. It has the native side back pointthe twisted colonial colors.417 The hat illustrated was a low cap that came to a point on the side of the head, similar in shape to Schiaparellis Mad Cap of the previous season. The same hat appeared in Vogue on March 15, 1931 on Princesse de Faucigny-Lucinge. In Hoyningen Huens photograph the lush texture of Agns hat is even clearer. Here, we can see how Agns takes the popular shapeoff the face with a jaunty angleand weaves strips of beige kid and brown raffia, around which are twisted strands of brown wool that separate to show the hair at one side.418 Raffia was one of the many French colonial imports being promoted at the 1931 exposition.419 The copy of Agns hat available at Marshall Field used woven brown and yellow raffia with twisted bands of red yellow and brown crepe de chine to create a graphic appearance. The Broadway Department Store in Los Angeles offered copies of Agns turbans in velvet. These hats could also be found in the windows of B. Altman & Company in New York, where they were advertised with the headline: The Colonels Lady and African Sadie are Sisters Under their Hats.420 (Figure 108) Another of these cone-shaped hats by Agns appears in the May 1931 issue of Harpers Bazaar. (Figure 109) The caption tells us that, Agns is going French Colonial. This hat, inspired by Cambodian head-gear, she made for Madame Schiaparelli. It is a cone shaped affair made of braided strips of
417 418
Marshall Field & Company Advertisement," 17. Princesse De Faucigny-Lucinge in the New Algerian Hat," Vogue (15 March 1931), 66. 419 Michelle Tolini Finamore, "Fashioning the Colonial at the Paris Expositions, 1925 and 1931," Fashion Theory 7, no. 3/4 (September/December 2003), 357. 420 "B. Altman & Company Window Display of Agns Hats,"
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black and white suede.421 Several different versions appeared in the May 1931 LOfficiel, one of silk straw on Agns herself. (Error! Reference source not
found.)(Error! Reference source not found.)(Figure 110)(Figure 111) While the hats
were made from a number of different materials, the silhouette was fairly uniform, the line is very much thrown back and to the right.422 This style was popular both in France and the US. Agns hats were not an extreme departure from the style of the time, at least in their shape. Their materials and their colors made them distinct. Like Agns costume on the cover of LOfficiel, these hats were generically exotic. They used colors and materials to create general colonial or primitive style. Only one image of an Agns hat is explicitly compared to an image of an African. It appears within an article on the Colonial Exposition in the June 1931 LOfficiel. A photograph of one of the hats, which has a feather ornamenting the front of the crown, is compared to a photograph of an African chief from the Colonial Exposition. (Figure 112) This is the only place where there is a clear appropriation of an African style. The generic tendencies of colonial styles did not go unnoticed at the time. One Washington Post writer mocked the potential for any color to be labeled as colonially influenced: a list of Algerian colors is so comprehensive that its a little amusing: red, yellow, blue, green, brown, orange, black, and
421 422
Howard, "Paris Hats," 81. Colonial Manifestation Chez Agns," 17.
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white.423 To a certain extent, Africa and other colonial possessions seemed to lend only a colorful vocabulary to designers and fashion writers: sheik red, caravan brown, or the seralglio [sic] blue.424 These hats represent the popular manifestation of colonial style: chic modern lines with exotic and primitive colors and materials. Like bangle bracelets and chokers, straw, beads, and feathers in bright colors came to signify Africa, and more generally the exotic within the world of fashion. These accessories and fashion participate in the spectacle of difference, conferring on their wearers exotic and potentially erotic glamour, but not moving too far out of the bounds of conventional fashion.
Fashion from Artifacts: Lilly Dachs Congolese Hats Lilly Dachs use of African influence in her hats was a radical departure from Agns aesthetic and the tame bangle bracelet. Like the Surrealists, Dach collected African objects and used them directly in her designs. In the world of fashion, women were still being encouraged to go native by Vogue, which informed readers in 1935, its smart this year to look like a Balinese maiden when you have the figure for it.425 The same year, Schiaparelli was showing dresses in the style of Indian saris, and Guatemalan hats from Macys appeared in Vogue. Guatemala was also featured in a long
423 424
Harvey, "Algerian Motifs Inspire Jewelry and Accessories," A1. Ibid, A1. 425 Native Charm," Vogue (1 January 1935), 29.
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article in Harpers Bazaar in 1937.426 Straight through the 1930s, ethnic masquerade was an important component of fashion. Going native gave women a new vocabulary of exotic forms with which to adorn themselves. The references to exotic locales in these fashions not only linked women to cosmopolitanism, but they also connected them to ideas about primitive sexuality. Schiaparellis saris could transport the wearer to the India of her imagination, allowing her--however ephemerally--to become Indian. This is clear in the way Steichen photographs the dress for Vogue, against a bold blue backdrop with Indian musicians in native dress on either side.427 The photograph of Nusch Eluard in one of the sari dresses also plays up the component of fantasy that was at the heart of these fashions. (Figure 113) She looks down in a kind of reverie; her profile reflected in the strange rodophane fan that Schiaparelli designed as an accessory for the ensemble. Schiaparelli herself appeared in Vogue go[ing] native on a trip to Tunisia with her daughter. (Figure 114) According to Vogue: Even the forbidden private wing of one of the great aristocratic Arab houses was opened to her, and her veiled hostesses, as one woman to another, tried on for her all of their ceremonial costumes.428 The article and photographs emphasizes the masquerade in which Schiaparelli is able to participate on her trip, particularly since Schiaparelli gravitated to the mens clothes. She and her daughter wear them in two of the photographs. The article assures readers
426 427
Guatemalan Colors," Vogue (1 April 1935), 91. Mysterious as an Indian Charmer," Vogue (1 August 1935), 43. 428 Schiaparelli Among the Berbers," Vogue (15 August 1936), 44.
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that Schiaparelli will soon be transforming the clothes she bought in Tunisia into ensembles for them, giving them access to the same masquerade. These kinds of fashions allowed women to change their looks and promoted strange glamour. Sarah Berry argues that by the end of the 1930s sensuous and dusky dark-haired sirens like Dolores Del Rio, Dorothy Lamour, Hedy Lamarr, and Rita Hayworth had replaced pale platinum blondes as icons of glamour. It is difficult to interpret such changes in fashion iconography, but what is clear is that in the 1930s a relative increase occurred in the range of beauty types on the American screen and in advertising, suggesting that the dominance of white, monoracial beauty was significantly challenged by previously marginalized female identities.429 Berry argues that these new ideas about beauty helped to market makeup in the 1930s since there was a new sense that any woman could be beautiful with the aid of makeup and fashion, predicated on a sense of the body's malleability and constructedness, andthe notion that one's personality could be endlessly modified through fashion.430 Just as makeup democratized beauty, the fashions I am discussing here were working in the same way. They allowed any woman, no matter how plain, to make herself exotic and sensual while maintaining a sense of propriety since sex appeal was constructed through fashion, rather than being innate in the wearer. Colonial influences on fashion allowed the sexuality of a woman to be displaced onto her clothes. A woman could play the role of a harem girl in a Schiaparelli sari, but could just as easily change into a suit and take on a different appearance
429 430
Berry, Screen Style: Fashion and Femininity in 1930s Hollywood , 95. Ibid, 99.
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and personality. Like Cliffords conception of Ethnographic Surrealism, these expressions of strange glamour revealed their own seams. This is especially true in the work of milliner Lilly Dach. Dach relied heavily on ideas of masquerade and fantasy in her collections. In 1936 she showed hats influenced by a Chinese exhibition in London. Bullocks Wilshire advertised them as hats that almost make us imagine we are sitting right on the wall of China, spying a mandarin.431 Another collection from the same year evoked the allure of Old Spain 432 Dachs publicity emphasized the research she did on each of her collections. A New Yorker profile from 1942 explained, when she does a collection suggested by the flora and fauna of a certain country, or a certain part of America, whether she has been there or not, she gets a stack of literature about itand studies so intently that, in her own words, I even know the color of the wind that blows there.433 She was photographed by Life in 1944 working in the picture collection of the New York Public library.434 The photograph attests to her continuing interest in African art, photographs of which surround her. (Figure 115) In March 1937, Dach illustrated to the Chicago Womens Congress how styles in hats follow the news, explaining that
431 432
"Bullock's Wilshire Ad," Los Angeles Times, 9 January 1936, A8. Ethel Ehlen, "Hats Go Spanish--with Mantillas, Bright Kerchiefs, Veils as Decorative Mediums," The Washington Post, 23 August 1936, S7. 433 Margaret Chase Harriman, "Hats Will Be Worn," New Yorker (4 April 1942), 24. 434 This photograph appears not to have been published in the magazine.
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sometimes it is so paradoxical a cause as war; sometimes an economic upheaval or a great scientific discovery. It may even come from exhibitions of paintings, porcelains, tapestries, great plays or cinemas inspired by some romantic period of history, a royal romance, or a kings coronation.435 That year she was also influenced, as were many other designers, by the PanAmerican Exposition set to open in June. Lilly Dach was born around 1893 in France. She moved to the US as a young woman and rose through the ranks in the New York fashion world in the mid 1920s to eventually open her own millinery business, which continued to expand throughout the 1930s. In April 1937, Dach laid the cornerstone for her new building on East Fifty-Sixth street, which would open that September.436 Dachs new building was an architectural marker for her meteoric rise in the fashion world. The building housed her retail millinery business, the manufacturing facilities from her perfume range, workrooms, rental space used by other retail fashion and beauty companies, and a penthouse apartment shared by Dach and her husband. Dachs office included a library for design research. The dcor of the building was as international as the inspiration for Dachs hats: a Ming dynasty statue, chairs upholstered in Tibetan wolf, hand woven Balinese textiles, and a settee covered in Indian fabric.437 Like Breton and Rubinstein, Dachs personal and
435 436
"Makes Own Hats," Chicago Daily Tribune, 12 March 1937, 10. "To Lay Corner Today," New York Times, 15 April 1937, 43. 437 New York: Milliner Builds Multi-Story Establishment," Architectural Record (March 1938), 5455.
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business space was a forum of self-promotion to display her modern and wide ranging tastes. The summer before the opening of the salon while in Paris, Dach purchased a collection of hats from the Belgian Congo.438 These hats formed the basis for a collection she designed for the opening of her new building where both the original hats and new designs could be seen. In October, the hats traveled to Marshal Fields in Chicago to be displayed in the French Room where the hats could be purchased.439 Like Breton and Rubinstein, Dach emphasized juxtaposition in her collection and dcor. Her Congolese hats would have been seen alongside her own creations in her shop, at Marshall Fields, and eventually in her own home. But before the hats crossed the Atlantic, they were part of a curious exhibition at Galerie Charles Ratton, La Mode au Congo.
Charles Ratton and Surrealism Ratton was an important dealer and exhibitor of both European nonwestern art. Just a year before La Mode au Congo, Galerie Charles Ratton had its first foray into Surrealist art, hosting the Exposition Surraliste dObjets. This exhibition is an example of another space in which Surrealism
438
This was reported by Life in September 1937. When Dach donated the hats to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1974 she reported the provenance as the Colonial Exposition in Paris 1930 -1931. It seems more likely that she bought the hats while in Paris and they were exhibited at Charles Rattons gallery and then traveled to New York to be exhibited in her new salon. Although it is also possible that the hats were being exhibited at Rattons gallery when Dach saw them and bought them. Thanks to Wendy Grossman for sharing the provenance information from the Dach bequest with me. 439 "Marshall Field & Company Advertisement," Chicago Daily Tribune, 4 October 1937, 15.
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engages with shopping and consumerism. A diverse group of contemporary art objects were included in the exhibition, some by Surrealist artists, others by Dadaists and Cubists. The exhibition also included natural specimens, found objects, and objects from Native North America and Oceania. Janine Mileaf explains that the exhibition was Surrealist by virtue of its method of display, rather than through the objects included. It was not arranged according to the Surrealists favorite method of chance, but instead was carefully contrived to facilitate [the] experience of desire. 440 She quotes one critic who writes that this exhibition was a flea market of the by-products of the imagination.441 The exhibitions design might also be compared to contemporary boutiques, which were also using pedestals, glass cases, and shelves to display their wares. Andre Breton conceived of the objects in the exhibition as both derivatives and vehicles of desire. Driven by attraction and fantasy, a viewer would move through the exhibition as if through a waking dream.442 This also describes the way that a viewer moves through a boutique or department store, fantasizing about the objects she encounters. In this period, many of the most chic and exclusive boutiques were not unlike museums. Helena Rubinstein, Elizabeth Arden and Lilly Dach all felt that
440
Janine A. Mileaf, "From Fountain to Fetish: Duchamp, Man Ray, Breton and Objects, 1917-1936" (PhD Thesis, University of Pennsylvania, 1999), 176. 441 Crouzet, Surralisme pas mort, quoted in Ibid, 189. 442 Janine Mileaf, "Body to Politics: Surrealist Exhibition of the Tribal and the Modern at the AntiImperialist Exhibition and the Galerie Charles Ratton," RES: Anthropology and Aesthetics, no. 40 (Autumn 2001), 251.
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art was an important part of the aesthetic of their retail business.443 With the help of Brooklyn Museum curator Stuart Culin, Bonwit Teller displayed works of African art to promote their African inspired sportswear.444 Culin believed that for every one person who goes to a museum to gratify his or her curiosity about new thingsten thousand visit the department store with the same motive.445 Galleries and retail spaces are far more related than the Surrealists might have wanted to admit. Jane Mileaf explains that: the entire [Ratton] exhibition would transport viewers through reverie to the realm of the marvelous, or the surreal, by enabling an unconscious desire to fuse with the common experience of consuming art. By way of the tactile body, objects would provoke imagined sensations and disturb a visitors perceptions.446 I would argue that this experience is the same kind encouraged in a department store, or Lilly Dachs shop. Her new building was meant to be an experience. Women could touch and try on dozens of hats. Dach herself might create an entirely new hat to order for a customer while she was there. Shops are designed to release unconscious desires to consume objects. While the objects in Rattons gallery did not have individual prices on them, what united them was their position as commodities. Whether found, readymade, cubist, surrealist, natural, or from a distant land, all of these objects were set
443
Rebecca Jumper Matheson, "'a House That Is Made of Hats': The Lilly Dach Building, 1937-68," in The Places and Spaces of Fashion, 1800-2007, ed. John Potvin (New York: Routledge, 2009), 214. Clifford, "Helena Rubinstein's Beauty Salons, Fashion, and Modernist Display," 98. 444 From the 1910s onwards there were close ties between museum curators, designers and department stores in the United States, see: William Leach, Land of Desire: Merchants, Power, and the Rise of a New American Culture, 1st ed. (New York: Pantheon Books, 1993), 164-173. 445 Jan Whitaker, Service and Style: How the American Department Store Fashioned the Middle Class , 1st ed. (New York: St. Martin's Press, 2006), 145. 446 Mileaf, Please Touch: Dada and Surrealist Objects after the Readymade, 154.
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up to invoke a desire to touch as Mileaf points out. The longing to touch is connected with a yearning to possess. These objects were brought together by artists who were also collectors, who were a part of this cult of ownership. The exhibitions closest kin was the flea market or the wunderkammern (cabinet of curiosity). This exhibition exemplifies the relationship Surrealists had to Primitive art. These works were markers of avant-garde capital. Like the objects used in Dada readymades, or Surrealist objects, Native American and Oceanic objects in the Ratton show were taken out of their useful contexts, juxtaposed pseudo-randomly, and reinserted into the world in order to trigger a reconfiguration of society.447 While the artists may have acknowledged the fact that such objects had lives that extended beyond the purely aesthetic, these lives ended when they appeared in Surrealist exhibitions, homes or on the auction block. In contrast, the Mode au Congo exhibition and the designs it inspired creatively suggested the ways in which its objects were used. The exhibition paired Dachs collection of hats with photographs taken by Man Ray of the hats on models. The exhibition literally showed how the African objects were used. It also reveals the surreal potential inherent in fashion. While the exhibition certainly overlooked any deeper meaning the hats had to their original owners, it did interact with them in a new way. Mileaf argues that the Exposition Surraliste dObjets achieves Walter Benjamins location of Surrealisms revolutionary potential in the physical
447
idem, "From Fountain to Fetish: Duchamp, Man Ray, Breton and Objects, 1917-1936", 237.
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disturbance of the body.448 Benjamin stresses the bodily confrontation with the surreal in everyday life: we penetrate the mystery only to the degree that we recognize it in the everyday world, by virtue of a dialectical optic that perceives the everyday as impenetrable, the impenetrable as everyday."449 Benjamin argues that the surreal is not truly encountered in a drug-induced haze, or in an ecstatic trance, but rather in our everyday life. Mileaf sees the Exposition Surraliste dObjets as combining objects from everyday life in such a way as to create such a surreal encounter. I would argue that this encounter occurred in La Mode au Congo, and in the designs that resulted from the exhibition. In fact, looking at Dach and Agns hats, and some of the other fashions discussed in this chapter, the so-called everyday that the Surrealists sought to disrupt was full of the kind of fantasies that they were encouraging.
La Mode au Congo While the exact timeline of Dachs purchase of the Congo hats is unclear, the Ratton exhibition of the hats opened in May 1937. Included in the exhibition were photographs by Man Ray of models sporting the hats.450
448
idem, "Body to Politics: Surrealist Exhibition of the Tribal and the Modern at the Anti-Imperialist Exhibition and the Galerie Charles Ratton," 253. 449 Benjamin, "Surrealism: The Last Snapshot of the European Intelligentsia," 190. 450 This is reported in the MoMA Primitivism catalogue with no reference to a source. Wendy Grossman, on the other hand, claims that the photographs were made after the exhibition was over. I think the fact that mode was in the title suggests that the photographs were probably a part of the show. (Grossman also reports that no photographs of the exhibition have survived. Jean-Louis Paudrat, "From Africa," in "Primitivism" In 20th Century Art : Affinity of the Tribal and the Modern ,
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Wendy Grossman has documented the long and fruitful professional relationship Ratton had with Man Ray, who photographed many of the objects that passed through Rattons gallery.451 These images are remarkable in the context of Man Rays other photographs of women with African objects, not to mention those of his contemporaries because of their engagement with masquerade and fashion. Man Ray used at least six different models, including his Caribbean lover Adrienne Fidelin, and the Salvadorian Comtesse Consuelo de Saint Exupry, the wife of Antoine de Saint-Exupry, author of Le Petit Prince. Each model is perfectly coiffed, manicured, and made up. Most of the models sport fashionable clothing, not out of place in the pages of Harpers Bazaar where a few of these photographs ended up. Some of them also wear pieces of jewelry that may have been African but, as we have seen, could also have been made by European designers. Man Rays photographs make Dachs collection of Congolese hats legible in the context of western fashion. Man Ray uses the same codes he was using in his fashion photography for Harpers Bazaar at the time. A comparison of two photographs of Reboux hats he made for the November issue of Bazaar makes this clear. The photograph on the left hand page of the suggestively titled Istamboul felt turban is a three-quarter view of the model who looks up dreamily.(Figure 116) A model wearing a stylish menswear inspired suit, complete with a tie, poses in the Mode au Congo portfolio in
ed. William Stanley Rubin (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1984), 164. Grossman, Man Ray, African Art, and the Modernist Lens, 143. 451 Grossman, Man Ray, African Art, and the Modernist Lens, 90.
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nearly the exact same way, although she looks less dreamy and more assertive as she gazes off in the distance.(Figure 117) Both models show off their hats to advantage in three quarter view, demonstrating how they create a beautiful line rising off the forehead. We can see similar poses in a number of the Mode au Congo series.452 In the right hand photograph, a Reboux hat in hunter-green felt is displayed by a model who gently tips her head forward to show the front. The hat hides one of her eyes and the other is closed. This pose is mirrored in a number of the Mode au Congo images, allowing Man Ray to show the delicate lace-like patterns of some of the woven caps. (Figure 118) A woman in a shortsleeved sweater poses in several of the photographs with a Melanesian kapkap around her neck, and a lavishly beaded hat on her head.453 (Figure 119)(Figure 120) The model is fashionably posed in a conventional profile or threequarter view to show off the silhouette of her hat. In one photograph, her hands are crossed over her chest, perhaps in homage to an Egyptian pharaoh. In another, she holds her hand to her ear, perhaps trying to hear the sound of drums in an imagined jungle. Her poses subtly evoke conventions of fashion photography as well as the imagined African who once wore her hat.
452
For more reproductions from the Mode au Congo Series see: Giulio Carlo Argan et al., Man Ray, Fotografia Anni '30 (Parma: Universit de Parma, 1981), and Man Ray: L'et Della Luce, (Modena: Galleria Civica, 1989). 453 This is a perfect example of the conflation of tribal arts from various countries. Kapkap are disk shaped ornaments made of a clam shell overlaid with a delicate filigree of turtle shell worn on the head or around the neck.
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The jewelry that is paired with the hats in these photographs conflates Africa with other tribal regions such as Melanesia. In addition to the kapkap pendant, a number of bangle bracelets are worn by some of the models. One quite large bracelet would not look out of place in Nancy Cunards collection, and perhaps it was borrowed from her. These may also be inexpensive Bakelite bangles, perhaps supplied by one of the models, or something Man Ray kept in the studio. In a number of the photographs it appears that a table has been set up with the hats and jewelry on it. (Figure 121) In one photograph, the Comtesse Consuelo de Saint Exupry wears a European stylehat while examining a woven hat with three long appendages embellished with cowrie shells. (Figure 122) (Figure 123) On the table in front of her lies a chessboard covered with at least three other hats and the large bangle. She wears another small bangle around her upper arm. This photograph marks these hats as fashion as opposed to ethnographic artifacts or works of art. They are not in glass cases, nor on pedestals. Exupry examines the hat carefully, feeling its texture, imagining herself wearing it. She is in the position of a discerning fashion consumer. Examining the other photographs of Exupry in which she tries on a number of the hats we see in front of her, it is clear the group of images creates a narrative of masquerade. In three photographs she wears a curvaceous and lavishly beaded hat along with a necklace that seems to be made from the fierce teeth or claws of some jungle animal. (Figure 124) It is not insignificant that Exupry and Findelin are the
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only two models to wear this necklace, since neither is European. (Figure 125) Both women seem to more fully embrace the masquerade in these photographs. In another photograph, Exupry poses with a hand behind her head that is encircled with a halo of cowries. She poses casually in a beaded cap, holding a cigarette in her perfectly manicured hand. (Figure 126) This pose mirrors that of Princess Sherbatow in a 1935 photograph for Vogue by Horst. In one of the photographs of Exupry published in Harpers Bazaar, she wears a fez-shaped, cowry-covered hat with an ebullient plume of fur on the crown. (Figure 127) She looks down, eyes nearly closed, with her hand on the side of her head. This strange pose is repeated in an image of Fidelin with her elbows in the tri-corner hat. (Figure 128) Man Rays photographs of Exupry in particular reveal the transformative potential of these African hats. They demonstrate the unconscious reverie evoked by trying on an exotic hat. They show how the wearers carriage and personality can change through her clothing. Exupry seems to be shopping around for the perfect hat; each evokes a different mood and feeling. These photographs reveal the Surrealist potential of shopping. They demonstrate that rich fantasies that can be conjoured through the donning of a particular garment or accessory. These are the same sorts of fantasies that were induced by Agns hats or Nancy Cunards bangles. Fashion designers and the women who wore those designs were creating Bretons marvelous in their own everyday lives. There was nothing
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mundane about an Agns hat, or even a Bakelite bangle; these objects evoked the fantasy of masquerade for the women who wore them. Man Rays photographs serve as a document of this process of the fashion masquerade. In contrast to Exupry, Man Rays photographs of Fidelin are unique within the group. She is positioned not as a female consumer, or fashionable European model, but as a beautiful ethnographic other. In 1936 Man Ray met Fidelin, whom he described as a beautiful young mulatto dancerfrom the French colony of Guadeloupe.454 In several of the photographs she is topless. (Error! Reference source not found.) In others, the tube of fabric that forms her skirt is pulled up to cover her breasts. (Figure 129) This dress is different from the sweaters and suits worn by the other models. Wendy Grossman explains that Fidelin wears not the Western garb of the other models but is decked out in African jewelry with her bare skin exposed. These cultural markers of her otherness lend an exotic and sexualized air to the image underscored by the classic come-hither pose of her arm crooked behind her head.455 Fidelin uses a stock fashion pose, which can be seen in a number of images from Harpers Bazaar that same year, as well as an image of Exupry from the portfolio. In combination with her body, either semi-nude or clothed in a kind of sarong/grass skirt hybrid Fidelin takes on the look on a woman from an ethno-erotic postcard. The only hint of Fidelins modernity is her lipstick.
454 455
Ray, Self Portrait: Man Ray, 237. Sala Elise Patterson, "Yo, Adrienne," New York Times Magazine (Spring 2007), 234.
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Man Rays other models combine the Primitive and Modern. Their fashionably plucked eyebrows, manicures, chic suits and blouses, provide just the right balance to their Congolese crowns and ivory bangles. These photographs pair the African hats with the models distinctly contemporary clothes. This is notable since in the Reboux photographs Man Ray is careful to crop the womens heads closely and blot out their bodies through solarization. Wedding bands on a number of models, the cigarette, and the mans shirt and tie mark these women as not only belonging to a civilized culture, but also a modern one. Wedding bandswhich might have been taken off by a fashion model for a shootpoint to the institution of monogamous marriage, an institution not perceived to be part of the primitive cultures of Africa.(Figure 130) The cigarette is also an interesting inclusion since many visitors to Africa noted that smoking was prevalent there, though images of Africans took care not to include cigarettes.456(Error! Reference source
not found.) Cigarettes are a notable presence in fashion photography; a 1935
photograph by Horst P. Horst for Vogue shows a model in a feather Agns hat smoking a cigarette coolly. Cigarettes were certainly emblematic of chic modern femininity since for so long they had been deemed unladylike. Another emblem of civilization and modernity present in the photographs is a chessboard. Man Rays interest in chess has been well documented and Grossman has analyzed these images relationship to the
456
Malvina Hoffman, for example, tells the story of making a portrait of a Ubangi woman with disks in her mouth who had rigged a bamboo holder to smoke. Malvina Hoffman, Heads and Tales (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1936), 149-150.
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metaphors of chess.457 Importantly, in the context of the meeting of ethnographic, Surrealist and fashion photography, the chess boardespecially in one photograph where a woman seems to be playingis a signifier for complex civilization, evoking as it does a history of monarchical and religious structure. Man Ray uses the conventions of fashion photography here to create images that juxtapose the primitive and the modern. These photographs must be read in the myriad of contexts in which they appeared. Within the Ratton exhibition, these photographsto a certain extentdemonstrated how their original owners used the objects in the exhibition. They also added a distinctly Surrealist flavor to the exhibition through their juxtaposition of the primitive and the modern. One photograph of Exupry appeared in the French magazine Cahiers dArt with the caption Photographie Man Ray. Parure Congolaise. La Mode Au Congo. Exposition a la Galerie Charles Ratton (Man Ray photograph. Congolese finery. Exhibition at the Galerie Charles Ratton.).458 (Figure 131) Here, the photograph is a work of art from Man Rays oeuvre and we can think of it in the context of his other images of women with African objects. The images from this portfolio are perhaps not as explicit as Man Rays photograph of Simone Kahn with a Vanuatu figure, but draw upon similar themes.
457
See for example, Wendy Grossman, "Man Ray's Endgame and Other Modernist Gambits," in The Art of the Project : Projects and Experiments in Modern French Culture , ed. Johnnie Gratton and Michael Sheringham (New York: Berghahn Books, 2005), 43-45. 458 La Mode Au Congo," Cahiers d'Art 12, no. 1-3 1937), 103.
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In the Mode au Congo portfolio, the African objects are not merely props, but are worn, transforming them from dcor into useful fashion. The hats interact with the head that wears them, as is apparent in many of the images where the models respond to their hats. In a number of the images the models hold their heads in their hands, sometimes with eyes closed, their hats seeming to express the thoughts arising in their silent reverie. (Error!
Reference source not found.)(Error! Reference source not found.) Finally, four of
these photographs appeared in Harpers Bazaar. (Figure 132) In this context they become fashion photographs, making the Congolese hats legible as fashion, not artifacts. Interestingly, Fidelin was featured on a full page and Saint-Exupry appeared in two of the three other small photographs in this spread. Fidelin was the first model of color to appear on the pages of a major fashion magazine.459 Because her photograph appeared in the context of a story on African hats, her racial presence was mitigated. Surrealist Paul Eluard wrote a short article explaining that the exposition will surely have a happy influence on fashion. Happy, because among the objects that are airily woven into the web of life there is none that demands greater inspiration, greater daring, than a womans hat. Every head should dare to wear a crown!460 Eluard clearly writes Dach out of the story altogether, despite the fact that a caption notes, All these hats at Lilly Dach. 461
459 460
Patterson, "Yo, Adrienne," 234. Paul Eluard, "The Bushongo of Africa Sends His Hats to Paris," Harpers Bazaar (15 September 1937), 106. This article also appeared in Paul Eulard, "Exposition," Marianne (5 May 1937), n.p. 461 Caption from, Eluard, "The Bushongo of Africa Sends His Hats to Paris," 107.
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The truth was that Dach had discovered these hats before Eulard. Grossman explains, while fashion publications in the interwar period exploited the novelty of the Surrealist aesthetic as an effective sales tool, in this instance fashion took the lead and the art world followed.462 Dach had bought these hats with an eye to using them in her new salon and as the inspiration for a new collection. The appearance of Man Rays photographs of the Congolese hats in the September 15th issue of Harpers would soften the ground for her collection that was simultaneously being advertised in newspapers across the US in August and September 1937. In an interview from October 1937, Lilly Dach explained: Two influences are of particular moment and will undoubtedly blaze a trail in this seasons millinery fashionsprimitive African Headdresses and sculptured hats which may be traced directly to the coiffeurs of Chinese idols. This article also reports that Sally Victor visited the Ratton hat show and is much to blame for getting from the gallery ideas for the skull and dunce caps with high crowns and beaded embroideries like the Belgian hats of the eighteenth century.463 Lilly Dachs exuberant Congo-inspired designs were a far cry from Agns tame straw hats six years earlier. One streamlined an exuberant feather headdress to create an incredible cap topped with a primitive uprising of feathers.464 (Figure 133)(Figure 134)(Figure 135) Dach took the
462
Grossman, "Modernist Gambits and Primitivist Discourses: Reframing Man Ray's Photographs of African and Oceanic Art", 156-7. 463 Crete Cage, "Hat Styles Arouse Clubwomen," Los Angeles Times 31 October 1937, D14. 464 Bullock's Wilshire Ad, Los Angeles Times 21 September 1937, A8
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shape of a conical hat and the pompom on its peak for another whimsical design. (Figure 136)(Figure 137) A black wool jersey hat mimics the texture of the tri-corner hat worn by Fidelin in Man Rays photograph, while adopting the elephant trunk shape of an elaborately beaded Kuba Mukyeem mask.465 (Figure 138)(Figure 139)(Error! Reference source not found.) In all of these hats, Dach is appropriating and adapting directly from the hats in her collection, both in form and material. Interestingly, the Mangbetu coiffure discussed at the start of this chapter inspired another hat in the collection. The resulting design was described by one store as a lofty barbaric turban.466(Figure 140) The image of the Mangbetu woman clearly endured. The image was emblematic of African style, particularly the Congo, so much so that Dach included a reference to the image in her collection even though it did not relate directly to a hat in her own collection.467 Lilly Dachs hats participated in the same kinds of contrasts that James Clifford identifies as Ethnographic Surrealism. Dach hats were made to be worn with conservative suits and dresses. Their exuberant exoticism stood in stark contrast to conventional outfits they were paired with. The
465
Dachs mask is now in the Metropolitan Museum of Arts collection along with the other hats in Dachs collection (accession number: 1974.83.30). Other examples of this type of Kuba mask can be found in: Suzanne Preston Blier, The Royal Arts of Africa : The Majesty of Form (New York: Harry N. Abrams, Inc., 1998), 236-241. Mary Lou Hultgren and Jeanne Zeidler, A Taste for the Beautiful : Zairian Art from the Hampton University Museum (Hampton: Hampton University Museum, 1993), cat. 24-5. 466 Bullock's Wilshire Advertisment, Los Angeles Times, 9 August 1937, A8 467 The American milliner Sally Victor also made reference to Mangbetu hairstyles in her 1937 collection inspired by the Ratton show. A black felt hat embellished with wooden triangles mimics the look of the elongated skulls and upswept hairstyles of Mangbetu women. A navy blue hat used tubular straw braid to mimic hair in a style inspired by the Mangbetu. (both in the Metropolitan Museum of Arts Costume Institute).
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Washington Post explained that Dachs African hats were, a smart method of adding drama to an otherwise simple and conservative costume.468 Juxtaposing the savage hat with a sophisticated suit, Dachs work created a bold silhouette. Dachs hats unsettled conventional ensembles, not least because they put the hats of African men on the heads of white American women.469 In Bretons essay, The Crisis of the Object, written at the time of the Surrealist Exhibition of Objects at the Galerie Ratton, he rails against the commonplace objects that populate our everyday worlds. He explains that the objects in the exhibition were devised to oppose by all possible means the invasion of the world of the senses by things which mankind makes use of more from habit then necessity. Here, as elsewhere, that mad beast of convention must be hunted down.470 Lilly Dach and Sally Victor, along with other milliners and fashion designers were already defying convention in their designs. Dachs hats reveal the rich presence of fantasy in fashion. They are only one example of the ways in which women were creating drama and resisting convention in their sartorial style. These hats were exuberant and provocative.
Si JEtais Blanche (If I Were White)471
468 469
Savage to Sophisticate; Hat-Bag Theme," The Washington Post, 28 October 1937, 13. One issue which I have not yet been able to grapple with in the context of these hats is whether African American women wore them. I hope to be able to research this futher in the future. 470 Andr Breton, "Crisis of the Object," in Surrealism and Painting, trans. Simon Watson Taylor (Boston: MFA Publications, 2002), 279. 471 Jules-Rosette, Josephine Baker in Art and Life: The Icon and the Image, 64.
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Lilly Dachs hats were designed for women who were interested in making an entrance. Unlike Agns demure raffia hats, these styles were brash and bold. According to Life, for 32.50, a Lilly Dach customer can, so far as headgear goes, look like a Congo chief.472 Dachs hats were certainly part of a larger trend of global influences in fashion stemming from the worlds fairs and colonial expositions. The interest in African fashion in particular reflected a complex set of idea about Africa in the popular imaginations of Americans and Europeans. Man Rays photographs of Dachs collection make clear the kinds of fantasies that could be evoked by fashion. While collectors like Breton, Rubinstein and even Dach used their collections to exhibit their aesthetic philosophy, women engaged with fashionable primitivism through their own wardrobes, participating in a complicated process of masquerade and fantasy, which was potentially more subversive. While these women could certainly change their clothes and divest themselves of the image of primitive sexuality, their clothes allowed them to subvert traditional gendered ideas of colonialism. These clothes allowed them to participate in fantasies about primitive sexuality that their gender would otherwise preclude. Early on, Josephine Baker recognized the ways that white women were engaged in racial masquerade. In 1932 she began performing a song titled Si
472
Africa's Belgian Congo Sets the Style in Hats for American Women," Life (13 September 1937), 54.
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JEtais Blanche (If I Were White) while wearing a blond wig at the Casino de Paris. She sang: Moi, si j'tais Blanche Sachez qu' mon bonheur Qui prs de vous s'panche Garderait sa couleur Au soleil, c'est par l'extrieur Que l'on se dore Moi, c'est la flamme de mon cur Qui me colore. Me, if I were white, Know that my happiness Which explodes near you Would guard its color Under the sun, its by ones exterior That one tans But for me, its the flame of my heart By which I am colored.473 While there are a number of ways in which one might interpret this song, it can certainly be read on the level of parody. By 1932, Baker was right at the center of the fashion for all things African, for all things that were not white and European. In the song she teases the Parisians who sunbathe in resorts like Juan-les-Pins in the Antibes trying to achieve her caf au lait complexion. Through her white-face performance, Baker satirizes the racial masquerades that were an important part of fashion in the 1930s. Nancy Cunard, among
473
Lyrics by: Bobby Falk, Leo Lelivre, and Henri Varna. Sung by Josephine Baker. Translation in: idem, Josephine Baker in Art and Life: The Icon and the Image , 63-4.
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others, was shocked and offended by the performance, no doubt because of her own deployment of African fashion.474 As we have seen, collecting was another space in which women could engage with materials from Africa and other colonized regions. While their practices have often been seen as distinct from those of Andre Breton, they were working in much the same way to display and promote their own aesthetic philosophies that relied on collage and juxtaposition. These ways of collecting and displaying objects are very much in line with the aesthetic of contrast at the heart of strange glamour. Strange glamour depended on the same eccentric juxtapositions and incongruous combinations that drew Surrealists to non-western art. Agns demure hats and brash turbans gave a sense of mysterious glamour to a womans wardrobe. They referred loosely to Africa through materials and textures. The turbans mimicked the hairstyle of Nobosodrou. Lilly Dach took this style even further making reference to actual hats and headdresses from the Congo. Her exuberant collection exemplified the strange glamour of the 1930s, and Man Rays Mode au Congo series reveals the surreal nature of this aesthetic. In the next chapter we will see the last explosion of this surreal aesthetic in both fashion and art before the war. By the end of the 1930s womens hats, in particular, had become so wild that both Vogue and Harpers Bazaar felt compelled to defend them from their male detractors. Vogue showed photographs of mens hats, culled form various parts of the world and presented here in the
474
Bennetta Jules-Rosette used the term white-face to describe Bakers performance, and reports on Cunards reaction. Ibid, 63.
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interests of social justice. To our mind, they prove conclusively that when funnier hats are worn, men will wear them.475 Harpers Bazaar challenged a group of men to come up with better creations than contemporary milliners, and showcased their odd creations in the April 1938 issue.476 Schiaparelli put everything from inkwells to hens to mutton chops on her customers heads, making Dachs Congo collection look tame by comparison. By 1937, Schiaparelli was frequently collaborating with Salvador Dal and the next chapter will examine the many spaces and forums in which the fashion and art world met in the years just before the war. Surrealism and strange glamour were working towards the same goals in this period, to unsettle and disrupt conventional ideas about beauty.
475 476
Gentlemen-Laugh These Off," Vogue (15 March 1938), 110. Bonnets by the Boys," Harpers Bazaar (April 1938), 80-81.
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Chapter 4
Strange Glamour
An illustration by Cecil Beaton of Schiaparellis first showing in her new atelier on Place Vendme appeared in the March 15, 1935 issue of Vogue. (Figure 141) The image shows a model, who bears a strong resemblance to Schiaparelli herself, sauntering down a flight of stairs in a smart suit, her hat cocked jauntily to one side: down the stairway festooned in blue velvet, steps a terse figure the epitome of spring 1935. Her hat marches aggressively ahead of her, its blue felt visor rolled amusingly. Her blue wool suit, punctuated with red-and-green buttonholes, has the military briskness of Vienna before the War. Her blouse of white silk, froths at the neck and wrists with Binche lace and wears a heart insignia.477 The woman in Beatons sketch is bold and unrestrained, her ensemble full of the contradictions fashion followers had come to expect from Schiaparelli. The militarism of the suit, with its signature wide shoulders and long lean skirt is contrasted with the feminine flourish of the blouse with its lace cuffs and collar and a playful heart with an arrow through it just below the neckline. Schiaparelli matches the masculine bravado of martial tailoring with the doodle of a love struck girl. The woman wearing the suit is also somewhat incongruous. Not the pretty young girl we expect in the fashion illustration, but a more mature, unusual looking woman who, in this ensemble, encapsulates the idea of strange glamour, which will be the subject of this chapter. What I am calling
477
Paris Openings," Vogue (15 March 1935), 56.
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strange glamour is an aesthetic in fashion created through dissonance, through the contrasts upon which Schiaparellis designs thrived: masculine and feminine, day and night, hard and soft, traditional and revolutionary. Strange glamour was certainly not Schiaparellis invention alone, but she is perhaps the designer who embodies it most fully, particularly in her own personal style that was so closely associated with her work as a designer. Schiaparelli was not classically beautiful, but was instead classified as one of the jolies laides, a good looking ugly.478 Her clothes were made for women like her, not to hide their unusual features, but to draw attention to these women, making them look shocking. This interest in shock is what sets Schiaparellis work apart from her contemporaries and links it with the notion of convulsive beauty so central to the Surrealist project. Schiaparelli and the Surrealists both used the uncanny conflation of incongruous elements to create convulsive beauty. This shared aesthetic connects Schiaparelli much more deeply with Surrealism than most fashion and art historians have yet acknowledged. This chapter will trace these connections between Surrealism and the work of Schiaparelli in the late 1930s. While Schiaparellis early collections experimented with the uncanny through issues of tactility and gender, in the late 1930s strange glamour really came into its own, particularly as she embarked on more serious collaborations with Surrealist artists. As this chapter will demonstrate, however, Schiaparelli had a well defined Surrealist aesthetic all her own.
478
Blum, Shocking!: The Art and Fashion of Elsa Schiaparelli , 153.
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While the themes that she worked with in her collections had parallels in Surrealism, she was not simply copying or translating. Schiaparelli was making these ideas her own, often changing their meaning, experimenting with wild abandon, and influencing the Surrealists themselves. In the years leading up to World War II, Schiaparellis work became increasingly exuberant and unusual. In Shocking Life, she wrote of her own work (as usual in the third person): In her special, ever-changing work, contrasting viewpoints, contrasting values are needed, but to obtain the necessary rhythm and harmony these contrasts have to be carefully balanced and adjustedSchiaps mind became increasingly receptive, and during the years that followed, and until the outbreak of war, her brain gave out the ideas like a fireworks show.479 Schiaparelli saw her own work as embodying contradictions and discordant ideas that she managed to bring together into one image. In the late 1930s these dissonant images grew odder and more exciting. These years were also productive ones for the Surrealists. Their work became well known in the United States, through fashion magazines, Schiaparellis designs, and only later through an exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in 1936.480 Dal emerged as the star of this exhibition and his fame would rise throughout the rest of the decade, in part through his collaborations with Schiaparelli. In 1938 Andre Breton and his cohort produced the Exposition Internationale du
479 480
Schiaparelli, Shocking Life: The Autobiography of Elsa Schiaparelli, 60-1. There had been earlier Surrealist exhibitions most notably Newer Super-Realism organized by Chick Austin at Hartfords Wadsworth Athenaeum in 1931 and throughout the 1930s Surrealism could be seen at the Julian Levy Gallery (starting in 1932). The MoMA show though was the most widely publicized.
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Surralisme. As we will see, this exhibition also had the mark of fashion and Schiaparelli.
Strange Glamour Strange glamour is built, it is not natural. It uses contrasts and juxtapositions. As we saw in chapter two, the Schiaparelli woman can be masculine and feminine all at once; she can embody multiple conflicting identities. Caroline Evans rightly connects Schiaparelli's playful attitude toward the body, to Joan Rivieres argument about the masquerade of femininity, for it articulates female identity as a matter of surface, or appearance, destabilizing the idea of an essential femininity.481 Schiaparellis destabilization of femininity in her fashion is part of the wider Surrealist project to question the notion of a unified consciousness and identity through an exploration of the subconscious. Similarly, for Schiaparelli, strange glamour was not glossy, young prettiness, nor was it the sweet androgyny of the flapper. It is eccentric, challenging, individual, and mature. It is the glamour of Joan Crawford, Greta Garbo, Marlene Dietrich, Tallulah Bankhead, and Katherine Hepburn, all of whom were dressed by Schiaparelli. These womenalong with ethnic beauties who rose to fame in the 1930s such as Anna Mae Wong, Dolores Del Rio (who was dressed by Schiaparelli), Dorothy Lamour, Hedy Lamarr, and
481
Caroline Evans, "Masks, Mirrors and Mannequins: Elsa Schiaparelli and the Decentered Subject," Fashion Theory 3, no. 1 (March 1999), 7.
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Rita Hayworthwere changing the standards of pale blonde beauty in Hollywood.482 In high society, Schiaparelli devotees Daisy Fellowes, Millicent Rodgers, and Wallis Simpson (later the Duchess of Windsor) also exuded strange glamour. Strange glamour is best demonstrated through several examples. In its Hollywood incarnation, Joan Crawford is particularly instructive, since we can see how her look changed from that of a young flapper to the mature aesthetic of strange glamour.483 In a photograph from 1927, Crawford poses as the classic flapper, cropped hair under a cloche, bee stung lips, gaze askance, and in a slouched pose. (Figure 142) In a photograph of Crawford by Edward Steichen from 1932, where she is dressed in a pleated dress and patterned coat by Schiaparelli, she stares directly at the viewer. (Figure 143) Crawford faces us head on, sitting straight up on the back of a modern chair. Her body is shaped by the coat that gives her the classic high, broad shoulders and nipped-in waist she became famous for. Her glamour is bold and constructed, right down to her notorious plucked eyebrows. A photograph of Tallulah Bankhead from Harpers Bazaar in 1934 illustrated the contrasts inherent to strange beauty. Bankheads stern glare in the photograph stands out against the fluffy white wool of her bunny hat and the bib collar of her Schiaparelli jacket. (Figure 144)
482 483
Berry, Screen Style: Fashion and Femininity in 1930s Hollywood, 95. Schiaparelli biographer Palmer White called Joan Crawford, the embodiment par excellence of the Schiaparelli Lady. Palmer White, Elsa Schiaparelli: Empress of Paris Fashion (New York: Rizzoli, 1986), 108.
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Shock Tactics Strange glamour is my term for the manifestation in fashion of Andre Bretons concept of convulsive beauty. Breton, a writer and theorist, placed himself at the head of the mainstream Surrealist movement. He wrote many of the key texts that defined the movement and he wielded the power to decide which artists belonged to the movement and which did not. Those artists who were excommunicated by this Marxist Pope of Surrealism were often those involved with fashion or other commercial endeavors, including Salvador Dal in 1939.484 Despite his distaste for fashion, Bretons concept of convulsive beauty found expression in clothing. Dilys Blum explains that, the acceptance of new concepts of female attractiveness during the 1930s had a parallel in the Surrealist challenge to existing notions of beautybeauty implied harmony, but convulsive beauty took pleasure in being shocking, with an emphasis on dissonance and discordance.485 In Schiaparellis hands convulsive beauty, in the form of her clothing and accessories, disrupts the stable gendered identity of the wearer, and conventional notions of attraction. Breton ends his novel Nadja (1928) with the statement, beauty will be CONVULSIVE or it will not be at all.486 Convulsive beauty is Bretons organizing principle for the aesthetic of Surrealism that defines beauty as a
484
It is also worth noting that Breton was not a great friend to female artists either. Artist Leonor Fini, who exhibited with the Surrealists, but refused ever to formally join the group, explained: I disliked the deference with which everyone treated Breton. I hated his anti-homosexual attitudes and also his misogyny. It seemed that the women were expected to keep quiet in caf discussionsBreton seemed to me to expect devotion, like a pope. Peter Webb, Sphinx: The Art and Life of Leonor Fini (New York: The Vendme Press, 2010), 69-72. 485 Blum, Shocking!: The Art and Fashion of Elsa Schiaparelli , 152. 486 Breton, Nadja, 160.
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series of strange encounters, or paradoxes. The classic example of convulsive beauty is the chance encounter. Breton writes in Mad Love that the Comte de Lautrmonts famous encounter of a sewing machine with an umbrella on a dissection table, constitutes the very manifesto of convulsive poetry.487 Bretons description of convulsive beauty also links aesthetic pleasure to erotic pleasure. Breton identified the merging of two thingsthat is when they move beyond Lautrmonts encounter to become one object or beingas lrotique voile (the veiled erotic).488 This merging is often of the animate with the inanimate, as we will see in the case of the Surrealist fascination with mannequins. Breton declared: Beauty, neither static nor dynamic, comparing it with a train that ceaselessly roars out of the Gare de Lyon and which I know will never leave, which had not left. 489 Something with convulsive beauty is at rest, in motion, and embodying the potential for movement all at once. This quality is referred to as lexplosante-fixe, the fixed explosion. Schiaparellis strange glamour esthetic engages with all of these aspects of convulsive beauty. It also engages with one of the most important elements of convulsive beauty: shock. According to Breton convulsive beauty consists of jolts and shocks, many of which do not have much importance, but which
487
Andr Breton, Mad Love (L'amour Fou), trans. Mary Ann Caws (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1987), 9, 123. 488 Briony Fer, "Surrealism, Myth and Psychoanalysis," in Realism, Rationalism, Surrealism: Art between the Wars (New Haven: Yale University Press, in association with the Open University, 1993), 216. 489 Breton, Nadja, 159-160.
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we know are destined to produce one Shock, which does.490 Shock in convulsive beauty can manifest itself as an unexpected erotic charge, or unstable amalgamation of movement and stillness. Hal Foster explains that shock is an alternative route to the unconscious, which is why it was so important for Surrealists such as Breton.491 Shock affects a viewer in a visceral way. It is a bodily reaction. It is what makes convulsive beauty convulse. Shock tactics were crucial to Schiaparellis practice, and her creation of convulsive beauty and strange glamour. Shock became practically a second signature for Schiaparelli in 1937 when she created her signature shade, Shocking pink, and the perfume Shocking. Schiaparelli even took the name for her autobiography, Shocking Life, where she wrote about her discovery of this new color and perfume name: The colour flashed in front of my eyes. Bright, impossible, imprudent, becoming, life-giving, like all the light and the birds and the fish in the world put together, a colour of China and Peru but not of the Westa shocking colour, pure and undiluted. So I called the perfume Shocking. The presentation would be shocking, and most of the accessories and gowns would be shocking. It caused a mild panic amongst my friends and executives, who began to say that I was crazy and that nobody would want it because it was really nigger pink. What of it? Negroes are sometimes strikingly smart.492 In Shocking pink and her perfume Shocking, Schiaparelli married a number of different themes that had defined her fashion: the natural world, exotic
490 491
Ibid, 160. Foster, Compulsive Beauty, 49. 492 Schiaparelli, Shocking Life: The Autobiography of Elsa Schiaparelli , 89-90.
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cultures, and Surrealism. Schiaparelli saw her new shade of pink as coming from cultures outside of Europe, cultures which, as we have seen often influenced her fashions. The bottle for Shocking, designed by Leonor Fini which will be discussed at length belowwas based on the torso of Mae West, and had a sex appeal that was certainly shocking to some. The fragrance too was shocking, formulated for the classic Schiaparelli woman: no shrinking violet would be attracted to the warm, sensual animalistic notes of ambergris, civet, and musk and the fruity and spicy tones of patchouli and vetiver blended with such classic perfume ingredients as rose, jasmine, syringe, magnolia, and gardenia.493 Perfume expert Jean-Marie Martin-Hattemberg went so far as to call Shocking the first sex perfume.494 Frida Kahlo, an exemplar of strange glamour herself, was a fan of the perfume. At her 1953 retrospective in Mexico, she was confined to her four poster bed that had been brought into the opening, the pillows laced with Shocking. As in Bretons account of convulsive beauty in Nadja, sometimes Schiaparellis jolts and shocks were inconsequential, for example, whimsical buttons shaped like cow heads, mermaids, or pianos. In other cases though, Schiaparellis details were more akin to Bretons capital-S Shocks: bullet casings used as buttons on a cream colored coat with details from mens hunting clothes (1932-5), a zipper placed provocatively across the front of a
493
Stamelman, Perfume : Joy, Obsession, Scandal, Sin : A Cultural History of Fragrance from 1750 to the Present, 213. 494 Jean-Marie Martin-Hattemberg, Elsa Schiaparelli. Senteurs surrealists, flacons dextravagance, Parfums & Senteurs 4 (October 2000), 73. Quoted in Ibid, 213.
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skirt (Winter 1935-36), padding usually sewn inside a dress to enhance the bust was appliqud to the outside of dresses (1936). Schiaparellis collaborations with Salvador Dal were also part of her shocking tactics. Dal, who had grown up in Spain, moved to Paris in 1929 and joined the Surrealist group. He made films, paintings, and sculptures, and wrote about his work and theories. He is most known for his carefully executed academic paintings that depict Freudian themes, but also for his infamous publicity stunts. In June 1936, Londons New Burlington Galleries hosted the International Surrealist Exhibition where Dal attempted to give a lecture in a diving suit and nearly suffocated. On December 7, 1936 Fantastic Art, Dada, and Surrealism opened at the Museum of Modern Art in New York sparking a blitz of publicity for Dal and Surrealism and landing him on the cover of Time magazine. Lewis Kachur argues that By the mid-1930s, in Paris and New York, a large Surrealist exhibition would set a theme for the season and be immediately reflected in the vitrines of department stores and in the press. 495 Surrealism was becoming more and more prominent in popular culture, particularly after the MoMA exhibition, and Surrealisms American mascot was undoubtedly Salvador Dal. Throughout the late 1930s Dal would venture beyond painting and sculpture, to dabble in popular culture, particularly fashion. In the same period Schiaparellis designs were becoming
495
Kachur, Displaying the Marvelous: Marcel Duchamp, Salvador Dal, and Surrealist Exhibition Installations, 8.
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wilder. It was apparent by 1936 that she was allying herself with the Surrealists, and the fashion press understood this. The art press also recognized the connection, although often more critically. The Washington Posts art editor, Sibilla Skidelsky, claimed that no one has any use for Surrealism, except designers of clothes who can, as Schiaparelli did after the London [International Surrealist] Exhibition, utilize some of the Surrealists practical jokes in details of pockets or of belts.496 Skidelsky is referring to Schiaparelli and Dals bureau drawer suits and coats. These garments brought to life Dals obsession with putting drawers into bodies. The collaboration was responsible for bringing Dals work onto the pages of Vogue. The magazine labeled him one of the unsung heroes behind the Paris openings including a cartoon of Dal in his diving mask.497 (Figure 145) The Bureau Drawer suits and one of Dals sketches appeared in the same issue. In November of 1936 an article on Surrealism appeared in Vogue that featured a portrait of Dal.498 Together Schiaparelli and Dal brought many of the artists favorite motifs to life, including hats shaped like mutton chops, inkwells, and high heels, and the Tear-Illusion and Skeleton gowns. The American publics first exposure to the term Surrealism may well have been through Schiaparellis fashion, which had been associated with
496
Sibilla Skidelsky, "Museum of Modern Art Sponsors Outworn Hoax," The Washington Post, 27 December 1936, F5. 497 Vogue's Eye View of Unsung Heroes Behind the Paris Openings," Vogue (15 September 1936), 57. 498 M. F. Agah, "Surrealism or the Purple Cow," Vogue (1 November 1936), 51.
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Surrealism for a number of years. In 1935 George Hoyningen-Huene created two photomontages for Harpers Bazaar that were inspired by Max Ernst. A Schiaparelli coat and gown are shown in strange barren Surrealist landscapes. (Figure 146) The captions read like exquisite corpse poetry: She paused on the threshold in her curious wrap of bright red Cellophane velvet, and because the air was cold, she tucked her hands and her icy rings under the heavy gathersShe slung the orange scarf over one shoulder and moved on into the moonlight, flame trailing over gray silk crepe.499 In January 1936 Schiaparellis clothes had been shown in a Surrealist inspired photo spread by Andre Durst for Vogue.500 (Figure 147) Schiaparelli had been linked to artists in the fashion press since the beginning of her career.501 A Schiaparelli ensemble on the cover of Vogue in 1936 was accompanied by the caption: Schiaparelli gives a strange hurricane twist to the flaming red velvet hat Eric drew for our current cover--a twist that shoots high at the side-back--take notice: the caracul [lambswool] scarf has dyed streaks of bright blue-green through the black fur--it looks as if the dress makers are becoming Surrealists, and, to climax it all, blue-green kid gloves.502 The fashion press clearly understood Schiaparelli as a Surrealist. She was not the only Surrealist whose work appeared on the pages of fashion magazines.
Fashion magazines also exposed their readers to Surrealism by featuring a number of different artists in their pages. The work of Man Ray
499 500
She Paused on the Threshold..." Harpers Bazaar (October 1935), 74-5. Rope Hurtling out of Oblivion, Surrealist Fashion," Vogue (15 January 1936), 43. 501 See chapter 2. Flanner, "Comet," 20. The Dressmakers of France," 76. 502 Table of Contents, Vogue (1 September 1936), 63.
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had appeared in Harpers Bazaar since 1934. He had also been an occasional contributor to Vogue since 1925. Vogue had been offering the work of Pierre Roy and Georgio de Chirico on its covers since 1935. Dal, in particular, was a natural at publicity, and a perfect fit for the world of fashion. From his student days, Dal used clothes and self-presentation to set himself apart from his peers.503 His wife Gala was also a follower of fashion and frequently wore Schiaparellis clothes to high profile events, and openings.504 By the close of 1936 the presence of Surrealism in fashion had reached a fevered pitch in the wake of the MoMA exhibition. In addition to her Surrealist fashion designs, Schiaparelli had also begun to design prints for the American market through Everfast and Druckerwolf. This line featured several Surrealist motifs including A Hand to Kiss, a navy silk crpe covered with disembodied hands. Bonwit Teller created a number of Surrealist window displays for their Fifth Avenue store just in time for Christmas that year, including one based on a sketch by Dal entitled, She was a Surrealist Woman like a Figure in a Dream.505 (Figure 148) The window featured a mannequin with a head of flowers, a recurring motif in Dals painting, along with two of his Surrealist objects, the Aphrodisiac Dinner Jacket and his lobster telephone. Grotesquely long arms crashed though the walls on either
503
For a discussion of Dals personal use of fashion see: Robyn Gibson, "Surrealism into Fashion: The Creative Collaborations between Elsa Schiaprelli and Salvador Dal" (PhD dissertation, RMIT University, Melbourne, 2001), 147-156. 504 Galas desire for Schiaparelli gowns has often been cited as the reason for Dals collaborations with the designer. Gala herself has often also been blamed for Dals pursuit of commercial projects. Dawn Ades and Michael Taylor, Dal (New York: Rizzoli, 2004), 437. 505 "Bonwit Teller Surrealist Windows Ad," New York Times, 20 December 1936.
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side of the display with purses and jewelry grasped in their hands. Dal used signature images from his repertoire to create a dynamic effect in the window. In January 1937, with her penchant for the topical, Lilly Dach showed a collection of hats for spring inspired by Salvador Dal. The collection featured dyed mushrooms perched on pillbox hats, the Fungus Hat a deep green straw peasant bonnet with an open top.506 Other hats in this Dal inspired collection were trimmed with metal, wood, and cork. The Washington Post proclaimed: Surrealist Dal put Mushrooms on New Bonnets.507 Helena Rubinstein got in on the act too, borrowing Man Rays painting Observatory TimeThe Lovers (1932-36) to use in a display of her lipstick line at her new salon after it appeared in the MoMA show. The year before, Man Ray had used the painting as a backdrop for a fashion photograph for Harpers Bazaar.508 As we have seen, Schiaparelli was always avant-garde and her aesthetic shared much with the Surrealists; her designs were increasingly being understood in the context of Surrealism by the public, just as she was beginning to collaborate with more artists associated with the movement.
Strange Glamour by Day and by Night The basic contrast at the heart of Schiaparellis strange glamour was day and night. Schiaparelli presented hard chic looks for day, and slinky
506 507
"Surrealist Dal Put Mushrooms on New Bonnets," The Washington Post, 24 January 1937, S7. Ibid, S7. 508 Clifford, "Helena Rubinstein's Beauty Salons, Fashion, and Modernist Display," 102.
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seductive looks for night.509 As we saw in chapter two, Schiaparelli introduced daywear that created a strong silhouette, sometimes called the toy soldier, with its broad shoulders, nipped in waist, topped with a quirky hat as the final flourish. (Figure 149) This look joined masculinity and femininity in a way that was a radical departure from the flapper look of the 1920s. The way that Schiaparellis looks oscillate between the masculine and feminine as we saw in chapter 2was related to the uncanny, a key part of the Surrealist aesthetic. Palmer White, in his monograph on Schiaparelli, argues that her day wear created an image of hard chic, [which] had a militant, masculine quality, a hard, highly individual femininity. He contends that Schiaparellis clothes worked to protect the New Woman from counterattacks by the male.510 Her gowns for the evening, on the other hand, were daringly sexy: body skimming with low backs and shimmering finishes. (Figure 150) Schiaparellis aesthetic freely mixed masculine and feminine, creating a contrast between hard and soft, day and night, public and private, aggressive and sensual. These contrasts also fascinated Dal. His favorite lobster, for instancewhich, as we will see below, made its way into a collaboration with Schiaparellicombined a hard shell that acted as a womb that protected the softness and more amorphous character of its internal organs.511 Dal, like Schiaparelli, believed in the necessity of armor, writing of his love of shellfish: by virtue of their armor, which is what their
509 510
White, Elsa Schiaparelli: Empress of Paris Fashion , 97. Ibid, 94, 96-97. 511 Ades and Taylor, Dal, 286.
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exoskeleton actually is, these are a material realization of the highly original and intelligent idea of wearing ones bones outside rather than inside, as is the usual practice.512 This image was realized in Schiaparellis x-ray sweater from 1929, and was recreated, as we will see, in the Skeleton dress she made with Dal. A perfect example of such surreal contrasts between day and night, hard and soft appears in George Hoyningen-Huenes Max Ernst-inspired photomontages. (Error! Reference source not found.) On the left a voluminous coat completely covers the models body as she stares coldly at the viewer, while on the right a flowing evening gown wraps around the body of a model who faces away from the viewer, her back exposed by the low cut of the dress. For day, Schiaparellis New Woman could stand up to any man whom she encountered. Her clothes were confrontational and daring, the woman in them was not to be ignored, and she was no shrinking violet. For evening, Schiaparellis New Woman transformed into a sleek, often shimmering sylph. Body-hugging gowns accentuated curves with revealing necklines, or low slung backs. Schiaparelli also contrasted masculine and feminine at night. She topped a slinky dress with a stark broad shouldered cape with lavishly decorated panels around the neck line and another with a bright red coat with military detailing and unusual escargot-shaped buttons. (Figure 151)
512
Salvador Dal, The Secret Life of Salvador Dal, trans. Haakon Chevalier (New York: Dial Press, 1942), 9.
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Schiaparellis woman was at once masculine and feminine. This dialectical combination, which as we saw in chapter two, was present from the very beginning of Schiaparellis fashion career, is related to Surrealism. Ulrich Lehmann, for example, calls Surrealist assemblages and found objects dialectical objects, explaining that the termimplies that the Surrealist object carried within itself its own contradiction.513 Schiaparellis clothing allowed women to express their own dialectical states as simultaneously masculine and feminine. Unlike the Surrealist objects however, these women were made subjects, not objects, though their dress.
Constructed Glamour The idea of agency and subjectivity were key to Schiaparellis strange glamour. Glamour and beauty were not givens in her understanding, but could be constructed. Schiaparelli describes one woman from the American mid-west who arrived at her shop quite plain but the designer liked her and began to mold her. She started to slim severely and irrevocably, cut her hair in a very strict way that made her head look like a cask. She seemed to become taller, and her rather large bones, that were a drawback at the beginning, became strangely interesting and took on a certain special beautyshe was more than smart, more than beautiful.514 Schiaparelli saw herself and her customers as constructing beauty, making what was an unattractive feature into one that was strangely glamorous.
513
Ulrich Lehmann, "The Uncommon Object: Surrealist Concepts and Categories for the Material World," in Surreal Things: Surrealism and Design, ed. Ghislaine Wood (London: V&A Publications, 2007), 20. 514 Schiaparelli, Shocking Life: The Autobiography of Elsa Schiaparelli , 74.
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Schiaparelli herself epitomizes strange glamour. It is easy to see her unusual and striking features in the Beaton sketch of the opening of her new salon. Strutting down the staircase casually with head tossed to the side, this woman is not the young, girlish, pretty type, but an older more unusual and confident beauty. This is evident in Man Rays early portraits of Schiaparelli, such as one for 1932 in which she poses with one of Antoines lacquered wigs on her head and a wooden hand and arm caressing her face (a prop Man Ray often employed in portraits). (Figure 152) Here Schiaparellis sharp features are softened in contrast with the wooden hand and stylized curls of the wig. This Surrealist portrait is significant because Schiaparelli chose to include it in the 1954 edition of her autobiography, Shocking Life.515 Schiaparelli recounts her mothers disparaging remarks about her looks in comparison to the beauty of her sister in this autobiography, and the surreal lengths she went to in order to change them. Perhaps her most infamous stunt was planting flower seeds in her mouth and ears so that her face would sprout flowers. Interestingly, this is an image that would later be realized in a number of Dals paintings including one in Schiaparellis personal collection, Necrophiliac Springtime (1936) which, along with Three Young Surrealist Women Holding in Their Arms the Skins of an Orchestra (1936), would form the inspiration for the Tear-Illusion dress that will be discussed below. (Figure 153)
515
It is possible that this photograph was taken in the same sitting as Man Rays photograph of Schiaparelli that was used in Minotaure. Man Rays retouching of the photograph i s probably also responsible for some of the softness of the photograph. Elsa Schiaparelli, Shocking Life (New York: E.P. Dutton and Co., Inc., 1954) n.p.
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Schiaparellis Summer 1937 collection reflected both the constructed nature of strange glamour as well as its potential for metamorphosis. The collection was described in LOfficiel in musical terms: the collection sings a roundelaya melody of music caught in the mousseline folds of waltz skirtsA song of birds, bees and butterflies woven on summer printsa ballad of impudent saucy hatsa lilt of flower, spring and sunshine. 516 Butterflies and flowers of all kinds were incorporated on the prints of dresses, as buttons, and on hats. Mermaids, fox heads, and cows became buttons.(Figure 154)(Error! Reference source not found.) The crown of a straw hat unzipped to reveal a vanity case. Metamorphosis was at the heart of this collection. Schiaparelli also introduced a new cheerful silhouette in the Waltz length dress, an hourglass shape with a full skirt. It was worn with petticoats that ended about ten inches off the ground making it the perfect style for dancing. Some of the most stunning of the designs in the spring collection were Schiaparellis Bird Cage coats, made of horsehair or crin (heavy silk net) woven to form a lattice-like mesh. One black coat was paired with a black gown printed with giant white butterflies. Another, in bright pink with butterfly fastenings, was paired with a simple black gown, and French Vogue showed a white satin [gown] printed with brightly colored butterflies and a black crin coata surrealist metaphor for beauty captured.517 (Figure 155) These ensembles move beyond this simple metaphor however. Cages were a
516 517
Schiaparelli," L'Officiel de la Couture de la Mode (March 1937), 88. Blum, Shocking!: The Art and Fashion of Elsa Schiaparelli, 156.
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favorite motif of Schiaparellis, appearing in her home, her boutique, and in her fashion. In 1939 she show[ed] saucy hats made with bird-cage crowns in which bright birds are imprisoned, as well as hats with mesh veils that seemed took on the appearance of a cage.518 Jean Michel Frank built an immense gold and black cage as a backdrop for the window of Schiaparellis perfume shop at Place Vendme that opened in June of 1937. (Figure 156) Notably, The Bird Cage by Picasso, which was a part of her collection, was her favorite painting. (Figure 157) What is fascinating is the way that Schiaparelli reads it: there is a cage. Below it are some playing cards on a green carpet. Inside the cage a poor, half-smothered white dove looks dejectedly at a brilliantly polished pink apple; outside the cage an angry black bird with flapping wings challenges the sky. According to Schiaparelli, the painting was thought by many friends to be a portrait of her. They saw her as a mixture of the white dove cowering within the cage and the angry black bird who, with flapping wings challenges the sky.519 Schiaparelli deliberately misreads the painting. The black bird is clearly in the cage, raging to escape, while the white bird cowers in the corner. Schiaparelli was a woman who always felt restricted, by her family, by the world around her, and even by the practicalities of turning her often eccentric ideas into wearable clothing. Schiaparelli explained that, As often as not too many elements are required to allow one to realize the actual vision one had in mind. The interpretation of
518 519
"Schiaparelli Sets Style to Music," New York Times, 30 April 1939, 58. Schiaparelli, Shocking Life: The Autobiography of Elsa Schiaparelli , viii.
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a dress, the means of making it, and the surprising way in which some materials reactall these factors, no matter how good an interpreter you have, invariably reserve a slight if not bitter disappointment for you.520 While her business was tremendously successful by this point, she surely would have felt the restrictions of being a woman in the 1930s. It is possible that Schiaparelli was also frustrated that some in the Surrealist circle, particularly Breton, did not take her work seriously.521 For Schiaparelli, perhaps seeing one of the birds free and railing at the sky was more gratifying than seeing her strain against the cage. Schiaparelli was both the woman who rages against the sky, creating a revolutionary style, blurring the boundaries between art and fashion, and the woman who cowered in the cage longing for the pretty apples, longing for an easier, more conventional life. This comes through in her autobiography. In the form of the cage coats, again Schiaparelli puts the control in the hands of the woman. She can appear as a surrealist metaphor for beauty captured, or liberate herself from the cage of the coat.522 While these clothes do not necessarily liberate the women who wore them, they did change and challenge Surrealist ideas about women, as muse and as object. These ensembles allowed women not simply to be literally transformed into
520 521
Ibid, 42. While Schiaparelli herself never spoke about not being accepted by the Surrealists, it is revealing that Schiaparelli leaves Breton out of her autobiography, only mentioning Duchamp when she discusses her participation in the 1942 First Papers of Surrealism exhibition. Breton also excommunicated artists who made work for Schiaparelli, such as Giacometti and Dal, precisely because of this commercial work. Judging by the way that contemporary writers have dismissed her work, as well as Bretons hostility toward women and commercial work, it seems likely that he would have dismissed Schiaparelli and her work. Ibid, 135. 522 Blum, Shocking!: The Art and Fashion of Elsa Schiaparelli , 156.
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butterflies, but to transform butterflies into moving thinking women with agency all their own.523 Schiaparelli believed that the woman who wore her clothes had just as much a role in their life as she, the designer, did: A dress has no life of its own unless it is worn, and as soon as this happens another personality takes over from you and animates it, or tries to.524 While this act of animation may or may not be successful, Schiaparellis philosophy certainly leaves room for the agency of her customer. One of these customers who bought a number of pieces from this collection was Mrs. Wallace Simpson, or Wally as she was known in the newspapers. The theme of metamorphosis from Schiaparellis butterfly collection was reflected in Simpsons own story. Her every move was followed by the papers during her romance with King Edward VIII, and his subsequent abdication of the British throne so that the two could marry. Simpson traveled to Paris and bought eighteen designs from Schiaparellis Spring 1937 collection, including a sky blue suit with enormous butterfly buttons, the black dress with large white printed butterflies worn with the black cage coat, a suit with leather chess pieces for buttons to be worn with a white silk blouse printed with black chess pieces, and a black suit for the evening with a rococo scroll work appliqu. (Figure 158) Cecil Beaton photographed Simpson in her new Schiaparelli wardrobe for Vogue just before her wedding. Mirroring her
523 524
Ibid, 151. Schiaparelli, Shocking Life: The Autobiography of Elsa Schiaparelli , 42.
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own description about molding a womans look, Beaton described her in her new attire as the classic Schiaparelli constructed beauty: Of late, her general appearance has become infinitely more distinguished. Not only is she thinner, but her features have acquired a refined fineness. She is unspoiled. She is like an ugly child who wakes up one day to find that it has become a beauty, but she herself has created this beauty by instinctively doing the right things.525 Her beauty was not innate, but rather Simpsons own creation. Schiaparellis unusual and eye-catching styles were crucial to the formation of her new beautiful image.
Surrealist Objects: Female, Edible and Otherwise Schiaparellis first collaborations with Salvador Dal, a series of suits and coats with pockets made to look like drawers, played off the notion of constructed beauty. Schiaparellis collaborations with Dal, as well as a number of other designs she created in the years leading up to World War II, engaged with ideas the Surrealists used in their found and assembled objects. As we have seen, the dialectic of masculine and feminine, subject and object, is at the heart of Schiaparellis work, as it is in Dals; so looking more deeply at Dals ideas about Surrealist objects can reveal new ways to read Schiaparellis designs. Dals 1931 text in Le Surralisme au Service de la Rvolution outlines a progression from separate subject and object to unified subject and object:
525
From Cecil Beaton, Cecil Beaton's Scrapbook (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1937), 27. Quoted in Blum, Shocking!: The Art and Fashion of Elsa Schiaparelli , 165.
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1. The object exists outside of us, without our taking part in it (anthropomorphic articles); 2. The object assumes the immovable shape of desire and acts upon our contemplation (dream-state articles) 3. The object is movable and such that it can be acted upon (articles operating symbolically) 4. The object tends to bring about our fusion with it and makes us pursue the formation of a unity with it (hunger for an article and edible articles)526 As we will see, Dals last category of objects, those that can fuse with a subject because they are edible, were of particular interest to both Dal and Schiaparelli. These edible objects are meant to be literallynot just visually consumed. Beyond this more literal interpretation however, Dals fourth stage of the object could also refer to fashion. A gown, when worn, fuses with the body of the wearer. The body shapes the clothes, the clothes shape the body. As we have seen, Schiaparelli believed in the potential for fashion to change a womans appearance, as well as the way she moves. Walter Benjamin also saw this surreal potential for fashion. In The Arcades Project, Benjamin declared that Every fashion couples the living body to the inorganic world.527 Through this merging of clothes and body, inorganic and organic, fashion was the perfect vessel for fetishism: In fetishism, sex does away with the boundaries separating the organic world from the inorganic. Clothing and jewelry are its allies.528 Like Schiaparelli, Benjamin saw the
526
Lehmann, "The Uncommon Object: Surrealist Concepts and Categories for the Material World," 23. Originally published in part as Objets Surralistes, in Le Surralisme au Service de la Rvolution (Paris), No. 3 (1931) translated in This Quarter (London), v. 1 (September 1932), 197-207. 527 Benjamin, The Arcades Project, 79. 528 Ibid, 69.
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eccentric, revolutionary, and surrealist possibilities of fashion.529 This potential was realized through this close relationship of the body to fashion. Fashion can be a uniquely Surrealist intervention, merging subject and object, woman and clothing. The key to Dals practice as a Surrealist artist was his paranoiaccritical method. This was a method through which he could intentionally misread what he saw. For Dal it was a way to achieve the results of automatism or a hallucinatory or hysterical state without giving up control. As he famously proclaimed: the only difference between myself and a madman is that I am not mad.530 Breton described Dals approach in 1936 as an insistence upon an infantile non-differentiation in approach to knowledge of objects and that of beings.531 Dals paranoiac-critical method ignored the difference between subject and object, deliberately mixing the two. We can see a parallel in Schiaparellis commandment to women: Never fit the dress to the body, but train the body to fit the dress.532 Schiaparelli worked in the same paranoiac-critical vein as Dal, merging the dress and the wearer into one Surrealist image.533 In Schiaparellis case, the woman is not objectified in the same way that Dal objectifies women in his work. This is apparent in the example of
529 530
Ibid, 68. Dawn Ades, Dal, Rev. and updated ed. (New York, N.Y.: Thames and Hudson, 1995), 119. 531 Andr Breton, "The Dal 'Case'," in Surrealism and Painting, trans. Simon Watson Taylor (Boston: MFA Publications, 2002; reprint, 1972), 135. 532 Schiaparelli, Shocking Life: The Autobiography of Elsa Schiaparelli , 211. 533 Blum, Shocking!: The Art and Fashion of Elsa Schiaparelli , 124.
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the bureau drawer suits and coats. These garments were based on sketches and paintings by Dal that centered on a recurring theme of bodies with drawers protruding from them.534 The bodies that these drawers penetrated were invariably female. According to Dal, The drawers include everything Freud, Christianity, the possibility of penetration into the interior of a human being with its secret compartments all full of meaning.535 The open drawers reveal the unconscious of these women, allowing a male viewer to penetrate their bodies. Women may hide their secrets in these drawers but in Dals works they are always open, to reveal them. Dal also cut drawers into a bronze replica of the Venus De Milo, using fluffy balls of fur for the pulls, playing up the fetishistic quality of the figure. Dal transforms a replica of high culture, fine art, into a bizarre example of craft or decorative art, a piece of furniture.536 This incredible object oscillates between art and utility, and between beauty and vulgarity. In Schiaparellis interpretation, her suits and coats also oscillate back and forth between art and fashion. They also cleverly riff on the objectification of women, particularly in the context of Dals art. Dals woman is transformed into furniture, but in the context of a garment that was worn, this furniture came to life. Schiaparelli designed several different permutations of the bureau
534
Interestingly, Richard Martin writes that the drawer suits and coats may not be a true collaboration between Dal and Schiaparelli, but may be a instance where Schiaparelli was simply taking inspiration from Dals art. Martin, Fashion and Surrealism, 118. 535 Gibson, "Surrealism into Fashion: The Creative Collaborations between Elsa Schiaprelli and Salvador Dal", 187. 536 Lehmann, "The Uncommon Object: Surrealist Concepts and Categories for the Material World," 20.
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drawer suit. Two examples can be seen in a photograph by Cecil Beaton for Vogue. (Figure 159) On the left, a blue wool suit with wide lapels and two drawer pockets just below the waist and on the right a black wool suit with five drawer pockets. Both are shown with the same calf-length skirt. This suit appears in a sketch from Bergdorf Goodman where it is clear that the bottom pocket, just below the waist, runs the full width of the suit, and is apparently buttoned over the front of the jacket.537 A belted coat appears in an unpublished photograph by Beaton with eight drawer pockets running all the way up to the neck, finished with round pulls, worn with a cap topped with a small crown, a motif Schiaparelli was also using in buttons that season.538 (Figure 160) Some of the drawer pockets were usable and others were simply decor. These false pockets confounded viewers.539 The suits and coat followed her principle of daywearand suits in particularas armor. Fabric was conflated with the wood of a bureau and only the woman wearing the suit knew which pockets could actually be used.540 Adding to this modern armor were the gloves Schiaparelli designed to accompany these ensembles that were made of black or white suede with colored snakeskin nails.541 These gloves appeared to reveal the polished nails
537
For a reproduction of this sketch, which is at the Costume Institute of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, see Blum, Shocking!: The Art and Fashion of Elsa Schiaparelli, 132. 538 Tales of Details," Vogue (15 September 1936), 152. 539 Vogue, in particular, was frustrated by the tease of the false pockets. Interestingly, the magazine also noted that designer Marcel Rochas was influenced by the surreal in his collection: Rochas, too, had a touch of surrealismwe suspect Leonor Fini was behind thisand used umbrellas, gloves, purses, and tobacco pouches for pockets and clocks for belts. Ibid 153. 540 Robyn Gibson, "Schiaparelli, Surrealism, and the Desk Suit," Dress 30 2003), 51. 541 Tales of Details," 150.
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of the wearer, and made the wearer appear to be wearing no gloves at all. Like her tattoo sweaters and swimsuits discussed in chapter two, these gloves conflated leather and skin, teasing viewers. In the same collection Schiaparelli also included gloves in surrealist pastel suedes with the veins of the hands painted on that may have been inspired by a sketch by Surrealist artist Meret Oppenheim.542 Echoing her early X-ray sweater, Schiaparelli again experiments with ideas of transparency and turning the body inside out. Instead of suggesting the soft skin of a womans hand through the use of pale colored kid or suede, these gloves evoke the fragile veins, at once beautiful and grotesque: strange glamour. Cecil Beatons photograph of the Bureau suits played up the Surrealism of these designs, creating a strange and barren landscape in the studio, and giving one of the models an issue of Minotaure (from June 15, 1936) to hold as a prop. (Error! Reference source not found.) The magazines cover was illustrated by Dal with a female minotaur whose breasts open as a drawer. The creature has polished fingernails and toenails alluding to Schiaparellis gloves, and in a nod to a future collaboration, a lobster climbs out from a hole in the stomach of the figure. There is no way of knowing if the idea of including Minotaure was Schiaparellis, Beatons, or perhaps Dals, but it is a significant addition to the photograph, directly connecting these clothes, and potentially the women who would buy them to the Surrealists.
542
Ibid 150. Blum, Shocking!: The Art and Fashion of Elsa Schiaparelli , 123.
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It is unclear exactly how Dals and Schiaparellis collaborations worked. Neither wrote much in their respective autobiographies about the process, and the contemporary press offers very few hints. In the case of the dresser drawer suit, a number of sources mention Dal as the inspiration for the design. The Los Angeles Times said the suit was patterned after drawings of the surrealist Salvator Dal [sic]543 The New York Times said the details of the suits were inspired by Dals work, and Vogue wrote of the pockets, obviously, Salvador Dal is responsible.544 Dal knew and respected Schiaparellis work, as did his wife Gala who was a frequent customer. Schiaparelli explained that, Dal was a constant caller. We devised together the coat with many drawers from one of his famous pictures. The black hat in the form of a shoe with a Shocking velvet heel standing up like a small column was another innovationThere was another hat resembling a lamb cutlet with a white frill on the bone, and this, more than anything else, contributed to Schiaps fame for eccentricity.545 [emphasis added] What is evident is that Dals name only added to the publicity for certain designs, and the suit would have also been good press for Dal himself, since it would have introduced him to a wide audience, particularly in the United States where Schiaparelli was very popular. The theme of drawers was also a part of Schiaparellis boutique in the form of a giant stuffed bear given to Dal by Charles James. Dal dyed the bear Shocking pink and cut drawers in it.
543 544
Sylva Weaver, "Seeing Paris Styles," Los Angeles Times, 4 October 1936, G6. "By Wireless from Paris: Winter Chic," New York Times, 16 August 1936, X8. Tales of Details," 153. 545 Schiaparelli, Shocking Life: The Autobiography of Elsa Schiaparelli , 90.
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Bettina Bergery, a friend of Dal who was in charge of displays at the boutique, used the drawers to display jewelry. Dals next collaboration with Schiaparelli was one of the most famous dresses in Wallis Simpsons trousseau, the Lobster Dress.(Figure 161)(Figure 162) The dress circulated widely through images of Simpsons trousseau in the French, American, and British fashion press. The lobster print was also used on beach clothes, such as a linen dress illustrated in Vogue.(Figure 163) None of the press surrounding these designs mentions Dal. Schiaparelli does not mention the dress in her autobiography, nor does Dal. The lobster was a recurring image in Dals work, for example, on Harpo Marxs head in his famous 1937 Hollywood portrait of the comedian, and atop the head of a male figure with drawers in The Dream of Venus (1939).546 The year after Schiaparellis dress appeared he put a lobster on the handset of his Aphrodisiac Telephone (1938) made for Edward James.547 In Dals work, the lobster appeared most often as a substitute for, or conflated with a telephone.548 This image probably derived from a visit to Edward James house during a meal of lobsters eaten in bed by the houseguests. A tossed off lobster shell landed on the telephone, prompting James to recount a strange visit to a woman who mistook a lobster sitting by
546 547
Harpo Marx, 1937 see Ades and Taylor, Dal, cat. 172. Designer Charles James also experimented with the lobster in 1939 with his dress, La Sirne" or the Lobster Dress which evoked the tail of a lobster through its draping. 548 Wood, ed. Surreal Things : Surrealism and Design, 285.
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her bed for her telephone.549 The lobster appealed to Dal because not only was it strange looking, with a phallic presence, it was food. Dawn Ades notes that in addition to the lobsters supposed powers as an aphrodisiac, it is also considered a phallic symbol in dream analysis.550 Consumption of food, and often non-food substancesshit, telephones, lamb chops, camembert, woodcocksfascinated Dal as part of his mission to unite subject and object. He wrote, It so happens that I attach to spinach, as to everything more or less directly pertaining to food, essential values of moral and esthetic order.551 The Aphrodisiac Telephone refers to fellatio, with the lobsters tail, and presumably its sex organs, positioned over the mouthpiece of the phone. Dals fascination with all things edible was tied up with ideas of consumption in sexuality. The idea of edible clothing and accessories appealed to Schiaparelli too; she made buttons in the shape of escargot and crabs, a fish bracelet, and a crawfish clip.552 Vegetables frequently appeared in jewelry: a necklace made of porcelain vegetables and flowers in 1937, and in a vegetarian bracelet with vegetable charms on raffia.553 (Figure 164) The placement of a larger than life lobster on the front of a delicate waltz length white organdy dress is a provocative gesture. The lobster, printed over the crotch of the wearer can be
549 550
Ades and Taylor, Dal, 286. Ibid, 286. 551 Dal, The Secret Life of Salvador Dal, 9. 552 For images see: Collection Caviar," Vogue (1 April 1936), 78. Eye-Catchers," Vogue (15 January 1937), 84-5. Blum, Shocking!: The Art and Fashion of Elsa Schiaparelli, 104. 553 Collection Caviar," Vogue (1 July 1937), 51.
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read as phallic, or perhaps as an invitation to dine on the wearer herself. This would certainly have been part of Dals reading of the dress, again connecting sexuality and consumption of food. Through his portrait of Gala with lamb chops on her shoulders, Dal discovered that it showed that instead of eating her he had chosen to eat the chops.554 In this context the act of eating is sexual. The lobster dress innocent white organza is violated by the lobster and all of its connotations, though Harpers Bazaar assures readers that the lobster is red, but not brilliant.555 The concept of the lobster covering a womans sexual organs would be fully realized by Dal in 1939 in his bizarre exhibit for the Worlds Fair in New York, The Dream of Venus, in which lobsters often act as pseudo-loincloths for the models in the show. Dals lamb chop would also be used by Schiaparelli in a clever hat in late 1937. The hat played on the feathered hats popular in the period. For example in 1936, couturier Edward Molyneux showed a pillbox with a feather trailing off the back. (Figure 165) Schiaparellis hat was also a pill box style worn forward on the head that came to a point in the back, capped off with a butchers paper frill made in patent leather. (Figure 166) Schiaparelli created a series of hats around this time that transformed fashionable hat silhouettes into everyday objects. These hats engage in Dals paranoiac-critical method, deliberately interpreting one object as another; in the case of the mutton chop hat, a plumed pillbox is deliberately misread as dinner.
554
Ades, Dal, 161, 176. For an image of Portrait of Gala with Two Lamb Chops Balanced on her Shoulder, 1933, see Ades and Taylor, Dal, cat. 1 555 Schiaparelli's White Organza..." Harpers Bazaar (April 1937), 87.
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Schiaparellis Inkwell hat from 1938 was also a collaboration with Dal, though as with most of their collaborations, it is unclear how the idea emerged. (Figure 167) The Inkwell hat played off of hats with outrageously long plumes adorning them, such as one designed by Schiaparelli in 1935. (Figure 168) Schiaparelli re-imagined these plumes as quill pens. In her Hen in a Nest hat, that graced the cover of Vogue, Schiaparelli, investigate[d] the special possibilities Surrealism [which] allowed for the noncontextual displacement of the object and its role as an amusement in complement to its being an aesthetic argument. Thus, the feather hat readily becomes a chicken hat a perched birdnow risible yet beautiful in its transformation into the mere barnyard chicken.556 These hats were popular because they were not simply outrageous, but they spoke to the shapes and styles that were fashionable. Fashion scholar Colin McDowell writes that, even at their most outrageous, Schiaparellis hats never made women appear foolish. They were far too amusing and sophisticated for that. In fact, a woman wearing one of Schiaparellis creations proclaimed her self-confidence while at the same time advertising the fact that she was au fait with the latest developments not only in fashion but also in the arts.557 Her infamous High Heel hat was another collaboration with Dal. The idea is thought to have come out of a photograph of Dal taken by his wife Gala in 1932 with a shoe on the artists head and shoulder. A sketch for the shoe hat appears in one of his sketchbooks c. 1937. Dal wrote in his autobiography that he was obsessed with shoes: All my life I have been preoccupied with
556 557
Martin, Fashion and Surrealism, 108. Colin McDowell, Hats: Status, Style, and Glamour (New York: Rizzoli, 1992), 152.
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shoes, which I have utilized in several surrealist objects and pictures to the point of making a kind of divinity of them. In 1936 I went as far to put shoes on heads; and Elsa Schiaparelli created a hat after my idea. 558 Schiaparelli showed the finished hat on August 5th with her fall 1937 collection, and the hat appeared in a number of different French and English fashion magazines. (Figure 169)(Figure 170) Dals most famous use of a shoe is his Objet Scatologique Factionnement Symbolique (Scatological Object Functioning Symbolically) from 1930, that includes a red high heel shoe as well as several images of womens shoes.(Figure 171) A sugar cube with an image of a shoe is suspended above a glass of milk that sits in the front of the shoe; it is counterbalanced so that it can be dipped into the milk. This animated object expressed both the phallic and vaginal potential inherent in the high heel. Schiaparellis High Heel hat exploits this dual potential as well. The hats clever design did not merely put a shoe on a head, as in Galas photograph, but re-imagined the shape of the funnel and tricorn hats popular at the time as high heels. (Figure 172)(Figure 173) Schiaparellis knowledge of millinery style and construction turned Dals bizarre gesture in Galas photograph into a paranoiac-critical image. In this case the transformation played with the sexual connotations of hats, replacing the funnel hat with a phallic shoe. Schiaparelli herself describes the Shocking pink heel of the hat standing up
558
Dal, The Secret Life of Salvador Dal, 122.
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like a small column.559 Here she describes the version of the hat that appeared in Harpers Bazaar with its phallic Shocking pink heel projecting from the head of the blas wearer.560 In another version that appears in a Schiaparelli house sketch, the shoe is a predecessor of Chrisitan Laboutins stilettos with a bright red sole. (Figure 174) This configuration plays up the labial potential of the shoe. The sexuality of the High Heel hat was underlined by the ensemble it was paired with: a black dress and jacket with lips embroidered on the pockets and lip-shaped buttons.561 Interesting pockets had become a Schiaparelli signature. She often created false pockets, double pockets on blouses that became known as Schiaparelli pockets, and slit pockets in unusual places on coats and blazers. A purple tweed suit from fall 1936 with pockets trimmed with velveteen ovals and oval-shaped buttons presages the Lip suit from the following fall. (Figure 175) The tweed suit is perhaps even more suggestive in its play with texture using velveteen to line pockets that might be read as lip-shaped. The 1937 Lip suit takes a paranoiac-critical reading of pockets as lips to the extreme, embroidering lip shapes in metallic thread over the pockets. It displaces a part of the body: when the wearer
559 560
Schiaparelli, Shocking Life: The Autobiography of Elsa Schiaparelli, 90. Martin, Fashion and Surrealism, 111. 561 Dilys Blum calls the ensemble a collaboration with Dal, but other sources credit only Dal with the idea for the hat. Lips were certainly another obsession of Dals, but were also present in Man Rays work. The suit may have been Schiaparellis own invention using a popular Surrealist theme. Blum, Shocking!: The Art and Fashion of Elsa Schiaparelli, 136. Evans, "Masks, Mirrors and Mannequins: Elsa Schiaparelli and the Decentered Subject," 2.
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slips her hand in her pocket she puts it in somebodys mouthbut whose?562 The mouth pockets, particularly in their velveteen incarnation, also refer to the labia, making these suits far more shocking than their conservative cuts suggest. The velveteen suit, in fact, places two of the pockets over the breasts of the wearer, a favorite trick of Schiaparelli, displacing the genitalia and teasing viewers with the open invitation of the pocket. The shoe hat and Lip suit were not merely meant as absurd gestures; there was an obvious sexual undercurrent to these designs. It is also evident that Schiaparelli was not merely the passive translator of Dals ideas into fashion, nor did she simply steal his ideas for her own profit. Schiaparelli adapted themes popular amongst the Surrealists for her own designs, using the same methods that the Surrealist artists were using. Perhaps the most interesting surreal objects used by Schiaparelli in her clothes were mirrors. This is especially true in a dinner suit with mirrored embellishment from Schiaparellis winter 1938-39 collection.563 (Figure 176) The suits lavish embroidery by Lesage depicted two shattered mirrors surrounded by gold embroidery in the form of baroque frames over the breasts of the wearer. The mirror designs were inspired by the dcor of Versailles. Schiaparelli had experimented with mirrors the season before this jacket appeared with another suit that had hand mirrors as closures. (Figure
562 563
Evans, "Masks, Mirrors and Mannequins: Elsa Schiaparelli and the Decentered Subject," 1. The importance of this garment is underlined by the number of times it has been appropriated by other designers. Yves Saint Laurent, a great admirer of Schiaparelli, used it on the back of a jacket for a 1978-9 collection, and in 2004 Roberto Cavalli adorned a t-shirt with the same embroidered patterns in a different configuration (going so far as to get Lesage to do the embroidery).
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177) Both suits reflect ideas about vanity, but also, quite literally reflect the viewer. The baroque mirror jacket, in particular, confronts a viewer who looks at the wearers breasts with his own image, distorted by the square mosaic of the mirrors. As Caroline Evans has argued, Ifwomen are condemned to watch themselves being looked at, Schiaparelli pursues that problem into the theatre, throws up a cloud of spangles and, in the form of the splintered hand mirrors, turns the shattered gaze back on the spectator. The theatricality of all Schiaparelli's work shows an understanding of fashion as performance, or masquerade; the wearer creates herself as spectacle, but the moment she displays herself she also disguises herself.564 Schiaparellis clothes are always concerned with revealing the masquerade of femininity. The contrasts she created between hard and soft, masculine and feminine, and day and night draw attention to the constructed nature of femininity. The mirror jacket not only drew attention to the masquerade but intervened in it, intercepting the viewers gaze and turning it back onto him or her. This gesture aligns Schiaparelli with the Surrealists. While the suit jacket with its reference to Versailles would seem to turn the wearer into furniture, the mirrors make the ensemble theatrical. The woman turns from object into a subject staring, or perhaps winking back at the man who tries to ogle her breasts. This conforms with Dals description of the final stage of unity between subject and object: The object tends to bring about our fusion with it and makes us pursue the formation of a unity with it.565 Dal tended
564 565
Evans, "Masks, Mirrors and Mannequins: Elsa Schiaparelli and the Decentered Subject," 6. Lehmann, "The Uncommon Object: Surrealist Concepts and Categories for the Material World," 23.
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to think about this fusion through objects that were edible, but Schiaparelli thought of it, in this case, through the mirror. In her mirror jacket the viewer is consumed by the mirror on the jacket, and made a part of the object. Instead of fashion objectifying its wearer (as it is often described as doing), Schiaparelli gives her client clothes through which to objectify others. Schiaparellis clothes at their most Surreal give their wearer agency. This agency is evident in Verts illustration of Schiaparellis Inkwell hat for Harpers Bazaar where the wearer uses the plumed quill of her hat to sign Verts signature, to literally finish drawing herself into existence. Caroline Evans explains the illustration: Here, perhaps, is Schiaparelli writing herself into existence or, perhaps, for she is a designer, drawing herself. Verts' conceit is prescient: Schiaparelli, herself a self-made woman, contributed in no small degree to other women's self-definition in her fashion designs of the inter-war years.566 Schiaparelli used the paranoiac-critical method to create garments and accessories that gave their wearers the agency to transform themselves into Surreal images of strange glamour.
Body Conscious While the Surrealists strove to make objects that could fuse with subjects, they never truly managed to achieve this union. Schiaparelli, on the other hand, created clothes that could fuse with the body. Fashion must be
566
Evans, "Masks, Mirrors and Mannequins: Elsa Schiaparelli and the Decentered Subject," 7.
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understood in relationship to the body that wears it. Clothes can shape and mold the body, just as the body can reshape the clothes it wears. Thus the fashion designer operates like the Surrealist artist whose intervention with an object changes it to make it absurd, or uncanny as in the case of Meret Oppenheims fur covered tea cup, saucer, and spoon, Objet (1936), or Oscar Dominguezs upholstered wheelbarrow, Broette (wheelbarrow, c. 1937). In the designers case, the object is a body. This is why clothes, particularly shoes and gloves, have such an erotic charge in the work of Surrealist artists. In Surrealist texts such as Bretons Nadja, traces of the woman are felt in her sartorial shell, and evoke the metaphorical potential of clothing as simulacra.567 Schiaparelli used these pieces of clothing to confuse and conflate clothing and the body, as well as the outside and inside of the body. In chapter two we saw how she conflated skin and fabric with her tattoo collection, and inside and outside in her x-ray sweater. These themes would return in later collections. We have already seen how the High Heel hat and lip pockets have refigured the body in bizarre and erotic ways. Schiaparellis collaborations with Jean Cocteau for her Fall 1937 collection also reconfigured the body. Schiaparelli used Cocteaus sketches as the basis for incredible embroidery and beadwork on a coat, dinner dress and evening gown. These designs displaced parts of the body onto clothing, confusing what was real and what was not. Cocteau, an artist, poet,
567
Lehmann, "The Uncommon Object: Surrealist Concepts and Categories for the Material World," 25.
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playwright, and filmmaker, was well ensconced in both the world of art and fashion by the 1930s. Like Dal, he was part of Coco Chanels circle. He was also a frequent contributor of both sketches and articles to Vogue. Though Cocteau may not have been officially associated with Surrealism, the press drew this connection, and his designs were obviously in a Surrealist vein.568 A telling example is a blue silk coat adorned with the kind of double image that fascinated Dal and other Surrealists. The back of the coat is decorated with two profiles facing each other, their outlines also forming the shape of a footed vase full of roses sitting on a column. (Figure 178) The flutes of the column create the illusion of pleats running down the bottom of the coat. This design is precisely the kind of oscillating double image that the Surrealists, particularly Dal, championed. Schiaparellis use of multiple materials to achieve the designgold metal, red silk, and pink silk appliqu creates multiple dimensions playing up the oscillation between the image of the vase and the faces. The interest in double images also appeared on the pages of Harpers Bazaar in an illustration of accessories in December 1936 that could be turned upside-down to reveal a second set of accessories and captions. (Figure 179) In this brilliant illustration, Erik Nitsche created hats that morph into scarves and collars when the magazine is turned upsidedown. Magazines were picking up on the interest in double images in both the art and fashion world.
568
"The Paris Collections Are Offering Three Lengths for Evening Skirts," New York Times, 30 May 1937, 62.
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The body comes more fully into view in Schiaparellis and Cocteaus second collaboration, a grey linen dinner jacket adorned with Cocteaus contour drawing of a womans profile. (Figure 180) Her hair, in gold bugle beads, flows down the left sleeve of the jacket. Her arm traces the lapel of the jacket with a hand curving around the waist of the wearer, its pink polished fingers holding a pair of silver gloves. In LOfficiel, the dress was shown with two tone gloves, mimicking those on the jacket. In this design the embroidered woman seems to embrace the wearer, her embroidered hand potentially confused for the real hand of the wearer. Again Schiaparelli experiments with trompe loeil, teasing the viewer, and provocatively inviting touch. The final collaboration with Cocteau in this collection was even more provocative: a figure-hugging mossy pink silk crepe gown with swaths of flowers in yellow, green, and blue sequins with a hand reaching across the dcolletage covering the right breast. (Figure 181 central image) This design was imported to New York in the Spring of 1937 by Bergdorf Goodman. Hands had been a recurring theme in Schiaparellis work, from fabric prints to belts to pins. Dilys Blum notes that Schiaparellis fall 1934 collection, in particular, was preoccupied with hands, coinciding with an article in Minotaure illustrated with a series of photographs of hands in different attitudes.569 Schiaparelli made a number of different hand
569
Jeweler Paul Flato, whose designs frequently appeared on celebrities both on and off the silver screen, was also interested in hands. In 1938 he created a series of pins in the gestures of signlanguage letters. The pins could be purchased in any configuration. Especially popular were initials. Katherine Hepburn wore one of these pins in the film Holiday (1938).
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accessories for this collection including belt fasteners, buttons, and purse fasteners. (Figure 182) A series of clips were also made by the jeweler Jean Schlumberger, some of which may have been used by Man Ray and Surrealist photographer Claude Cahun in their work.570 Schiaparelli continued to incorporate hands in her designs, often as Victorian whimsies, as her designs became more nostalgic.571 In addition to these hand accessories, Schiaparelli was also preoccupied with gloves in a number of her collections. Gloves were a potent symbol in Nadja, becoming a simulacrum for women. Breton talks about his uncanny feeling at a woman removing her sky-blue glove: I dont know what there can have been, at that moment, so terribly, so marvelously decisive for me in the thought of that glove leaving that hand forever.572 The same woman also possessed a bronzed glove that Breton uses to illustrate this page. In this passage a hand is conflated with a glove and a bronze sculpture. In Nadja, intimacy is always mediated, for Breton, by the displaced objects of desire, those objectsbe they Nadjas glove, her clothes, or the city itselfon which he focuses attention.573 The glove is conflated and confused with the woman. The glove functions as lexplosante-fixe, embodying the potential to take on a life of its own. Bretons work underlines the gloves close connection to the body that was integral to Schiaparellis playful designs. In addition to
570 571
Blum, Shocking!: The Art and Fashion of Elsa Schiaparelli , 122. Ibid, 131. 572 Breton, Nadja, 56. 573 Fer, "Surrealism, Myth and Psychoanalysis," 183.
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Schiaparellis gloves with faux nails and veins, discussed above, she experimented with a number of other uncanny designs in the 1930s. She created evening gloves for her Winter 1938-39 collection with metal claws. (Figure 183) These accessories obviously played on the idea of the femme fatale, a woman letting her talons show. Instead of covering claws with elegant gloves, this pair allowed a woman to put on claws or take them off at her will. Other gloves also played on the idea of woman as animal. Harpers Bazaar describes one such pair: Schiaparellis humor persists. Bright red snakeskin inserted between the fingers of black antelope gloves to make your hands look like little paws.574 (Figure 184) Other pairs used fur to create the look of paws. (Figure 185)(Figure 186) These gloves mocked the idea that women were more primitive, more animalistic, a notion popular with the Surrealists. Caroline Evans explains that often [Schiaparellis] use of fur disturbs conventional associations with softness and femininity.575 In 1938 Schiaparelli created a pair of long gloves with garters, and a few month later she showed spats worn as gloves, confusing the arms with legs. (Figure 187) In all of these cases, Schiaparelli exploits the surreal and erotic potential of gloves. She used them to transform women into femmes fatales, animals, or even to change arms into legs. Gloves are conflated with hands, as they are in the work of Breton. We can also see this theme reflected in a number of
574 575
Schiaparelli Hands out a Frenzy of Excitement," Harpers Bazaar (15 March 1938), 133. Evans, "Masks, Mirrors and Mannequins: Elsa Schiaparelli and the Decentered Subject," 3.
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fashion magazine covers that also animated gloves, including Surrealist Georgio de Chiricos cover of Vogue where gloves appear in a Surreal still life, and another Vogue cover by Raymond De Lavererie in which a glove comes to life to feed a bird a grape-shaped broach. (Figure 188)(Figure 189) Schiaparellis most surreal works often resulted from her conflation of clothing with the whole body. These were often her most sexually explicit designs in which the body skimming style of 1930s gowns was used to subvert the wholeness of the body itself. Unlike gloves, which were meant to be removed in public, a gown was not taken off in public, and thus has a closer relationship with the body that wears it. In 1936 she designed a series of dresses on which she appliqud decorative padding over the breasts. (Figure 190) This decorative detail mimicked the padding often sewn into a custom couture gown to enhance the breasts.576 The falsies gowns not only changed the shape of the body wearing it, but revealed the illusion created by the couture gown. Diana Vreeland remembered these gowns fondly in her autobiography: I can remember a dress I had of Schiaparellis that had fake ba-zoomsthese funny little things that stuck out here. When you sat down, they sort of wentall I can say is that it was terribly chic. Dont ask me why but it was.577 This was a particularly humorous gesture at a time when larger breasts were coming back into fashion and women were using falsies. It is
576
"Schiaparelli Evening Dress: T.36-1964," Victoria and Albert Museum, http://collections.vam.ac.uk/item/O133559/evening-dress/. 577 Diana Vreeland, D.V., ed. George Plimpton and Christopher Hemphill (New York: Vintage Books, 1985), 125.
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also a biting commentary on the masquerade of femininity, raising questions about the assumptions viewers make about what clothing reveals about the body underneath it. After a long period of emphasis on slim boyish silhouettes, the hourglass figure began to come back into fashion, partly because of the popularity of the voluptuous Mae West. Schiaparelli discusses this development in her autobiography, writing that the most modern of the falsies were called Very Secret and they were blown up with a straw as if you were sipping crme de menthe.578 This description provides an intriguing context for Dals Aphrodisiac Dinner Jacket (1936), which was made the same year as Schiaparellis falsies dresses.579 (Figure 191) The assemblage consists of a smoking jacket covered in shot glasses with crme de menthe and straws. Inside of the jacket was an advertisement for the Diamond Dee Uplift bra with the image of the bra at about chest height. It is possible that Dal was also making a comment on the falsies trend. He had most certainly created a garment that was at once masculine and feminine and loaded with erotic references. Both Schiaparelli and Dal respond to viewers visual consumption of the body. Dal invited viewers to literally consume, by drinking his shot glasses of crme de menthe.
578 579
Schiaparelli, Shocking Life: The Autobiography of Elsa Schiaparelli , 89. Its also interesting to note that Duchamp and Enrico Donatis cover for Le Surralism en 1947: Exposition Internationale du Surralisme included an actual foam rubber falsie on the cover with the inviting phrase prire de toucher (please touch). Mileaf, Please Touch: Dada and Surrealist Objects after the Readymade, 1-2.
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Schiaparelli meets the viewers gaze head on, revealing the construction of the female body through fashion. A number of Schiaparellis other designs also drew attention to the breasts, and their erotic potential. In 1937 Schiaparelli showed suggestive brassire-formed bodices.580 This new silhouette was tailored to hug the body, creating a second skin in a way distinct from the classic bias cut dresses of the 1930s. An illustration from Vogue shows one of these dresses worn with an exuberant Scheherazade hat whose sweeping shape seems to mirror the brassire shape of the bodice.581 (Figure 192) This was the same collection that included the High Heel hat and the Lip suit, two other designs that experimented with displacing parts of the body. Schiaparellis designs frequently called attention to the corporeal sexuality of the wearer, as well as the viewer. These designs, particularly the falsies dresses, acknowledge the constructed nature of sexuality and gender. In this way the wearer of Schiaparellis garments is put in control of what is concealed and revealed. The viewer of the garment is caught off guard when his gaze is met not by a sexual object, but by padding. Through these garments the viewers gaze is met by a sexual subject who returns his gaze with a playful wink.
580 581
Vogue's Eye-View of Paris Sex Appeal," Vogue (1 September 1937), 75. The dress in Vogue may be the same as a green printed silk faille dress in the collection of the Brooklyn Museum now housed at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. While the dress has been given a date of 1933-1935 by the museum, it appears to be the same green dress illustrated in Vogue. The Met dress included a number of Schiaparellis trademark zippers, at the wri sts and on the side seam near the waist, adding to the sex appeal of the garment. Reeder, High Style: Masterworks from the Brooklyn Museum Costume Collection at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, 104.
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In the years leading up the outbreak of World War II, Schiaparellis Surrealist winks began to turn more somber. In 1938 she presented her Circus collection, that included the Inkwell hat, the Hen hat, clown hats as well as Circus Tent veils. These were made in fabric to match the gowns in the collection and could be worn with a small hat shaped like a snail or a small fez. (Figure 193) The collection used a number of exuberant circus-inspired embroideries, prints, buttons, and accessories featuring acrobats, elephants, and merry-go-rounds. (Figure 194) It also included garments inspired by the spirit of the circus with Surrealist touches, like snail toques, mouth pockets, eye embroideries with gold eyelashes and dresses worn backwards.582 Two of the Surrealist touches in the collection were collaborations with Dal, the Tear-Illusion Dress and the Skeleton Dress. (Figure 195)(Figure 196) These dresses were notably darker than the rest of the collection. The Tear-Illusion dress did not appear in either Vogue or Harpers Bazaar, nor in any of the popular French fashion magazines, suggesting how revolutionary it was. Only Harpers Bazaar published the Skeleton dress.583 The TearIllusion dress was made of pale blue silk crepe printed with trompe loeil patches of torn flesh. (Figure 197) The print was designed by Dal to resemble a series of his paintings including Necrophiliac Springtime (1936), owned by Schiaparelli, and Three Young Surrealist Women Holding in Their Arms the Skins of an Orchestra (1936). (Error! Reference source not found.) Both paintings
582 583
"By Wireless from Paris," New York Times, 13 February 1938, 84. Harper's Folies," Harpers Bazaar (15 March 1938), 70-71.
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featured women with heads of flowers wearing torn white dresses. In Schiaparellis translation the blue dress is printed with tears in Dals tromp loeil style. The tears reveal the pink underside of the fabric and a darker pink revealed in the holes. The dress is worn with a circus tent veil which, instead of the trompe loeil print, has actual cut-away flaps of the blue material, revealing the same dark purple-pink underneath. These tears are ambiguous. Dilys Blum reads them as torn patches of fur: as if the gown were made from an animal skin turned inside out.584 Caroline Evans writes that They are the colors of bruised and torn flesh; yet it is completely unclear whether the illusion is meant to suggest torn fabric or flesh. Is the cloth below the "tears" textile or skin? Do the rips designate poverty (rags not riches) or some form of attack?585 The strange color combination of the gown, even more difficult to imagine now that the colors have faded, confounds our expectations. The blue fabric of the gown is torn to reveal not the skin of the wearer, but the viscera, as if fabric and skin are one and the same. This is the very illusion Dal creates in his paintings. As we have seen, the conflation of clothes and body has been a prominent theme in the work of Schiaparelli. This dress was worn with a pair of opera length pink gloves with two strips of ruffled material that ran the length of the gloves. The delicate dress gives the illusion of vulnerability and exposure, but paired with its matching full length flesh colored gloves, the
584 585
Blum, Shocking!: The Art and Fashion of Elsa Schiaparelli , 139. Evans, "Masks, Mirrors and Mannequins: Elsa Schiaparelli and the Decentered Subject," 11.
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ensemble almost completely envelopes the wearers body. As it typical with Schiaparelli, the viewer thinks that the clothes reveal more of the body beneath than they actually do. Schiaparellis friend and collaborator Leonor Fini was also fond of creating images of women with ripped clothing. Her biographer Peter Webb goes as far as to suggest Fini as a possible source for Dals imagery in the Tear-Illusion dress.586 As with Schiaparellis dress, these women are not being victimized, but are strong protagonists in her paintings. Peter Webb writes that Finis paintings from the 1930s mark an important stage in the progress of Leonors art They create an erotic dream world in which women are in control.587 This is particularly evident in her 1938 SelfPortrait with Scorpion in which she is fashionably posed in a brown shirt with mutton chop sleeves, torn at the elbow and wrist. Her single white glove is turned up to reveal a scorpions tail, or perhaps simply a brooch. Just as Fini created erotic images of women in control, Schiaparelli created erotic gowns for women to wear that kept them in control. Some of these were worn by Fini herself.588 The Tear-Illusion dress is not merely an expression of sexuality. Richard Martin rightly points out at the time of the Spanish Civil War, when Fascism was spreading throughout Europe, the references to shattered glass and rent fabric would have held strong implications for both the political and
586 587
Webb, Sphinx: The Art and Life of Leonor Fini, 64. Ibid, 77. 588 Schiaparelli lent dresses to Fini, as she did to many other famous women as a way of advertising. Ibid, 33.
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visual worlds.589 This macabre gowns presence in an otherwise joyful collection is related to the impending war. In 1936 German troops had reoccupied the Rhineland and the country was remilitarizing in violation of the treaty of Versailles. The same year, Schiaparellis native Italy had conquered Ethiopia. Years before Schiaparelli had become a French citizen, but she felt the weight of being Italian in these years. She wrote in her autobiography, Personally I never experienced during that difficult period any antagonism from friends or newspapers. The fact that I was Italian born was never referred to but I could not help thinking about it, and it hurt me as a missing limb hurts when the weather is about to change.590 In her autobiography, published in 1954, she made sure to tell readers that while visiting Italy she had been invited to meet Mussolini, but refused.591 1937 had seen a metaphoric face off between Germany and the Soviet Union on the Trocadero at the Paris International Exposition. Picassos haunting work Guernica (1937) appeared in the Spanish pavilion at the Exposition, representing the horrors occurring during the Spanish Civil War. Schiaparelli wrote that in the years just before the war: the Parisian women, as if feeling it was their last chance, were particularly chic.592 The circus collection in many ways reflected this sentiment.
589 590
Martin, Fashion and Surrealism, 136. Schiaparelli, Shocking Life: The Autobiography of Elsa Schiaparelli, 99. 591 Ibid, 77. 592 Ibid, 100.
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The Tear-Illusion dress also serves as evidence of a complex Surrealist sensibility, creating an uncanny comparison between the actual tears and the trompe loeil ones. Schiaparelli undercuts the elegant shape of the gown with the menacing tears and the uncanny pairing of reality and illusion. Caroline Evans writes that in the Tear-Illusion dress, Schiaparelliplays with ideas normally antithetical to fashion, countering poise and tranquility with violence and anxiety.593 Since the heyday of Punk, in the late 1970s, torn clothing has been part of the fashion landscape, and Schiaparellis work is an important predecessor. Her clothes do not reflect the idea of random violence, the patina of wear, or the rags of poverty that are evoked by ripped styles popular in the last half decade or so. Instead, she combines elegance with violence. She renders the tears with exacting precision, whether in the print, or the cut panels of the veil. The violence enacted on this gown is the result of careful calculation. Schiaparelli is not a designer whose work we would automatically associate with violence but her contemporaries did. Jean Cocteau explained that, whereas in other times only a few mysterious and privileged women dressed themselves with great individuality and by the violence of their garb destroyed the moderne style, in 1937 a woman like Schiaparelli can invent for all womenfor each woman in particularthat violence which was once the privilege of the very few.594
593 594
Evans, "Masks, Mirrors and Mannequins: Elsa Schiaparelli and the Decentered Subject," 11. Jean Cocteau, "From Worth to Alex," Harpers Bazaar (March 1937), 143, 172.
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Schiaparellis fashions are violent because they defy our expectations. Instead of an elegant gown we get torn flesh, and the viewer is again confounded when he or she realizes that the whole garment is meant to trick the eye. The Skeleton dress was another shocking inversion of our expectations of elegant eveningwear. As we have seen, the idea of displacing the inside of the body onto the outside of the clothes had been of interest to Schiaparelli since the beginning of her career. The Skeleton dress was in many ways the ultimate expression of this theme. A sketch by Dal gives some sense of the garments origin. (Figure 198) Dals original sketch of skeletons swathed in transparent drapery dress with stylized bones, even included his ideas for bags. He writes at the bottom of the page Dear Elsa I like this idea of bones on the outside enormously.595 Perhaps the idea arose from a conversation between the two. Schiaparelli had been attracted to this idea for quite some time as well, and had experimented with the skeleton in the late 1920s in her x-ray sweater. She transformed Dals sketch into a black silk crepe evening gown with a high neck and long sleeves. The silk crepe was a natural choice since it had been favored for decades as a fabric appropriate for mourning due to its matte finish. Schiaparelli forms the bones with padded ridges following Dals stylized design. (Figure 199) A pelvic bone with padded lines emanating from it forms the leg bones; ribs hug the bust and continue onto the back of the dress where a spine runs the length of the torso. (Figure 200)
595
Cher Elsa jaime enormement cidee des os a lexterieur. My translation from a reproduction of the sketch in: Blum, "Fashion and Surrealism," 147.
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The sleeves have a simple line running down them with a curlicue suggesting the elbow joint. Dilys Blum connects this design to the circus theme, citing the skeleton man in the freak show as its origin.596 Yet this dress is more likely aligned with the melancholy aberration of the Tear-Illusion dress in the collection. Caroline Evans argues that images of the inside of the body and the skeleton in fashion are always linked with death.597 This dress could thus be read in line with the claw gloves as a humorous reflection of the idea of the femme fatale, a woman whose aggressive sexuality threatens the men that she ensnares. Many of Schiaparellis designs played off of this idea, including her metal claws gloves. The Skeleton dress brought to life the idea of sex and death embodied in the figure of a woman, while also toying with a viewers expectations. As opposed to clinging to the body, the way an evening gown was expected to in the 1930s, revealing every curve, this dress revealed a womans bones instead. The dress becomes even more strangely macabre when seen with the hat Schiaparelli designed for it: a black circus tent veil topped with a snail-shaped cap. With its morose veil, the gown becomes a frightful image of mourning, an omen of the images of the emaciated victims of Hitler. The Skeleton dress only appeared in one fashion magazine, Harpers Bazaar, which proclaimed this dress, and other garments in the Circus collection to be Designed Especially for Coo Coo the Bird Girl by
596 597
Ibid, 147. Evans, Fashion at the Edge : Spectacle, Modernity, and Deathliness , 224.
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Schiaparelli alluding to the malnourished figure the dress evoked. 598 The strange glamour of the design is evident in the accompanying illustration by Verts. (Figure 201) The Tear-Illusion dress and particularly the Skeleton dress also moved beyond this reference to current events to offer a commentary on fashions own connection with death. Writing at the same time Schiaparelli was designing, Walter Benjamin most eloquently explained the way that fashions relentless quest for the new, tied it firmly to our own mortality.599 He explains that fashion has opened the business of dialectical exchange between woman and warebetween carnal pleasure and the corpse. The clerk, death, tall and loutish, measures the century by the yard.600 Fashion is a system predicated on obsolescence, it depends on the death of old styles to create room for fresh ones. Thus, fashion always carries within it the specter of its own death. For Benjamin the way in which obsolescence was built into fashion is what makes fashion emblematic of modernity, in which everything eventually becomes outmoded. Benjamin argues that, fashion was never anything other than the parody of the motley cadaver, provocation of death through the woman, and bitter colloquy with decay whispered between shrill bursts of mechanical
598 599
Harper's Folies," 71. Benjamin started the project in 1927 the same year a Schiaparellis first collection, and work ceased with his suicide in 1940. 600 Benjamin, The Arcades Project, 62-3.
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laughter. That is fashion.601 In 1937 poet and artist Jean Cocteau described Schiaparelli and her boutique in remarkably similar terms: Schiaparelli is above all the dressmaker of eccentricity. Has she not the air of a young demon who tempts women, who leads the mad carnival in a burst of laughter? Her establishment on the Place Vendme is a devil's laboratory. Women who go there fall into a trap, and come out masked, disguised, deformed or reformed, according to Schiaparellis whim.602 Cocteau describes Schiaparelli as a devil, relating the metamorphoses she enacts on her customers to deals made with death. Schiaparelli herself reflects on this in her autobiography: Dress designing, incidentally, to me is not a profession but an art. I found that it was a most difficult and unsatisfying art, because as soon as a dress is born it has already become a thing of the pastA dress cannot just hang like a painting on the wall, or like a book remain intact and live a long and sheltered life.603 The Skeleton dress represents the quality of death inherent in fashion. It also reflects the mortality of its wearer, as it fuses with her body. Both the Skeleton dress and the Tear-Illusion dress reassert the corporality and mortality of the clothed body and emphasize its vulnerability. At the same time, they shield the wearer from the voyeuristic gaze, upending the conventions of the slinky evening gowns of the late 1930s.
601 602
Ibid, 63. Cocteau, "From Worth to Alex," 172. 603 Schiaparelli, Shocking Life: The Autobiography of Elsa Schiaparelli , 42.
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Surreal Shopping In 1935 Schiaparelli had moved her business to Place Vendme, where it would remain until she closed her doors in 1954. Schiaparellis first major shop had been at 4 Rue de La Paix. (Figure 202) The space, like many of the couture salons of Paris, looked more like a home than a shop. Schiaparelli mixed art, books, and photographs with clever displays of scarves and handbags. Her work table was a simple board laid over two saw horses, a brilliant contrast to the parquet floors and an intricate fireplace at the center of the room. Schiaparellis new headquarters also blended the sleek and modern with the antique. Designed by Jean Michel Frank, the space reflected her avant-garde style. Frank streamlined the 98 rooms Schiaparelli had taken on at 21 Place Vendme, painting them white and using chintz, denim, cotton pique and gingham to furnish the spaces. The sculptor Alberto Giacometti, a refugee from Bretons camp, who had made jewelry for Schiaparelli, contributed light fixtures and ashtrays.604 (Figure 203) It was Giacomettis design work for Frank that had led to his expulsion from Bretons cadre. Schiaparellis new space included not only the traditional couture salon, where collections were shown and women could be fitted in her designs, but also a perfume shop and a boutique called alternately the Schiap Shop, Schiap Boutique or the Boutique Fantastique.605 This was her own unique innovation, adding to the custom couture business a shop where
604 605
Schiaparelli at 21 Place Vendme," Harpers Bazaar (October 1935), 154. Schiaparelli calls it the Schiap Boutique in idem, Shocking Life: The Autobiography of Elsa Schiaparelli, 65.
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customers could buy off the rack dresses, knitwear, beachwear, lingerie, hats, jewelry, and bags.606 Schiaparelli designed her atelier so that customers were forced to walk through the boutique in order to approach the grand staircase that led up to her salons on the second floor.607 This method of directing visitors was used with great success by the Surrealists in their 1937 Exposition Internationale du Surralisme. This idea was nothing new for Schiaparelli though. According to biographer Palmer White, at her earlier location on Rue de la Paix, her ready to wear items were displayed on glass pickle jars decorated with eyelashes made of paper or feathers and red leather lips.608 From the start, Schiaparellis stores had embraced the ready-made flea market aesthetic of Surrealism. At her new home at 21 Place Vendme, Schiaparelli was not only able to innovate her business practices, but also her artistic ones. These worked hand in hand to build her fame and reputation as madder and more original than her contemporaries.609 Schiaparellis shop appeared to be furnished out of the same Paris flea markets popular with the Surrealists. The perfume shop became famous for the gilded cage that Frank had designed for its window that mimicked the popular Victorian bird cages that Schiaparelli collected.610 A new member of the Schiaparelli staff, Pascal, resided here.
606 607
Blum, Shocking!: The Art and Fashion of Elsa Schiaparelli , 71. White, Elsa Schiaparelli: Empress of Paris Fashion , 161. 608 Ibid, 86. 609 Haute Couture," Time (13 August 1934), 50. 610 Marisa Berenson, Schiaparellis granddaughter, talks about her birdcage collection, and connects it to Schiaparellis favorite Picasso painting, The Bird Cage in: David Vincent, "Schiaparelli: The
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Pascal, an old fashioned wooden mannequin that Schiaparelli had acquired for display, was eventually given a wife Pascaline. Bettina Bergery, who traveled in the same artistic circles as Schiaparelli, was responsible for the stores unique displays. Pascale was not used to display Schiaparellis clothes, but was a platform for Bergerys wildly imaginative ensembles that made the Schiap Shop a must see destination for Paris tourists. Bergery (formerly Bettina Jones) was an American who had been working with Schiaparelli since the late 1920s. She was married to Gaston Bergery, a prominent French politician who, according to the Chicago Tribune, was making a name for himself as the future Stalin of France.611 In addition to her political connections, Bergery was also well connected to the Surrealists, particularly Dal who, in his autobiography named her amongst his closest friends, writing, the soul and biology of the Schiaparelli establishment was Bettina Bergery, one of the women of Paris most highly endowed with fantasy. She exactly resembled a praying mantis, and she knew it.612 Bergereys window displays were so famous that they even made it onto the pages of Harpers Bazaar in 1937. The magazine showed photographs of a mannequin made of code flags, a scarecrow holding Schiaparellis perfumes, and Pascal or Pascaline dressed in underwear of red roses, with the
Shocking Truth," Harpers Bazaar (September 2009), 473. See for example photographs in: Boylan, "The Schiaparelli Dynasty," 130-135. 611 In 1936 Schiaparelli traveled to the Soviet Union to participate in a French Trade Fair in Moscow. This trip was controversial particularly in light of Bergerys associat ion with Schiaparelli, giving fuel to a conservative French paper to accuse Schiaparelli of communist leanings. Taylor Edmond, "Red Mob Stones French Police in Ballot Riot," Chicago Daily Tribune, 30 April 1934, 1. Blum, Shocking!: The Art and Fashion of Elsa Schiaparelli, 74. 612 Dal, The Secret Life of Salvador Dal, 340.
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(inevitable) butterfly on her bosom.613 (Figure 204) Bergers displays shared the Surrealists esthetic, particularly for using found objects. For example, the display with Pascal includes, one of those fearful Niagara Falls souvenir boxes encrusted with shells.614 This is precisely the sort of unfashionable knick-knack that Breton would have gravitated towards at the Paris Flea Market. Breton and the Surrealists shared more with fashionable Parisians then they may have cared to admit, since women such as Schiaparelli and Bergery often frequented the Paris Flea Market. These women were looking for the same kinds of outmoded found objects that the Surrealists were interested in. Harpers Bazaar included a spread on The Junk Markets of Paris and London, in its January 1934 issue, advising readers that at the famous flea market of Parisalmost any Saturday or Sunday, you can pick up, for a song, Louis XV bureaus, Directoire stools, music boxes, dressmakers dummies, pewter, opaline, chessman, fleas.615 Through the Surrealists may not have not looking for antique furniture, they would certainly have been interested in the dressmakers dummies. In addition to found objects from the flea market, Bergery and Schiaparelli also enlisted some of Dals Surrealist objects for use in the store, such as his sofa shaped like the lips of Mae West, and the previously mentioned pink stuffed bear with bureau drawers. The bear was dressed in a silk jacket and Bergery used the drawers to display jewelry.
613 614
Schiaparelli's Window Dolls " Harpers Bazaar (June 1937), 143. Ibid 143. 615 The Junk Markets of Paris and London," Harpers Bazaar (January 1934), 72-3.
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In addition to drawing in customers with clever and sometimes shocking windows, Schiaparelli also used her name and signature in prominent and clever ways on her clothes, accessories and perfume. Schiaparelli managed to not only build her name as a fashion brand but also as an artist's signature that guaranteed the avant-garde nature of her creations. As part of her inaugural collection at Place Vendme, she had cotton and silk printed to look like a collage of newspaper clippings that she had saved, both good and bad press on her work. The fabric, which some fashion scholars have connected to Picassos collages, was used for many designs including hats inspired by the newspaper hats of Copenhagen fishwives.616 (Figure 205) (Figure 206) Other designs featured her signature S, including a clever belt with a lock emblazoned with the initial. (Figure 207) Such designs married with Schiaparellis signature, or simply the initial S, helped to cement her reputation in the minds of followers of fashion who knew she could be counted on for witty, unique, and unusual fashion. Schiaparelli always insisted on speaking about herself as an artist. Chanels snide remark that she was that Italian artist whos making clothes, must have come as an unintentional compliment.617 Her revealing retort was that Chanel was that dreary little bourgeoise.618 Of course being bourgeois was code for being a conservative prude, everything that Schiaparelli and the
616
White, Elsa Schiaparelli: Empress of Paris Fashion, 134. Schiaparelli, Shocking Life: The Autobiography of Elsa Schiaparelli, 68. Blum, Shocking!: The Art and Fashion of Elsa Schiaparelli , 71. 617 Blum, Shocking!: The Art and Fashion of Elsa Schiaparelli , 125. 618 White, Elsa Schiaparelli: Empress of Paris Fashion , 92.
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Surrealists opposed. Using bourgeois as a slur was, for Schiaparelli, another way of aligning herself with artists and the avant-garde. By the mid-1930s, Schiaparellis name had become synonymous with artistic, whimsical, and daring fashions and accessories. She reliably provided several eye-catching images for Vogues column, Collection Caviar, or Diana Vreelands column, Why Dont You? in Harpers Bazaar. By July 1935, Bazaar was referring to these classic flourishes as Schiaparelli-isms.619 Schiaparelli had turned her name into a brand, but more importantly a fashion aesthetic. The value of this brand is apparent from the number of products that used her endorsements in their advertisements in American fashion magazines.620 Schiaparelli lent her name to everything from girdles to nail polish to Wrigleys gum. Schiaparelli also ensured that women of all means could afford at least some of her products. Unlike Chanel who insisted on having the costliest perfume, Schiaparelli insisted hers be affordable, particularly in the US and Britain where she had an enormous following.621 At the same moment Surrealism itself was shifting from being an artistic movement to being a brand, eventually used to sell everything from neckties and fur coats, to lipstick and perfume. In 1936 the word Surrealist was copyrighted by the Celanese Corporation of America for a series of dress
619 620
Schiaparelli-Isms," Harpers Bazaar (July 1935), 30-1. It is worth noting that Schiaparelli was probably more famous and popular in American than she was in France. Her designs certainly appeared much more frequently in American fashion magazines. Perhaps her eccentric style was too much for traditional French couture audiences, but it fit perfectly with the American taste for shock and scandal. 621 White, Elsa Schiaparelli: Empress of Paris Fashion , 158.
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fabrics inspired by Miro, Dal, and Ernst.622 While Breton may have resisted this transition, the movement had spread into the popular and shamelessly commercial realm. Covers of Harpers Bazaar and Vogue in the 1930s often featured either the work of a Surrealist artist or a Surrealist-inspired illustration. As early as 1935, Pierre Roy and Giorgio de Chirico were illustrating the covers of Vogue. Man Ray, Cecil Beaton, and others were creating Surrealist images inside of fashion magazines, often to complement the Surrealist designs by Schiaparelli that they were illustrating. While many credit MoMAs 1936 exhibition Fantastic Art, Dada, and Surrealism as bringing Surrealism to popular audiences in the United States, followers of fashion would have been well aware of the movement through fashion magazines. Dal, in particular, was credited with helping to forge the Surrealist brand: Dals work after 1932 is often said to evince a loss of creative drive. Another way of explaining it is to see his repetition as part of a strategyaimed at promoting familiarity, even a sort of brand loyalty By the late 1930s, Dals burning giraffes and soft watches were safe, proven, reliable Surrealism, the standard by which competitors were measured.623 Dal never hesitated to brand his art as Surrealist, often using the word in his titles. Dals collaborations with Schiaparelli were also a part of this brand strategy.624
622
Dilys E. Blum, "Post-War American Textiles," in Surreal Things: Surrealism and Design, ed. Ghislaine Wood (London: V&A Publications, 2007), 235. 623 Eggener, "'An Amusing Lack of Logic': Surrealism and Popular Entertainment," 42. 624 Duchamp was an obvious precursor to this kind of branding in art; see chapter one.
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Schiaparellis shop was a new kind of space in which art and commerce met and mingled. She was going further than women such as Helena Rubinstein, who used art as a merchandising tool in her salons. Schiaparelli was using art, display techniques, perfume, and her fashion designs to create a multisensory experience for her customer. In Schiaparellis salon, art was not just dcor, it was what was for sale. Salvador Dal wrote about her store as the crux of Surrealism in the 1930s: the war which was soon to break out and which was going to liquidate the postwar [WWI] revolutions was symbolized, not by the surrealist polemics in the caf on the Place Blanche, or by the suicide by my great friend Ren Crevel, but the dressmaking establishment which Elsa Schiaparelli was about to open on the Place Vendme. Here new morphological phenomena occurred; here the essence of things was to become transubstantiated; here the tongues of fire of the Holy Ghost of Dal was going to descend.625 Dal captured the way that Schiaparellis boutique looked toward the future, as fashion always does, predicting the coming war. Schiaparelli also talks about the forward-looking nature of her practice: so fashion is born by small facts, trends, or even politics, never by trying to make little pleats and furbelows, by trinkets, by clothes easy to copy, or by the shortening or lengthening of a skirt The world was being pulled from every side like a tired balloon. One could not forget that one carried, like a steel ball chained to the ankle, the stark business side, but one had to sense the trend of history and precede it.626 She also connects the boutique directly with Surrealism and the avant-garde. Schiaparellis shop used the trope of the readymade, invented by the Dadaists,
625 626
Dal, The Secret Life of Salvador Dal, 340. Schiaparelli, Shocking Life: The Autobiography of Elsa Schiaparelli , 88-89.
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and taken up by the Surrealists. She placed found objects alongside her ready to be taken away immediately merchandise.627 She was selling fashions and accessories, many of which looked like readymades. Belts with locks, sword pins, and newspaper hatsin her salon all of these objects became works of art. The May 1936 Exposition Surraliste dObjets at Charles Ratton reflected the same aesthetic as the Schiap Boutique. The objects were displayed at Rattons gallery as commodities in vitrines and included readymades such as Duchamps Bottle Rack (1914) as well as objects that directly engaged with fashion including Dals Aphrodisiac Dinner Jacket (1936) and Meret Oppenheims My Nurse (1936)a pair of white pumps trussed like a turkey, down to white paper frills on the heels.628 These objects were shown alongside Hopi kachina dolls, masks from New Guinea, and found objects-both natural and manmade. Alyce Mahon describes the exhibition as, nodding to the grands magasins with their luxurious interiors lined with display cases to seduce the bourgeoisie, the exhibition staged fashion, objects and furniture in a peculiarly Surrealist shopping bazaar. 629 Mahon contends that this exhibition demonstrated that the Surrealists were the first to recognize, but also to overturn, the dramatic potential and
627 628
Ibid, 65. It is entirely possible that this work formed part of the inspiration for the mutton chop hat. 629 Alyce Mahon, "Displaying the Body: Surrealisms Geography of Pleasure," in Surreal Things : Surrealism and Design, ed. Ghislaine Wood (London: V&A Publications, 2007), 124.
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libidinous signification of the department store.630 She argues that the Surrealists recognized the erotics of shopping and turned this bourgeois spectacle on its head. The erotic potential of fashion and shopping, however, had been understood long before the Surrealists. After all, what was Paul Poirets Thousand and Second Night party in 1911 but a living breathing sexy advertisement for his new harem trousers, linking them to the exotic tales of Scheherazade.
Exhibitionist Mannequins In 1937 Paris sponsored the Exposition Internationale des Arts et Techniques dans la Vie Moderne. The exhibition was significant for a number of reasons. As discussed above, the exhibition came at a crucial moment during the run up to World War II. Both Hitler and Stalin used their national pavilions, that faced one another on the Trocadero, to show the accomplishments of their regimes. In the Spanish Pavillion, Picassos Guernica served as evidence of the disastrous consequences of the rise of fascism. Meanwhile, in the Pavillon dElgance, Elsa Schiaparelli was creating a furor of her own in her typically shocking style. This event may not have had political consequences, but it did reflect the tenuous tenor of the times and had a profound impact on the Surrealists. The Pavillon de lElgance at the Exposition Internationale, which opened in June of 1937, featured a display by the most prominent couturiers
630
Ibid, 124.
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in Paris. Their work was exhibited on mannequins designed by Robert Couturier in an Arcadian landscape devised by mile Aillaud.631 The style of the display had been influenced by the biomorphic branch of Surrealism. Contemporary critics linked the bizarre faceless mannequins the designers were given to the work of de Chirico. The Surrealist feeling of the exhibition space was played up by the German photographer Wolf Schulze, also known as Wols. Wols, also a painter, was the only photographer permitted to photograph the Pavillon dElgance. These photographs appeared in publications all over the world and were sold at the Pavillon as postcards. (Figure 208) Wols emphasized the strange quality of the mannequins and the spaces they inhabited. His photographs animated these bizarre faceless women, giving them an uncanny presence. This is particularly evident in his photographs of the installation of the exhibition that were even more surreal, full of disembodied limbs and strange shadows. (Figure 209) Schiaparelli did not see the beauty Wols did in these Surreal mannequins. She thought that they were in some respects hideous. All one could do was to hide their absurdity under voluminous skirts.632 The mannequins looked like the hysterical women who fascinated the Surrealists. (Figure 210) Their massive arms gesticulated wildly with splayed fingers. These mannequins would not do for Schiaparelli: I naturally protestedCould I use Pascale, my wooden figure, and thus retain the atmosphere of the boutique Fantastique?
631 632
Ibid, 134. Schiaparelli, Shocking Life: The Autobiography of Elsa Schiaparelli , 73-4
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Certainly not, cried the pundits. That would be conspicuous and revolutionary. So after much discussion I went and made my own show myself. I laid the dreary plaster mannequin, naked as the factory had delivered it, on some turf and piled flowers over it to cheer it up. I then stretched a rope across an open space and, as after washing day, hung up all the clothes of a smart woman, even to panties, stockings, and shoes. Nothing could be said. I had carried out most strictly the decrees of the Syndicat de la Couture, but in such a way that on the first day a gendarme had to be sent for to keep back the crowds!633 Schiaparellis vignette excited the crowds because she had shocked the Arcadian elegance by making her mannequin look like a corpse. Harpers Bazaar described the scene on opening day: Schiaparelli stretches a nude figure on the ground, partially covered by a rug of flowers. On the opening day, someone threw a visiting card on the blanket with condolences, so now that lady has been jerked up to a sitting position, with her discarded dress and hat thrown on a garden chair.634 Even this more sanitized version of Schiaparellis stunt was provocativeso provocative that her display did not appear in any of the major French fashion magazines that reproduced a number of the other couturiers vignettes.635 According to Christine Mehring, the fashion pavilion itself toned down the Surrealism of the mannequins and fashion magazines in turn toned down the Surrealism in Wols photographs.636 While this argument is certainly debatable, it ignores Schiaparellis contribution to the pavilion that plays up the uncanny
633 634
Ibid, 95. Within the Pavillon d'Elegance," Harpers Bazaar (15 September 1937), 78. 635 Schiaparellis tableau in Pavillon dElgance is not illustrated or mentioned in Femina, LArt et la Mode, or Jardin de la Mode. 636 Christine Mehring, Wols Photographs (Cambridge: Busch-Reisinger Museum, 1999), 19.
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mannequin: the surrealist combinations of the half-alive and half-dead.637 Schiaparelli emphasizes the uncanny by showing the mannequin as a corpse. This treatment is very much in line with Schiaparellis treatment of mannequins in other contexts. In her autobiography she talks about Pascal and Pascaline, her shop mannequins, as through they were employees. Schiaparelli also describes her commission to design costumes for Mae West with great surrealist aplomb in her autobiography: Mae West came to Paris. She was stretched out on the operating-table of my work room, and measured and probed with care and curiosity. She had sent me all the most intimate details of her famous figure, and for greater accuracy a plaster statue of herself quite naked in the pose of the Venus de Milo.638 In fact, West herself did not come to Paris; instead she sent a dress form. Schiaparelli refers to the form as though it were the actress herself. She also invokes the famous operating table of the Compte de Lautramont. Schiaparelli was well aware of the Surrealist performance she was enacting at the Pavillon dElgance. Schiaparellis provocative gesture inspired the Surrealists to, by their own description, violate several more conventional mannequins for their own exhibition that opened on January 17th of the following year. At the Exposition Internationale du Surralisme visitors were ushered in through the Rue Surraliste that was lined with mannequins dressed by the artists. (Figure 211) Man Ray claimed that,
637 638
Ibid, 20. Schiaparelli, Shocking Life: The Autobiography of Elsa Schiaparelli , 88.
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in 1937 nineteen nude young women were kidnapped from the windows of the large stores and subjected to the frenzy of the Surrealists who immediately deemed it their duty to violate them, each in his own original and inimitable manner but without any consideration whatsoever for the feelings of the victims who nevertheless submitted with charming goodwill to the homage and outrage that were inflicted on them, with the result that they aroused the excitement of a certain Man Ray who undid and took out his equipment and recorded the orgy639 Like Schiaparelli, the Surrealists sought to provoke, but their interpretation invokes sexual violence. For Schiaparelli the gesture, while sexually provocative, was not about violence but about the deathliness of mannequins. In the Surrealists hands, mannequins were sexually available figures. Their uncanny state was not between death and life, but between real and unreal, subject and object. The 1938 Surrealist exhibition was set up according to the same logic as Schiaparellis shop. It was carefully designed to direct visitors in specific directions. Kachur notes the historical continuities between art exhibitions and commercial marketing: The ideological exhibition space coincides historically with the rise of the marketing of brand name goods, as well as the spread of the site consecrated to such display, the department store. Not surprisingly, the display as spectacle has its overlapping histories in the commercial and fine art realms. Exhibition space is often where the two most obviously mingle and compete. This is notably true of the Surrealists, as witness their mannequins, borrowed from the fashion houses and dressed by the artists along a gauntletlike entry corridor for the 1938 show.640
639
Man Ray, La Rsurrection des Mannequins (Paris 1966), Quoted in Mahon, "Displaying the Body: Surrealisms Geography of Pleasure," 134-5. 640 Kachur, Displaying the Marvelous: Marcel Duchamp, Salvador Dal, and Surrealist Exhibition Installations, 7-8.
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While the Surrealist exposition certainly had many similarities to the spectacle of shopping at a department store, it was perhaps more akin to Schiaparellis Boutique Fantastique. Her boutique, the first of its kind, was the space in which she cemented her brand identity. She sold ready to wear garments, accessories, and perfumes that were more affordable than her couture garments. Many of these traits were copied by the American department stores, which also helped to spread her brand. Her fantastic displays and windows made the shop a destination for tourists. As discussed above, her use of found objects and the Surrealist constructions of Dal and Bettina Burgery made the shop a space of exhibition for these objects and Schiaparellis own designs. Schiaparellis shop took notes from department stores, ensuring that customers spent the maximum amount of time in the space so they were more likely to buy. The Surrealist Exhibition also forced viewers to experience the space in a certain order and celebrated excess, camouflaged entrances and exits so as to create a sense of all-encompassing enclosure and disorientation.641 Like the Boutique Fantastique, the Surrealist Exposition immersed visitors in a world of its own, trying to keep them in as long as possible. In the exhibition, objects filled dimly lit spaces and paintings were hung on revolving doors of a kind typical to the Bon March department store.642 Visitors were provided with flashlights to view the exhibition,
641 642
Mahon, "Displaying the Body: Surrealisms Geography of Pleasure," 129. Ibid, 131.
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leading to an even more surreal experience.643 The gallery was next door to Jean-Michel Franks boutique where the overflowing crowd on opening night loitered until they could enter the exhibition. Dals Mae West Lips couch was in his shop, no doubt amongst many other Surrealist designs. As visitors arrived outside the exhibition at the Galerie Beaux-Arts they first approached Dals Rainy Taxi, their first taste of the bizarre mannequins they would encounter inside. An ivy draped taxicab, whose interior was drenched in rain, was home to two mannequins and a number of real snails. According to Vogue, the cars leaking rain soaked the evening slippers of the well dressed guests.644 Once guests managed to enter the exhibition they walked down a long corridor, the Rue Surraliste. The corridor was lined on one side with sixteen mannequins, each dressed by a different artist.645 Like Schiaparelli, the Surrealists had rejected the first batch of mannequins they were sent that were too modern and abstract, preferring old fashioned realistic mannequins with curly synthetic wigs and eyelashes.646 Interestingly, the only mannequin to be designed by a woman, Sonia Moss, included a number of Schiaparellis favorite themes: one dummy had a chalk white body with water lilies here and there, a green beetle on her mouth, and tiny green lobsters on her body
643
Acacia Rachelle Warwick, "Prefabricated Desire : Surrealism, Mannequins, and the Fashioning of Modernity" (PhD dissertation, University of California, Los Angeles, 2006), 38. 644 Bettina Wilson, "Surrealism in Paris," Vogue (1 March 1938), 144. 645 For detailed descriptions and images of all 16 mannequins see Mannequin Street in Kachur, Displaying the Marvelous: Marcel Duchamp, Salvador Dal, and Surrealist Exhibition Installations , 37-67. 646 Warwick, "Prefabricated Desire: Surrealism, Mannequins, and the Fashioning of Modernity", 38.
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the whole veiled in green tulle.647 Beetles had just appeared in Schiaparellis Fall 1938 collection (shown in April 1938), adorning dolls hats, and on a clever clear necklace covered in plastic bugs that seemed to climb around the wearers neck. Duchamps mannequin was transformed into a risqu garonne, playing off his Rrose Slavy alter ego. (Figure 212) The mannequin is dressed in a polished mens suit complete with a vest, shiny shoes and a fedora over her mass of shiny curls, but missing trousers. In place of a handkerchief, a red light bulb peeks from her breast pocket. Duchamp signs the mannequin on the crotch Rrose Slavy. In Raoul Ubacs photograph of the mannequin taken from a low angle, someone has pulled back the blazer to reveal the signature of Rrose. This photograph attests to the sexual charge of Duchamps mannequin and reveals the strange glamour of this figure. As in Schiaparellis designs, Duchamps mannequin combines male and female, not in a way that reconciles the genders, but in a way that brings attention to the contradiction. The emphasis on the mannequins crotch, in particular, is revealing since this is perhaps the least realistic part of the mannequin, displaying a complete absence of genitals, an uncanny lack of labia. The revelation of genitals that would verify this transvestite performance is disrupted. Lewis Kachur writes that Duchamps figure calls attention to the other male artists ultimately monotonous fetishization of the female body. He argues that Duchamps work critiques the space it occupies, and through the authorship of Rrose
647
Wilson, "Surrealism in Paris," 144.
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Slavy draws attention to the rather token presence of women artists (usually with only one or two works) in this exhibition.648 Kachur takes this argument a bit far. Duchamps mannequin, while it certainly draws attention to the construction of gender and sexuality in a distinctly different way from the other Surrealists work, is not a radical departure from the other mannequins. With the light bulb and missing pants, this mannequin does not challenge the viewers sexual gaze in the way that many of Schiaparellis garments do, nor does it upend the conventions of the exhibition the way that Schiaparelli did at the 1937 Exposition. Andre Massons mannequin, which stood to the right of Duchamps, is more typical of the male Surrealists treatment of these female figures. (Figure 213) Masson gags his mannequin with green velvet, covering her mouth with a pansy. A bird cage filled with goldfish surrounds her head with a small door open so we get a clear view of her face. Instead of in the cage, birds are nestled in her armpits. The only clothing on the mannequin is a mirror surrounded by tiger eyes and festooned with plumes. Massons mannequin also shares a number of themes with Schiaparellis designs in the years immediately before this exhibition. Like her mirror jacket, the mannequins reflective undergarment returns the gaze of the viewer, catching them in the act of their scopophilic gaze.649 The eyes around the mirror are akin to the eye buttons that Schiaparelli featured in a number of collections. Masson also
648
Kachur, Displaying the Marvelous: Marcel Duchamp, Salvador Dal, and Surrealist Exhibition Installations, 47. 649 Ibid, 48.
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uses a cage and flower, frequent themes for Schiaparelli both in her shop and designs.650 While Schiaparellis woman is usually in a position to escape her cage, Massons is not. Masson surely would have been exposed to some of Schiaparellis designs, as they were frequently worn by Surrealist women and patrons. Though there is no way to know whether Masson was influenced by Schiaparelli, it is unmistakable that Schiaparelli was working with the same ideas that the Surrealists were at the same time. Often she was turning these ideas on their head, giving her woman the agency that artists like Masson often robbed her of. In Salvador Dals mannequin, Schiaparelli found a small place of her own in the exhibition. Dal used Schiaparellis Shocking pink chullo to cover the head of his mannequin, a fact dutifully noted by Vogue.651 (Error! Reference
source not found.) The hood, which covered the entire head and shoulders of
the wearer, was inspired by a Peruvian chullo (a knitted hood) that Schiaparelli saw in the Peruvian pavilion at the Paris Exposition. The hood and a number of other items in her winter 1937-38 were inspired by the garments in the Peruvian pavilion. (Figure 214) Its entirely possible that the gloves and belt the mannequin wears were Schiaparellis designs as well.652
650
The cage may have also been derived from Mrs. George Crawfords costume for Caresse Crosbys 1935 dream ball given in Dals honor. A clipping posted by Dal with Crawfords photograph would have lead viewers to draw this connection. A number of cages occupied the rest of the exhibiton as well, both in paintings and Surrealist objects. Ibid, 50-1. 651 This somewhat menacing garment was also worn by Chick Austin for his Surrealist Magic on Parade show at the Wadsworth Athenaeum in 1939. Wilson, "Surrealism in Paris," 144. 652 While no belts are pictured, in an article on Schiaparellis Peruvian accessories, belts are given special attention and it is reasonable to assume that she created some Peruvian inspired belts. Peruvian Magic," Harpers Bazaar (October 1937), 72.
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Dal places a penguin head over the chullo and spoons cover the body of the mannequin, again suggesting the idea of sexual consumption.653 A spooncovered mannequin inspired by Dals appeared in a shop on the Rue du Faubourg Saint-Honor during the run of the exposition. The mannequin also sported mens shoes like Duchamps mannequin and an oversized flower at her waist.654 Alyce Mahon contends that, in presenting a vampish display of fashionable femmes fatales, [the Rue Surraliste] pointedly turned on its head the poise and elegance of the exhibition of mannequins in an Arcadian setting at the Pavillon de lElgance.655 As we have seen however, Schiaparellis nude mannequin had already disrupted the elegance of Exposition within the space of the pavilion itself. In light of her radical gesture within the Exposition, the Surrealist mannequins might even be seen as derivative and simplistic. The thematic similarities between the Surrealists mannequins and Schiaparellis designs prove that Schiaparelli neither translated Surrealist ideas into fashion nor stole them. She was engaged with Surrealist ideas, and often found ways to reconfigure them to reflect her own ideas about womens changing role in society.
653
Kachur, Displaying the Marvelous: Marcel Duchamp, Salvador Dal, and Surrealist Exhibition Installations, 57. 654 Ibid, 58. 655 Mahon, "Displaying the Body: Surrealisms Geography of Pleasure," 131.
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Mae West and Nostalgia Articles of clothing of all sorts appeared throughout the Surrealist exhibitionand not just on the mannequins. A Kurt Seligmann stool (Ultrameuble, 1938) sported legs in pink stockings wearing black and pink heels, a decidedly contemporary fashion surely inspired by Schiaparellis own Shocking pink. (Figure 215) One room in the exhibition was topped off by a giant pair of bloomers, a garment from the nineteenth century, acting as a chandelier. Oscar Dominguezs Jamais also fused a nineteenth century Victrola with a pair of high heel shod legs emerging from the horn and an arm in the place of the mechanical arm and needle, hovering over a pair of breasts where the record should be. Both of these Victorian-inspired constructions appeared in the Vogue spread on the exposition. (Figure 216) Throughout the second half of the 1930s, nostalgia was becoming increasingly important to visual culture in the United States and Western Europe, particularly in fashion. This nostalgia, which was the result of the impending war, was a longing for an imagined idea of the nineteenth century. On January 17, 1938 the Exposition Internationale du Surralisme opened, and the following month Schiaparelli showed her Circus collection. Just a little over a month later, on March 12, 1938, Germany annexed Austria, and that September the Munich Agreement giving Germany Czechoslovakia would be a last pathetic effort by France and Britain to avoid war with
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Germany. The Germans invaded Poland September 1, 1939 and two days later France and Britain declared war. Even as early as February 1937, the Los Angeles Times was reporting on War Influences Seen in Coming Fashions. According to Hollywood costume designer Adrian, the Vogue for short skirts is a natural outcome of conditions of war time. In the first place short skirts are more suitable for action of unsettled times.656 As each month passed, war in Europe seemed increasingly inevitable. The nineteenth century, a time before the horrors of industrialized warfare had been realized, seemed simpler and slower as the world seemed to spiral out of control in the 1930s. The Surrealists had been turning to the nineteenth century in their work since the beginning of the movement in the 1920s. Eugene Atgets photographs of the spaces of nineteenth century Paris were particularly appealing to Surrealists. These were the spaces that Breton haunted in Nadja (1928), hoping to experience the uncanny, and finding it in the person of his mysterious muse Nadja. Surrealists were fascinated by the outdated and outmoded, the time when their parents were young. Walter Benjamins writing was also an important part of this project, in Surrealism: The Last Snapshot of the European Intelligentsia he writes that [Breton] was the first
656
Adrian was one of Schiaparellis American disciples who had taken up padded shoulders enthusiastically, particularly in his designs for Joan Crawford, a Schiaparelli client: [Adrian] upholds the Vogue of wide shoulders which slenderize the hips. Its a fad which has become a fa shion classic and is here to stay he believes. "War Influences Seen in Coming Fashions," Los Angeles Times, 17 February 1937, B7. Schiaparelli talks about Adrian in Schiaparelli, Shocking Life: The Autobiography of Elsa Schiaparelli, 56-7.
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to perceive the revolutionary energies that appear in the outmoded, in the first iron constructions, the first factory buildings, the earliest photosthe fashions of five years ago657 Benjamin praised Surrealisms ability to look at the old with fresh, and critical eyes.658 In a time when technology, culture, art, and fashion were moving faster than ever before, those objects and styles that had just gone out of fashion represented the specter of obsolescence and death always present in the modern world. In her book, The Future of Nostolgia, Svetlana Boym explains that, a cinematic image of nostalgia is a double exposure, or a superimposition of two imagesof home and abroad, past and present, dream and everyday life.659 This description of nostalgia fits perfectly with the Surrealist aesthetic of double images and dreamlike juxtapositions. Boym describes nostalgia as coeval with modernity itself660 I would argue that it is also coeval with the cycles and trends of modern fashion. Fashion designers have always looked to outmoded fashions for inspiration. The modern couturiers way of working was predicated on finding some inspiration for a collection. This formula is cemented in the 1930s fashion press and continues to be true in contemporary fashion. As we saw in chapter three, for example, foreign cultures are often the source of such inspiration. In the early 1930s, Schiaparelli and other designers used the styles of the First Empire period, including high waistlines
657 658
Benjamin, "Surrealism: The Last Snapshot of the European Intelligentsia," 181. Fijalkowski, "Black Materialism: Surrealism Faces the Commercial World," 103. 659 Svetlana Boym, The Future of Nostalgia (New York: Basic Books, 2001), xiii-xiv. 660 Ibid, xvi.
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and long trains.661 This allusion to the past continued throughout the 1930s. In 1936, for example, Schiaparelli was inspired by the victory of the Popular Front government and began to produce Phrygian bonnets, an ode to the Sans Culottes of the French Revolution. In fact the Sans Coulottes had adopted these hats from ancient Rome where they were worn by emancipated slaves. Ulrich Lehmann argues that fashion is modernity: essentially, la modernit equals la mode, because it was sartorial fashion that made modernity aware of its constant urge and need to quote from itself.662 Fashion made modernity aware of its own need for nostalgia. The turn of the nineteenth century, the so called gay nineties was also becoming increasingly popular in popular culture, particularly through Mae West. West had parlayed her popular and often controversial performances on Broadway into a Hollywood film career. Her first leading role was in the 1933 film She Done Him Wrong in which she co-starred as Lady Lou with a young Cary Grant. The movie had been a huge hit in the US and Paris.663 In this performance, as in many of her films, West literally embodied a fantasy of life in the gay nineties, her incredible hourglass figure the epitome of the bustled beauties of the turn of the century. Her bawdy humor always got her what she wanted in her movies. In Harpers Bazaar, Stanley Walker wrote that, Mae West, by adding a slightly burlesque overtone to the by-play between the sexes, made everybody more comfortableexcept the censors
661 662
Blum, Shocking!: The Art and Fashion of Elsa Schiaparelli , 294. Ulrich Lehmann, Tigersprung : Fashion in Modernity (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2000), xx. 663 Blum, Shocking!: The Art and Fashion of Elsa Schiaparelli , 102.
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With her small-waisted figure, her undulating hippy strut, her nasal whine and her meaty lips, she has made sex a thing gorgeously panoplied.664 Mae West had found a way to use her figure to its best advantage, writing plays and then films for herself that took place in the gay nineties, a time when her figure type had been the ideal.665 She resisted both the conventions first of the slim androgynous flapper in the twenties and then the hard chic of the early 1930s. Her style of dress was highly feminine, but her attitude was far from it. She was brash, outspoken, and always in control. West was a perfect advocate of strange glamour, self possessed, mature, and one of a kind. Dal, obviously a fan of Mae West, was fascinated by her strange glamour. Wests celebrity captured Dals imagination. Like Dal and Schiaparelli, she used shock to publicize her work. West was jailed for ten days for staging an indecent performance, her play Sex.666 Her plays and films always pushed the limits of what would be permissible on the stage and screen. She encapsulated the sexy underbelly of the turn of the century, opposed to the stereotyped idea of Victorian prudery. Dal responded to Mae West, transforming a photograph of her into the basis for a Surrealist interior design in Mae Wests Face which May Be Used as a Surrealist Apartment (1934-5).(Figure 217) He painted over a magazine photograph of her face,
664
Stanley Walker, "Sex Comes to America: A Chapter from Mrs. Astor's Horse," Harpers Bazaar 1935), 59. 665 West had perhaps learned the hard way that her body was not built for all roles while playing a young flapper in The Wicked Age (1927). See: Emily Wortis Leider, Becoming Mae West (New York: Farrar Straus Giroux, 1997), 174. 666 Walker, "Sex Comes to America: A Chapter from Mrs. Astor's Horse," 161.
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making her lips into a sofa, her nose a fireplace, her eyes into Surrealist paintings and her golden hair into cascading drapes. With the help of his patron, Edward James, Dal was able to have the Mae West Lips Sofa manufactured in 1938. One was manufactured in Schiaparellis new shade Shocking pink. James used a lipstick to get the right color for the satin sofa. Schiaparelli also had a connection to Mae West, whose costumes she designed for the 1937 film Every Days a Holiday. As discussed above, Schiaparelli was sent a mannequin to use to fit Wests costumes.667 Schiaparellis costumes were in classic Mae West style emphasizing her gorgeous curves, but the designer added her own flair, bringing attention to the shoulders. In a lilac broadcloth coat dress, the skirt lapped over in front, the edges scalloped and outlined with pink and mauve cording. [Worn with a] purple hat with brim turned up on one side and trimmed with a bright red feather, she played up the shoulders using the pink and mauve cording to create epaulets.668(Figure 218) Another dress featured secret pockets in the mutton chop sleeves, perfect for Wests character Peaches ODay, a practiced pickpocket. One of Wests most extravagant costumes in the film was a sequined black gown paired with a lavish fur and lace cape.
667
The mannequin, it turned out, was too small by the time of the making of the film and all of the costumes had to be remade in Hollywood. White, Elsa Schiaparelli: Empress of Paris Fashion , 10910. Blum, Shocking!: The Art and Fashion of Elsa Schiaparelli , 115 668 Schiaparellis original costume was not used in the film because West had gained weight by the time the film went into production. The dress was remade in a slightly darker color scheme, but with the same design. Schiaparelli, Shocking Life: The Autobiography of Elsa Schiaparelli , 88. Blum, Shocking!: The Art and Fashion of Elsa Schiaparelli, 115.
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This ensemble influenced one of the looks in Schiaparellis fall collection that year, an exuberant tiered pleated tulle cape. (Error! Reference
source not found.) Other designs in the collection were inspired by the film,
which began on New Years Eve 1899, and by West herself. According to the Washington Post Schiaparelli and Mae West are responsible for the startling change in hats.669 These hats were upswept off the face. Vogue proclaimed Schiaparellis collection a Merry Widow Revival, noting Schiaparellis designs for Mae West as the influence for the sly hint of pre-War opulence [in] her Mid-Season collection.670 (Figure 219) Mae West influence on fashion had started even earlier in the 1930s. In January 1935 a letter to Photoplay complained that along with the Mae West influence and the Gay Nineties styles, large hats have reappeared, obscuring views at the movie theater.671 As we saw above Schiaparelli played off the return of the hourglass silhouette with her falsies dress. She continued to comment on the return of this silhouette in one wool suit for Fall 1937 that included buttons shaped like Mae Wests torso. Another suit in Shocking pink had cancan dancer buttons. Mae Wests torso provided not only the inspiration for buttons in this collection, but also for the bottle of Schiaparellis new perfume, which was to become her most famous. Schiaparelli asked fellow Italian artist Leonor Fini
669
Ethel Ehlen, "Black Is the Raining Color for Mid-Season While Silk Jersey Leads National Parade," Washington Post, 18 July 1937, S6. 670 The Merry Widow hats had been made famous by Lily Elsie in 1907 in the opera of the same name. Merry Widow Revival," Vogue (1 June 1937), 50. 671 Brickbats and Bouquets, Letters from Photoplay Readers," Photoplay (January 1935), 12.
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to design the bottle. Fini used the mannequin Mae West had sent as the basis for the bottle.672(Figure 220) The clear dress form was draped with a dressmakers tape measure with the name of the perfume in Schiaparellis handwriting. The tape crossed over just below the bust of the figure, and was secured with a golden circle with Schiaparellis S. The measuring tape combined with the dress-form underlines the literal construction of garments, the construction of beauty by fashion. The packaging of the bottle, along with its nod to Mae West, creates a Victorian aesthetic. Fini covered the bottle in a glass dome with a painted scalloped border resembling lace with Schiaparellis signature on the front. This Victorian dome was a popular motif at the time and appeared in fashion photographs in Vogue and Harpers Bazaar as well as a 1930 Man Ray photograph, Hommage D.A.F. de Sade (Tanja Ramm and a Bell-Jar).673 The original bottle design was deemed ugly by Schiaparellis commercial director, who insisted that flowers be added. They were placed on the bottle top, perhaps a nod to Dals flower headed figures. In her own work, Fini was preoccupied with historic costume. She created her Corset Chair in 1939. This chair was a part of an exhibition organized by Fini at Leo Castellis first gallery, Galerie Drouin, next door to Schiaparellis establishment on Place Vendme. The show, which opened in
672
Peter Webb credits the idea of using the mannequin to Fini, and it certainly fits in with her aesthetic. Palmer White gives the credit to Schiaparelli; like all of Schiaparellis collaborations, it is difficult to know whose idea was whose. Webb, Sphinx: The Art and Life of Leonor Fini, 64. White, Elsa Schiaparelli: Empress of Paris Fashion, 157. 673 Haworth-Booth, The Art of Lee Miller, 47-48. Haworth-Booth notes that this photograph may be a collaboration between Man Ray and Lee Miller as Tanja Ramm was her flat-mate at the time.
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May 1939, also included a pair of decorative panels by Fini adorned with figures representing Painting and Architecture. (Figure 221) Their Renaissance-style costumes are constructed from the tools of their respective trades creating surreal costumes that Schiaparelli must have appreciated. George Hoyningen-Huene used the exhibition as a backdrop for a Harpers Bazaar spread. (Figure 222) Finis work in the 1930s often referred to historical costume, corsets, armor, and Victorian stripes. Her atmospheric watercolors of two Schiaparelli ensembles for Harpers Bazaar in 1940 reflect this timeless aesthetic: set against muddy vague backgrounds, the two models hold fantastic hybrid creatures by their leashes. (Figure 223) Schiaparelli continued to use the nineteenth century as an influence on her collections. For the Summer of 1939, she and many other designers brought back the Victorian bustle. Schiaparelli sent four of these bustle dresses worn by society women to a ball to celebrate the anniversary for the Eiffel tower. The designs with their stripes and bustles recalled 1889 when the tower was built. One gown was even printed with women in the style of Mae West. (Figure 224) This summer turned out to be the last one before the declaration of war on Germany by France and Great Britain in September 1939.
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Conclusion While the war did not entirely put a stop to Schiaparellis mad creation, it certainly slowed her down. Her designs from 1940 had ingenious pockets and clever utilitarian designs for women who might have to hurry to a bomb shelter at any moment. By 1941, Schiaparelli, along with many of the Surrealists, including Duchamp and Breton, decided that occupied France was too dangerous for a radical Italian designer. She moved to New York, and encouraged her house in Paris to carry on without her, never designing while living in the U.S. lest she compete with her French compatriots. Her exile, however, did not mark the end of her association with the Surrealists for she spearheaded the famous First Papers of Surrealism exhibition in New York in 1941. As this chapter has demonstrated, Schiaparellis connection to the Surrealists was far from casual. She was deeply interested in the same ideas that the artists were experimenting with. What made Schiaparelli unique was that she used Surrealist themes to create clothes for a strong modern womana woman like herself. She created an image of strange glamour that best fit Surrealist women such as Leonor Fini and Frida Kahlo who did not comfortably fit into the male-dominated movement. Bretons infamous description of Kahlos work as a ribbon around a bomb is an apt description
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of the strange glamour embodied by Kahlo, Fini and Schiaparelli, in their distinctive personal styles as well as their work.674 Schiaparelli used Surrealist motifs to create clothing that had a different kind of sex appeal. Not vulgar or girlish, it was mature. It acknowledged the scopophilic gaze, often thwarting it, or winking back. Schiaparelli understood the unique ability of clothes to fuse with the body. She understood the potential of clothing to create an uncanny image: a live bureau, a lobster in a womans lap, a mutton chop worn as a hat. The unique commercial spaces she created are undoubtedly linked to the exhibition practices of the Surrealists. Most notably perhaps, her radical disruption of the Pavillion dElegance inspired the Rue Surrealist at the Exposition international du Surrealism.
674
Andr Taylor Simon Watson Breton, Surrealism and Painting / Uniform Title: Surralisme Et La Peinture. English, 1st artWorks ed. (Boston, Mass. : MFA Pub.: New York, NY, 2002), 144.
Conclusion
Legacies of Strange Glamour

In August 1949 Elsa Schiaparelli showed a slinky evening gown called Forbidden Fruit in a dark maroon color of the same name. (Figure 225) The strapless bodice of the dress appeared to be slipping down to reveal a pale pink brassier embroidered with gold and laden with crystals. Brenda Helser of the Chicago Tribune explained, while the rest of the world tries vainly to invent a brassiere which doesnt show with the deep V necks, Schiaparelli publicizes this intimate little harness in bright gay colors, and even sports several in velvet with fur trim.675 Schiaparelli may herself have worn the gown, whose illusion was so successful that a party guest thought that one of her breasts had actually been exposed.676 Another dinner dress in the collection in black taffeta featured a deep v-neck revealing a royal blue velvet brassiere. (Figure 226) This kind of shocking display of brassieres was not surprising from a designer who sold Shocking perfume in a bottle shaped like the curvaceous torso of Mae West, designed gowns with falsies sewn on the outside in 1936, and made hats shaped like genitalia in 1933. Schiaparelli was responding to the development of Christian Diors New Look in 1947. Carmel Snow came up with this name for Diors first collection of dresses that used a soft shoulder, cinched waist and voluminous skirt. Many designers, including
675
Brenda Helser, "Schiaparelli Changes Her Pace in Fashion Offerings for Fall," Chicago Daily Tribune, 8 August 1949, A7. 676 Kennedy Fraser, "Simply Shocking," Vogue (October 2003), 356.
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Schiaparelli, and Chanelthough she was still in exile in Switzerland strongly objected to this look.677 They saw it as regressive and anti-modern, not to mention impractical. Diors success marked the beginning of the end of the age of the great couturire and the rise of the male couturier.678 In the United States though, a number of women were emerging and contributing to a rising American ready-to-wear and sportswear industry. Women such as Claire McCardell, Tine Leser and Carolyn Schnurer built on the successes of Seventh Avenue during World War II when the U.S. was largely cut off from Paris fashions. The revealing dresses of Schiaparellis Winter 1949-50 collection mocked the new styles of Dior and even Claire McCardell. (Figure 227) Schiaparelli turned these highly feminine looks into provocation, once again finding ways to stare back at the sexualized male gaze. About the same time these dresses were shown, Schiaparelli was launching a new wholesale business in the United States creating ready-towear suits, coats, and few gowns. In the wake of Diors meteoric rise with the New Look, Schiaparellis business had been struggling. One reporter described her going everywhere, parties, balls, concerts, anywhere she would be seen and photographedSchiaparelli made an entre at a assortment of fancy dress balls dressed in a weird variety of costumesa popular song, a
677
Chanel, who had a relationship with a German officer during the war, was arrested as a collaborator in September 1944 after the liberation of France, but managed to secure release after just three hours, according to many because her friend Winston Churchill stepped in. Some speculated that Churchill stepped in because Chanel could have revealed the Duke and Duchess of Windsors cozy relationship with the Germans. It is unclear to what extent she actually was a collaborator with the Germans, but she was perceived as one by the French public in the years immediately after the war. 678 Steele, Women of Fashion: Twentieth-Century Designers, 11, 14.
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radish, a mineral queen[sic] all in an effort to drum up publicity for her waning brand. The effort looked like a success in 1949, but by 1954 Schiaparelli showed her last couture collection. The most famous couturire of the 1930s, whose work once covered the pages of fashion magazines, would slowly become a dim memory brought up when designers used her shade of Shocking pink or came up with a clever hat reminiscent of her brilliant designs. Schiaparelli, if she is present at all, has been reduced to a footnote in most histories of Surrealism. In histories of fashion, she is often placed in opposition to her great nemesis Chanelfashion loves a good cat fight after all. Compared to Chanel, who has been the subject of dozens of biographies and monographs, Schiaparelli has only been treated to two major studies, first by Palmer White in 1986, and recently in a lavish exhibition and catalog by Dilys Blum in 2003.679 While Schiaparelli has been written out of most
histories of Surrealism, she is perhaps one of the most important figures in ensuring the movements legacy. She was a key instigator of one of the most important Surrealist exhibitions in New York during the war, The First Papers of Surrealism. Schiaparelli had been forced, like so many of her friends, to ride out the war in the United States, abandoning her beloved Paris and her couture house. While the business carried on without her, it was not quite the same
679
Karl Lagerfeld, the designer now at the helm of La Maison Chanel has made a kind of cottage industry of books and films on Chanel, contributing to a number of projects in recent years including the 2009 films Coco Avant Chanel and Coco Chanel and Igor Stravinsky.
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powerhouse when she returned. The war, however, did not sever Schiaparellis ties with the artistic avant-garde. Most of the Surrealists had retreated to the city as well, including Andre Breton and Marcel Duchamp. She explained: New York was not New York, and certainly was not America, especially the milieu I frequented. The city was invaded by people from many nations and paths of life who, for some reason or other had been obliged to leave their homes, or had simply abandoned them because they were scared or found war uncomfortable. Some had left everything, some managed to retain a great deal; some worked for a living, others made a very unnecessary display of their wealth.680 While in New York, Schiaparelli had been working to aid France in a number of ways. Her first trip to the U.S. during the war in 1940 was for a lecture tour. Schiaparelli designed a collection to be produced in America, with some of her profits going to benefit unemployed dressmakers in Paris, and in many cities the proceeds of her lectures benefitted children in unoccupied France. 681 In 1942 Elsa Schiaparelli spearheaded the organization of the First Papers of Surrealism exhibition at the French Relief Societies headquarters in Reid Mansion in New York City.682 She had been connected to Breton through Peggy Guggenheim. Despite his aversion to fashion and commerce, Breton was in no position to refuse this opportunity since he was struggling to get by in New York as a refugee from the War.683 In her autobiography
680 681
Schiaparelli, Shocking Life: The Autobiography of Elsa Schiaparelli , 127. Ibid, 113. 682 Kachur, Displaying the Marvelous: Marcel Duchamp, Salvador Dal, and Surrealist Exhibition Installations, 171. 683 Ibid, 172.
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Schiaparelli does not mention Breton but says that she called on Duchamp to help her organize the exhibition.684 Duchamp himself acknowledged Schiaparelli as a partner in the exhibition along with Breton in a 1943 letter to his friends Walter and Magda Pach.685 Breton appears to have taken the lead in contacting artists to participate in the show. A review in Newsweek noted that Dal was noticeably absent from the show after being expelled from the movement and dubbed Avida Dollars.686 Asked by Schiaparelli to keep the costs low, Duchamp decided to use twine for his installation in the show. He created Mile of String, an intricate web of string that wound its way throughout the exhibition in the heavy and gaudy space of Reid Mansion. (Figure 228) The exhibition was just one of a number of exhibitions of the work of exiled artists living in the United States. The show also included the work of some American artists as well as Native American dolls, masks, and figural sculpture.687 This exhibition was unique because it involved several American artists along with the Europeans, particularly of the younger generation including David Hare, Robert Motherwell, Barbara Reis, and William Baziotes. Histories of Surrealism tend to credit the emigration of Surrealists to the U.S. during the war, and The First Papers of Surrealism, as well as Peggy
684 685
Schiaparelli, Shocking Life: The Autobiography of Elsa Schiaparelli , 135. Duchamps letter translated in: Francis M. Naumann, "Amicalement, Marcel: Fourteen Letters from Marcel Duchamp to Walter Pach," Archives of American Art Journal 29, no. 3/4 1989), 47. Also cited in Kachur, Displaying the Marvelous: Marcel Duchamp, Salvador Dal, and Surrealist Exhibition Installations, 173. 686 Agonized Humor," Newsweek (26 October 1942), 76. 687 Inheritors of Chaos," Time 40, no. 15 (2 November 1942), 47.
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Guggenheims contemporary exhibition, Art of this Century as leading logically to the development of Abstract Expressionism. This linkage, though, is loose and privileges the more abstract tendencies in Surrealism. Writing in 1968, William Rubin explained that, it appeared by 1955 as if the entire Dada-Surrealist adventure was a kind of anti-modernist reaction situated parenthetically between the great abstract movements prior to World War I and after World War II. But the force of this conviction has been
compromised by a subsequent reaction in favor of Dadaand to a much lesser extent Surrealismon the part of many younger artists who have matured since 1955.688 Dada has certainly been resurrected in the ensuing years, with Duchamp replacing Picasso as the pivotal figure in some art historians narratives of modern art. The catalogue for Surrealism USA, a 2005 exhibition at The National Academy Museum in New York, traces the ways in which Surrealism fell out of favor in the years following World War II. Robert S. Lubar writes that in addition to Dals work for Vogue and his advertising campaigns for various products (most of which were notably associated with women and fashion), Dals work for the commercial film industry sealed his fate as an artist who had sold out.689 Isabelle Dervaux explains that Surrealism came to be most closely associated with the work of Dal, who was often seen as regressive and
688 689
Rubin et al., Dada, Surrealism, and Their Heritage, 182. Robert S. Lubar, "Salvador Dal in America: The Rise and Fall of Arch Surrealism," in Surrealism USA (New York: National Academy Museum, 2005), 27.
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academic even before he began his major commercial endeavors. Dervaux writes that Surrealisms fall from favor between 1944 and 1947 can be explained by the anti-Surrealist campaign waged by influential critic Clement Greenberg in the mid-forties. Greenberg denigrated Surrealism as literary and antiquarian. For the sake of hallucinatory vividness the Surrealists have copied the effects of calendar reproduction, postal card chromeotype, and magazine illustration.690 [sic] Greenberg would go on to align the Abstract Expressionists with Cubists and other European abstractionists. Scott Rothkopf describes the reemergence of Surrealism in American art in the 1960s through critics Gene Swenson and Lucy Lippard. Rothkopf argues that Lippard and Swenson each produced a cleaned up version of Surrealism that matched the climate of their time: By viewing Surrealism through the lens of Pop [Swenson] was able to retain its essential potency, while avoiding the narcissistic introspection made taboo by the demise of Abstract Expressionism. IfPop learned the lessons of the readymade and the psychosexual fetish from Dada and Surrealism, then conversely, Swenson taught Surrealism a lesson in cool from Pop.691 Lippard, on the other hand, championed the abstract surrealists, such as Andre Masson, Joan Miro, and Arshile Gorky, linking their works to PostMinimalists such as Eva Hesse. Neither Swenson nor Lippard, however, was interested in reviving the Surrealism of Dal or Magritte. Art historians have been wary of artists such as Dal, Magritte, and Di Chirico, particularly because these artists directly engaged not only with
690 691
Dervaux, "A Tale of Two Earrings: Surrealism and Abstraction, 1930-1947," 54. Scott Rothkopf, "Returns of the Repressed: The Legacy of Surrealism in American Art," in Surrealism USA, Isabelle Dervaux , ed. (New York: National Academy Museum, 2005), 69.
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commerce, but with fashion. It is precisely in fashion where we can see the legacy of the dirtier parts of Surrealism, those which did not fit in with the stories art historians told about art after World War II.692 While Schiaparellis business fizzled after World War II, American designers Charles James and Gilbert Adrian took up Surrealism in their work. James reached the peak of his fame between 1947-1954, designing incredible evening gowns that combined historical styles and techniques of body shaping with modernist forms to create garments more akin to biomorphic sculpture than party dresses. James Surrealism was subtle and sculptural. (Figure 229) He used his clothing to abstractly reshape his clients bodies into forms akin to flowers, birds, and butterflies. Adrian had begun his career as head costume designer for MGM, and staged a star studded fashion show and party to welcome Schiaparelli to Hollywood in 1933.693 Adrian had taken up Schiaparellis toy soldier style
and was using it to great advantage on stars such as Joan Crawford, a fact which Schiaparelli noted in her autobiography.694 By 1939, with his costumes for The Women, it was clear that Adrian was taking up strange glamour and making it his own. In the opening scenes, Rosalind Russell wears a blouse embroidered with three eyes and bolero style jacket that is also adored with
692
It is hard to imagine that Dal was not at least a partial influence on Warhol in his courting of an artstar persona, and Marcel Broodthaers wrote about Magritte as an important influence on Pop Art: Marcel Broodthaers, "Gare au defil Le Pop Art, Jim Dine et l'influence de Rene Magritte," Journal des Beaux-Arts, no. 1029 (November, 1963). 693 Merrick Mollie, "Hollywood in Person," The Atlanta Constitution, 16 March 1933, 6. 694 Schiaparelli, Shocking Life: The Autobiography of Elsa Schiaparelli , 57.
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eyes. Schiaparelli had used eyes as buttons in several collections. Adrians Surrealist flourish was rather apt since Russells character Sylvia Fowler is an enormous gossip. (Figure 230) Many of the styles in the film echo
Schiaparellis designs, dolls hats and military inspired suits, for example. The film also included a lavish Technicolor fashion show in the middle of the black and white film. Many of the dresses in this extravaganza are clearly inspired by Schiaparelli. A bathing costume includes a loose jacket with a sculptural hand reaching around the collar holding a rose. (Figure 231) This detail mimics the print of hands holding roses that lines the jacket and adorns the swimsuit. This design is a clear reference to Schiaparellis collaborations with Cocteau. Adrian takes the uncanny representation of the body a step further with his hand closure, which seems to have been chopped off of a mannequin, a favorite prop of the Surrealists. A green dress includes a bizarre turban with a transparent plastic top. (Figure 232) One of the final looks of the fashion show is a tan dress with dolman sleeves and a hood adorned with a black feather flourish. (Figure 233) The ensemble is worn with green gloves that appear to have light bulbs or door knobs projecting from them. This gown is even more surreal in the context of the setting in which it is shown, an outsized laboratory with flasks and beakers that make the model appear to have been shrunken in some science fiction experiment. Russell wears a similar ensemble toward the end of the film with a hooded headpiece
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reminiscent of Schiaparellis Circus Tent veils from her Summer 1938. (Figure 234) Adrian continued to experiment with surrealist themes in the collections he created under his own label that he started in 1942. A design from one of his first collections, a beautifully draped white silk day dress, included the surreal presence of a guard in full armored regalia printed on fabric that drapes from the wearers left shoulder. (Figure 235) Adrian
produced smart suits and artful gowns, often inspired by modern art He created a series of dresses inspired by modern art including a several gowns in the series Shades of Picasso, which were made from abstract shapes of crepe immaculately pieced together. (Figure 236) These gowns not only evoke
Picassos abstractions and collages, but also the Surrealist abstractions of Hans Arp and Juan Miro. Adrian also used fabrics designed by Dal for several gowns in his March 1947 collection.695 (Figure 237) He also designed a dress for Gala Dal, which like many of his dresses and suits used gingham fabric, reminiscent of one of his most famous costumes, Dorothys blue gingham dress in the Wizard of Oz.696 Gala rejected the dress and refused to wear it.697 Adrians gesture of integrating a simple American fabric like
695
Dilys Blum details the manufacture and use of Dals textiles as well as those made by other Surrealists and in the style of Surrealism in the years after World War II in: Blum, "Post-War American Textiles," 235-45. 696 For an example of Adrians use of Gingham, see fig. 100 in Patricia Mears, American Beauty: Aesthetics and Innovation in Fashion (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009), 139. 697 Christian Esquevin, Adrian : Silver Screen to Custom Label (New York: Monacelli Press, 2008), 153-4.
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gingham into a high fashion garment is just the kind of mixing of high and low that Schiaparelli and Dal himself would have appreciated. Adrian also followed the lead of Lilly Dach, taking inspiration from Mexico and Native American sand paintings, as well as his own travels to Africa. In 1948 he created a dress and cape ensemble printed with designs from Native American sand paintings. A 1949 trip to Africa, through the Sudan, Kenya, and the Congo, led to a collection filled with inspiration from the animals of the country, including leopard and snakeskin prints. 698 Interestingly the Chicago Defender, an African-American newspaper, included a long report on this collection noting: included in the African inspired series were suits decorated with replicas of the tribal body plaques worn by the Mangbetu. The article also notes woolen fabrics in the collection inspired by African head cloth, and tall rounded caps of brushed beaver inspired by the elongated bound heads of the Mangebetu babies. [sic] The paper also noted one gown inspired by the costume of a Maasai woman, topped by a cape made of a whole antelope skin dyed [tawny rose] and drawn through a huge beaten gold ring.699 Both Lilly Dach and American milliner Sally Victor continued to create hats inspired by global cultures. Along with Adrian their work helped to carry through the thread of fashionable primitivism in strange glamour.
698
Apparently he included tiger prints as a joke in the collection, since tigers are not from Africa. Ibid, 167. 699 "Noted Designer Sees African Influence in Winter Wear," The Chicago Defender, 31 December 1949, 18-9.
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Strange Glamour in Postmodern Fashion By the 1960s and 1970, Caftans, saris, African prints, fringed Native American style tunics and gypsy skirts all became popular as ways of demonstrating sartorially a return to nature and radical political views. These looks, however, had more in common with the costume of Paul Poiret than the juxtapositions of Ethnographic Surrealism that appeared in the work of Dach and Victor. This Fashionable Primitivism, however, returned, perhaps most exuberantly in John Gallianos collection for Dior in the late 1990s. Mixing African beading with Diors New Look silhouettes, or Native American textiles with 16th century European costume Galliano became famous for his neo-colonial fusions.700 (Figure 238) These combinations clearly evoke the constructed, collaged aesthetic of strange glamour.701 Other aspects of strange glamour are also clearly evident in contemporary fashion. Alexander McQueens dictum: I want people to be afraid of the women I dress, mirrored Schiaparellis own use of clothing as a
700 701
Evans, Fashion at the Edge : Spectacle, Modernity, and Deathliness , 29. Galliano is clearly indebted to Surrealism and strange glamour. His Spring 1999 collection for Dior couture was an ode to Surrealism and included nods to Schiaparelli including and several riffs on her backwards suit from the Circus collection, as well as some Shocking pink suits, one adorned with a dolls hat and chess pieces. Several couples walked together in the show styled after Salvador and Gala Dal. The Dal models had tendrils of hair made into curls which played the part of Dals famous mustache. Large eye brooches referred to Dals own jewelry designs. A trio of dresses used Cocteau sketches as the inspiration for their large scale prints. The show even had its own Minotaure, and several Surrealist tableau vivants, including some centered around a dress with black hands printed on it across the hip and buttocks, worn with a mannequin hand hat. Men in Magritte bowler hats accompanied the traditional finale: a bridal gown with skirts of tulle and cellophane whose veil was a fishermans net adorned with shells. This dress, as well as several others drew inspir ation from the Surrealist photographs of British artist Madame Yvonde. Interestingly, Galliano mentioned the Dals, Cocteau, and Madame Yvonde in his introduction, but not Schiaparelli. Lisa Armstrong, "Dior Gets Fashionably Surreal," The Times of London, 19 January 1999, 11.
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kind of armor for the women who wore it.702 While the dark often morbid sensibility of McQueens aesthetic would seem to be at odds with the whimsical Surrealist tendencies of Schiaparelli, both designers thought of clothes as arming women for the penetrating gaze of viewers as they went out into the world. Like Schiaparelli, McQueen also created a collection centered around circus imagery, his Fall/Winter 2001-2 collection What a Merry-GoRound. This collection, like Schiaparellis Summer 1938 collection, was inspired by the circus and images of childhood. Yet, McQueens
interpretation was more sinister than Schiaparellis. Caroline Evans explains that, although the circus is a locus of spectacle, fun and abandon, it is also a twilight world of refuge, danger and loss of self.703 Like fashion, the
spectacle of the circus is fleetingthe big top can be filled with the excitement of the show one night, and the next, only an empty field where the tent once stood. McQueen populated his circus with women made up as melancholy clowns dressed in a bricolage of historical styles. Other models, styled after 1920s cabaret performers, were outfitted in military styles with a distinctly sexy edge. (Figure 239) These ensembles reflect McQueens interest in the idea of childhood revolt, You know, when your parent says you shouldnt do
702
Quote from Vogue (October 1997), 435. Cited in Caroline Evans, Fashion at the Edge : Spectacle, Modernity, and Deathliness (Yale University Press, 2003), 149. Lisa Armstrong, "Clever Is Better Than Beautiful," The Times, 31 May 2004, n.p. 703 Ibid, 99.
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something, but you do it anyway.704 The show also commented more broadly on the fleeting spectacle of fashion, and unmistakably represented the haunting of fashion by death in the figure of a clown/model dragging a gold skeleton at her feet. (Figure 240) The fashionable woman is followed by an image of deathas soon as the dress departs the catwalk it will be obsolete, the next seasons designs already being dreamed up. Schiaparellis skeleton has been a recurring image in contemporary fashion. McQueen for example, commissioned Shaun Leane to make a corset for his Spring/Summer 1998 collection. (Figure 241) It was made from aluminum and shaped like the spinal column and ribcage cast from a human skeleton, which morphs into an animal, with a tail coming off the back. In this corset, the wearer can be read either as a human animal hybrid a concept that McQueen explored in his final collection before his death in 2010or as a huntress wearing the remains of her prey as a memento mori, a reminder of death. Both readings suggest the femme fatale, whose sexuality was dangerous, even deathly and for whom, therefore, male desire would always be tinged with dread.705 This is precisely the kind of woman
McQueen was interested in evoking with these clothes, one who would provoke fear. These are the same sorts of images Schiaparelli conjured up with her claw gloves, and with the Skeleton and Tear-Illusion gowns.
704
Horyn Cathy, "McQueen Nods to a Prince, but Genuflects toward Milan," New York Times, 27 February 2001, B9. 705 Evans, Fashion at the Edge : Spectacle, Modernity, and Deathliness , 145.
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Most recently Jean-Paul Gaultier resurrected the Skeleton gown in his Fall 2010 collection. This collection was inspired by Schiaparellis designs with wide shoulders, cinched waists, and even a bit of her signature Shocking pink. A number of the designs directly quote those of Schiaparelli. Dresses and suits included pronounced pockets, a Schiaparelli signature. A polo neck top with Gaultiers infamous cone breasts evokes Schiaparellis falsies dresses. A deep purple dress with lavishly embroidered shoulders is
reminiscent of Schiaparellis evening capes with embroidered and beaded shoulders. The collection also included a number of garments and accessories adorned with skeletal motifs that reference Schiaparellis Skeleton dress. A black top and skirt included padded and piped lines of a stylized skeleton, with particular emphasis on the arms and hip bones. Gaultier repeated the motif of the hip bones on a number of garments in the collection. A little black dress featured rib shaped padding across the torso. (Figure 242) One purse was covered in bone shapes covered in black sequins, another had a spine curving around it with spangled rips running its width, while shoes featured bone shaped appliqus. All of these designs built on Schiaparelli and Dals idea of putting the bones on the outside of the body. In Gautiers show, these designs were linked to the idea of the femme fatale. His models sauntered down the runway smoking with long cigarette holders, their hair upswept in exuberant turbans. Burlesque star Dita Von Teese closed the show with a striptease, revealing one of Gaultiers designs for
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a new line of undergarments for La Perla. (Figure 243) Gaultier coved a nude corset in padded black sections forming the skeleton, embellished with black beading. The hip bones again are exaggerated, forming the garter belt,
complete with bone-shaped suspenders for the stockings. Gautier explained that the collection "was all about structure, about bringing the bones, the very foundation of what makes a garment, to the surface. It's about bones, but not in a ghost kind of way--unless we're talking about the ghost of couture."706 The Skeleton corset is, in part, a visual pun, putting literal bones on a boned corset. The Skeleton corset, like Schiaparellis Skeleton gown, also reasserts the corporeality of the female body, resisting the ways that fashion transforms the body into a spectacle. The revelation of the skeleton underneath the gown also functions as a powerful reflection of Benjamins contention that death always lies beneath the surface of fashion: Teese literally is the ghost of couture, the femme fatale. Her ghostly white gloves with their long black nails, another Schiaparelli reference, complete the image of glittering specter of death in fashion.707 Isaac Mizrahis Spring 2011 IM Xerox collection took a more playful note from Schiaparelli for its inspiration, her early trompe loeil sweaters. (Figure 244)(Figure 245) The collection features classic work-wear with details such as pockets and collars printed on as if by a Xerox machine.
706
"Dita Von Teese Strips at Jean Paul Gaultier Haute Couture Show," Huffington Post (8 July 2010), http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/07/08/dita-von-teese-strips-at_n_638862.html. 707 Schiaparelli created black and white gloves with colored snakeskin nails to go with her Bureau Drawer suits and coats, a collaboration with Dal in 1936.
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Cleverly playing on the mass production of clothing, Mizrahi reinvented archetypal garments such as the trench coat or button down shirts as sleek simple sheaths and tunics. A number of collections in Fall 2009 looked back to Schiaparelli. In the midst of the Great Recession, designers were looking to Schiaparelli for a model of how to create fantasy in a world with a bleak economic reality. Cathernine Malandrinos Fall 2009 collection appears to have been inspired by many of the garments that appeared in Richard Martins book Fashion and Surrealism. Malandrinos collection used the bird and feather imagery from Martins chapter, Natural Worlds and Unnatural Worlds, and quoted from Schiaparellis collaborations with Jean Cocteau. Dolce & Gabbanas exuberant Fall 2009 collection used Schiaparellis leg-of-mutton sleeves, her signature Shocking pink, eccentric buttons, and drew on the designers love of gloves, turning them into scarves and hats. Harpers Bazaar ran an article on Schiaparelli in their September 2009 issue that included a photograph of one of the Dolce & Gabbana ensembles. Another spread in the issue, Fashionand All that Jazz: the fabulous 40s live on in gorgeous details, wonderful prints, and all-out glamour, included one of the Dolce & Gabbana dresses with its eccentric shell buttons, worn with a vintage Lilly Dach hat.708 (Figure 246) Schiaparellis presentation of the boutique space as an artistic installation has also had an important legacy in the continued ties between the art and fashion worlds. The 1960s bourgeoning boutique scene in New
708
Fashionand All That Jazz," Harpers Bazaar (September 2009), 368.
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York was enmeshed with the Pop Art movement. For example, designer Betsy Johnsons fit model was Edie Sedgwick, perhaps the most famous superstar in Andy Warhols factory. Johnson was designing for the boutique Paraphernalia, which was opened in 1965 by British entrepreneur Paul Young. This boutique encouraged a generation of American designers who saw clothing as a form of performance art, made from non-traditional materials, and perfect for dancing in New Yorks club scene. The interior of the shop was often more like an art installation than a boutique. In 1968, the store was reconfigured so that customers could not see the actual clothes, but were given a remote control to scroll through images of the clothes projected on a screen. (Figure 247) This installation brilliantly presaged the phenomenon of internet shopping. The mingling of artists and fashion designers has continued to bear fruitful collaborations through the 1990s and into the present. Rei Kawakubo, designer of the label Comme des Garons has collaborated with numerous artists for advertising campaigns. Cindy Sherman, for example, created a series of photographs in 1993 and 1994 used on postcards and posters from Comme des Garones. (Figure 248) These photographs fit so seamlessly into Shermans oeuvre, that they are often not even identified as commissioned work. In them she uses her familiar technique of self portraiture to create avant-garde fashion photographs for Kawakubos cutting edge designs. The clothes themselves are often lost in the mysterious quality of Shermans poses
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and props. This was not the first of Shermans fashion collaborations. Since the early 1980s she had been commissioned by designers and magazines to create fashion photographs. Some of her most recognizable color photographs from the early 1980s are part of a series for the New York boutique Diane B. that were published in Interview magazine.709 (Figure 249) A number of these photographs, as well as some from a series she made for Dorothee Bis Knitwear in 1984 appear in a 1987 catalogue of her work from an exhibition at the Whitney Museum.710 Peter Schjeldal barely acknowledges these images as fashion photographs, describing them as the costume dramas, Shermans finest work to date, evolved through experimentation with a wardrobe made available to her by a dress designer.711 Lisa Phillips notes in her essay that the clothes actually come from Diane Bensons boutique and were made for Interview, but is quick to quote Sherman herself explaining that she is trying to make fun of fashion.712 Interestingly though, Sherman continues to make work for designers and magazines. She created a spread for the August 2007 issue of French Vogue with clothes by Balenciaga and appeared in a Narciso Rodriguez gown in her own photograph for
709
For more on Shermans fashion work see: Hanne Loreck, "De/Constructing Fashion/Fashions of Deconstruction: Cindy Sherman's Fashion Photographs," Fashion Theory 6, no. 3 (September 2002), 255-75. 710 See for example Peter Schjeldahl and Lisa Phillips, Cindy Sherman (New York: Whitney Museum of American Art, 1987), cat. 81, 83,89, 91, and 94. 711 Peter Schjeldahl, "The Oracle of Images," in Cindy Sherman (New York: Whitney Museum of American Art, 1987), 10. 712 Lisa Phillips, "Cindy Sherman's Cindy Shermans," in Cindy Sherman (New York: Whitney Museum of American Art, 1987), 15.
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American Vogues Age Issue.713 The article notes Shermans own extensive designer wardrobe and friendships with designers Rodriguez and Todd Oldham. Sherman is also a regular at the runway shows for Balenciaga, Narciso Rodriguez, and Marc Jacobs, who she has also collaborated with on advertisements. Shermans work is just one example of the way in which the kinds of artistic collaborations Schiaparelli and other early 20th century designers and artists participated in have only grown more common at the turn of twenty-first century.714
Conclusions By reimagining the relationship between Surrealism and Fashion in the years between the wars, it is also possible to look at the interaction of art and fashion throughout the twentieth century to the present with fresh eyes. Cindy Shermans work might be fruitfully examined alongside the radical designs of Rei Kawakubo, for example. It is not only these legacies of Surrealism, and legacies of fashion and art collaborations that I want to point to in this conclusion. I also want to point back to the years between the wars as demanding further study. By considering art and fashion as existing
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The Balenciaga collaboration continued for Fashions Night Out 2010 in New York. Balenciaga designer Nicolas Gehesquire held an opening for a showing of Shermans Balenciaga photographs at the houses flagship store in New York. The designers fall 2010 collection included a clever riff on Schiaparellis newsprint fabric, using text from interviews with Sherman and reviews of her work to create dynamic prints used in several garments which also included prominent zippers la Schiaparelli. 714 Other examples include performance artist Marina Abramovic, who has incorporated Riccardo Tiscis designs for Givenchy into her work, and Louis Vuittons numerous collaborations with artists such as Richard Prince and Takashi Murakami.
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together within the same visual culture of the interwar years, new practices become legible as both art and fashion. For example, Leonor Fini was often photographed in eccentric ensembles that drew on historic costume and modern style. How was she using such fashion to create a sartorial image of herself as an artist? How did these styles play into her paintings? What relation did they have with the work of fashion designers who were her contemporaries? There were a number of women artists in this period who used fashion as a means of expressing themselves, as much as they used painting, photography or sculpture. Frida Kahlo and Claude Cahun both used fashion in their art and personal lives, experimenting with its expressive possibilities. Fashion need not always be read as an imposition. It has the potential to be transformative, revolutionary and significant. Strange glamour, as it developed in the 1930s, revealed this potential. The androgynous looks of the 1920s freed womens bodies to participate in public life in new ways, playing sports, driving cars, or working in offices. In the 1930s, designers like Elsa Schiaparelli began to look beyond gender to explore issues of sex. Strange glamour developed new possibilities for women, to dress in ways that freed the body, but which could also affirm their sexuality. Women were no longer dressing like men to express their political beliefs, but rather were mixing and juxtaposing masculine and feminine in uncanny ways. They were wearing
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clothing that was meant to stand out. This was a bold structured answer to the limp shapeless silhouettes of the 1920s. Fashionable primitivism also contributed to the boldness of these silhouettes. Outfitting women with the hats of Congo chiefs, or shaped like the coiffeurs of Mangbetu women, designers such as Lilly Dach created hats that did not match the clothes they were worn with, but rather contrasted with them in exciting ways. These accessories gave women new ways to express exoticism and eroticism, mixing it with modernity. Strange glamour transformed the varied global influences that have always been a part of European and American fashion from costumes into constructions. Working in the same vein as the Surrealists, these designers used the evocative qualities of clothing from Africa to create juxtapositions with modern European and American fashion. Strange glamour resisted the notion that fashion merely objectifies a womans body. This is a concept that Schiaparelli clearly poked fun at over and over in the Bureau Drawer suit, Mutton Chop and Inkwell hats. These garments were provocations, examples of Bretons idea of convulsive beauty, looks that affected viewers on a visceral level. These clothes defied expectations, presenting padding instead of breasts, claws instead of nails, or even a nude mannequin instead of a clothed one. Strange glamours provocative, confrontational and complex history shows clearly the way in which fashion can transcend the utilitarian and
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frivolous and act as a genuine expression of its designer, wearer, and historical moment. Schiaparelli saw the ways in which fashion was portrayed as the imposition of absurd trends on a duped female public. She responded during her 1940 U.S. lecture tour, to the distinguished guests gathered at the Copley-Plaza Hotel for the event that woman is really not as hapless a victim of industry... For after all, she pointed out, it is women who make the clothes that make the woman.715 This legacy of womens domination of fashion design has waned in the years after the World War II, but the legacies of these female designers have not.716 Strange glamour and Surrealism live on in the work of many contemporary designers who have used the uncanny in their work, conflating clothing with the body itself. Other designers have continued to explore fashionable primitivism in the new context for the multicultural nation, as well as the new global markets. Shock has also continued to be a vital part of contemporary fashion whether in Gaultiers designs for Madonna in the 1990s, or McQueens designs for Lady Gaga. In the early twentieth century, women who make the clothes that make the woman blazed the trail of strange glamour that is still at the heart of contemporary fashion.
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Josephine B. Ripley, "Paris Comes to Boston for a Day," The Christian Science Monitor, 7 October 1940, 9. 716 For more on this phenomenon see Robin Givhan, "New York Fashion Week's Mean Girls," The Daily Beast, no. 15 February (2011), http://www.thedailybeast.com/blogs-and-stories/2011-0215/new-york-fashion-week-mean-girls-sneer-at-victoria-beckham/. Steele, Women of Fashion: Twentieth-Century Designers, 114-123, 190-211.
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Strange Glamour: Fashion and Surrealism in the Years between the World Wars

Victoria Rose Pass

363 364 364 365 365 366

Figure 61. Figure 62. Figure 63. Figure 64.

390 390 391 391

Figure 65. Figure 66.

Figure 77. Figure 78. Figure 79.

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Figure 80. Figure 81. Figure 82.

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Figure 83. Figure 84. Figure 85. Figure 86.

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Figure 87. Figure 88. Figure 89.

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Figure 96. Figure 97.

Figure 143. Figure 144. Figure 145.

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Figure 156. Figure 157. Figure 158. Figure 159.

440 440 441 441

Figure 160. Figure 161. Figure 162.

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Figure 180. Figure 181.

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Figure 231. Figure 232.

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Art and Fashion?

Harpers Bazaar (15 September 1937), cover.

Ibid, 83. Ibid, 103 18 Ibid,103.

Troy, Couture Culture: A Study in Modern Art and Fashion, 2. Ibid, , 3.

Schiaparelli, Shocking Life: The Autobiography of Elsa Schiaparelli, 42.

Perfume and Plastic Pearls: Chanel and Rrose Slavy

Troy, Couture Culture: A Study in Modern Art and Fashion, 292.

Madsen, Chanel: A Woman of Her Own, 40.

Gundle, Glamour: A History, 145.

Steele, "Chanel in Context," 119.

Ibid, 98. Ibid, 27. 142 Ibid, 25-27.

Evans and Thornton, Women & Fashion : A New Look, 122-3.

de Meyer, "Drian Shows the Silhouette from Head to Heels," 51.

See Foster, Compulsive Beauty, xvii.

Breton, "Artistic Genesis and Perspective of Surrealism," 76. Ibid, 70.

Schiaparelli, Shocking Life: The Autobiography of Elsa Schiaparelli , 43.

Mastai, Illusion in Art: Trompe lOeil, a History of Pictorial Illusionism , 15.

Schiaparelli, Shocking Life: The Autobiography of Elsa Schiaparelli , 42.

Evans and Thornton, "Fashion, Representation, Femininity," 55. Ibid, 55.

Here I am referring to the explanation I quoted on page 3. Foster, Compulsive Beauty, 7.

Rowlands, A Dash of Daring : The Life of Carmel Snow, 183.

Ray, Self Portrait: Man Ray, 131. Ibid, 131.

Flanner, "Comet," 23.

Vogue Goes to the Collections," Vogue (1 October 1931), 42.

Fijalkowski, "Black Materialism: Surrealism Faces the Commercial World," 109.

Tythacott, Surrealism and the Exotic, 95-6.