When I was a child, one of my favorite pieces of clothing was a white cotton shirt with French words written all over it. I didn’t know it then, but many decades before, an Italian woman living in Paris had designed the prototype for that newsprint fabric.
Later, as I read more about Elsa Schiaparelli, I discovered that she was responsible for some of my most whimsical fashion choices: turbans, roomy skirts with huge pockets, shoulder pads, a leopard-print coat, folk embroidery, funky buttons, a little evening bag of meshed gunmetal as a kind of “make love, not war” statement, even a see-through blouse, though mine had strategic double layers for the pockets. They all originated as Schiaparelli designs that took up permanent residence in the fashion world, filtering all the way down, through the decades, to small-town girls like me who bought their clothing in department stores, off the rack.
The thirties was a golden age of couture, and it was dominated by one city: Paris, and that city was dominated by two women: Coco Chanel and Elsa Schiaparelli. Everyone has heard of Coco; too few have heard of Schiap, as she called herself (pronounced scape with a hard sch, as in school). Unlike Coco, whose rough, deprived childhood is legendary, Schiap was born into wealth, grew up surrounded by books and art and educated people. Yet as soon as she could, she ran away, first to New York and then to Paris, and chose her own path, her own life, one of hard work, occasional hard knocks, and more than a little heartache.
It was inevitable that she and Coco would become lifelong rivals in that city, in that industry.
One of the central scenes in this novel, that of Coco dancing Schiap into a flaming candelabra, is based on an actual event. That was the passion of their rivalry. The polarity of their political beliefs, as portrayed in my novel, is based on fact. They were both suspected of collaboration with the enemy and spying.
Did they help the Germans? Schiap traveled freely, made and maintained important connections, and, during the war, had many wealthy Germans among her clients. However, in her early years, thanks probably to the influence of the husband she loved, and who had abandoned her, she had been a known Bolshevist and political activist. In Paris she joined an antifascist group and during the war she fought to keep the fashion industry in Paris, though Hitler wanted it moved to Berlin.
Coco Chanel did have an affair with von Dincklage and spent most of the war years holed up with the head of Nazi propaganda and other German officials at the Ritz. Even if she wasn’t a spy actively working for the Germans (and there are those who say she was), she was a collaborator or, as they described such women, a “horizontal collaborator.” She was far from alone in that category; as soon as the Germans marched out of Paris, thousands of Frenchmen and -women were charged with, or at least accused of, collaborating. There’s a good chance that if Winston Churchill hadn’t sent a well-timed letter, Coco might have ended up in prison. But he did, and she didn’t, and after the war her reputation grew, rather than diminished.
Coco’s war years are described in Hal Vaughan’s book Sleeping with the Enemy: Coco Chanel’s Secret War, and there are several excellent biographies about her, including Lisa Chaney’s Coco Chanel: An Intimate Life, Rhonda Garelick’s Mademoiselle: Coco Chanel and the Pulse of History, and Justine Picardie’s Coco Chanel: The Legend and the Life. I particularly recommend Paul Morand’s The Allure of Chanel (with illustrations by Karl Lagerfeld), based on his conversations with Coco. It’s Coco’s life, as told by Coco, and while it may not be completely accurate, it’s fascinating reading.
There are, sadly, few biographies of Elsa Schiaparelli, but Meryle Secrest’s fabulous Elsa Schiaparelli is about as complete as a biography can be, and Palmer White, who was a friend of Elsa’s daughter, Gogo, has also written a great, and wonderfully illustrated, biography of Schiaparelli. Elsa’s granddaughter Marisa Schiaparelli Berenson published the wonderfully intimate Elsa Schiaparelli’s Private Album, and Elsa also wrote her own autobiography, Shocking Life.
The series Vogue on has published Vogue on Coco Chanel and Vogue on Elsa Schiaparelli, two little volumes that trace both the lives and the artistry of the women.
The Museum of Art in Philadelphia contains several Schiaparelli costumes and put up a show called Shocking!: The Art and Fashion of Elsa Schiaparelli some years ago. An important book about the exhibit, by the same name and authored by Dilys E. Blum, is still available. The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York also includes some Schiaparelli designs and put up their own exhibit and book, Schiaparelli & Prada, comparing the two designers and the conversations and parallels in their work.
Other invaluable texts for this story include My Grandfather’s Gallery: A Family Memoir of Art and War, by Anne Sinclair, granddaughter of Paul Rosenberg; Samuel Marx’s Queen of the Ritz about Blanche Auzello, who ran the great hotel with her husband during the thirties; The Hotel on Place Vendôme, by Tilar J. Mazzeo; Over Here!: New York City During World War II, by Lorraine B. Diehl; Charlie Scheips’s Elsie de Wolfe’s Paris: Frivolity Before the Storm; and Fireworks at Dusk: Paris in the Thirties, by Olivier Bernier.
I also recommend, for pleasure as well as research, Théâtre de la Mode: Fashion Dolls: The Survival of Haute Couture, based on a 1945 traveling exhibit of couture-dressed dolls organized by the Chambre Syndicale de la Couture to jump-start the fashion industry at the end of the war.
I’m sure I’ve left someone or something out; if so, please accept my apologies. Keeping order and track of five years of reading and research can be like trying to find all the pins on the floor.
Both Coco and Schiap survived the war, but the world changed, grew more serious and less playful. Schiap’s couture house went into decline and then bankruptcy. And while Schiap had a pleasant and relaxing time in that hammock in Tunisia, I’m sure she missed the hustle of collection week, the thrill of a new design, a new concept appearing in her imagination. She died in her sleep, in 1973, at age eighty-three. She died not knowing, thankfully, that one of her beloved grandchildren, Gogo’s daughter Berry, would die in one of the planes that crashed into the World Trade Center on 9/11.
Coco died in Paris, in 1971, at the grand age of eighty-seven.
I doubt Schiap ever forgot that fashion and politics are inextricably linked. What we wear gives messages about our beliefs, our hopes, our fears, from the everyday blue jeans of rebellious adolescence to the power suits women felt necessary in the 1970s. And when our clothing choices are made for us by others, part of our identity is threatened, some of our freedom removed.
At the end of Shocking Life Elsa Schiaparelli lists twelve commandments for women, and number five is my favorite: “Ninety percent [of women] are afraid of being conspicuous and of what people will say. So they buy a grey suit. They should dare to be different.” Her last commandment was to the point: “And she should pay her bills.”