Fashion in interwar France: The urban vision of Elsa Schiaparelli

Abstract

Elsa Schiaparelli’s avant-garde designs and her collaborative efforts with surrealist artists are the subject of most analyses of her work, which focus on themes of glamour, gender and the construction of a modern feminine beauty. Yet a number of lesser-known creations from the 1920s and 1930s, equally experimental in nature, reveal other progressive themes in the Italian-born designer’s oeuvre. References to the city in a number of her pieces, for example, provide a commentary on the important relationship between fashion, women and their urban environments. This article examines designs like the skyscraper silhouette, plastic accessories and new synthetic fabrics, echoing contemporary building materials, alongside the changing landscape of interwar Paris. Comparing the imagined city suggested in Schiaparelli’s sartorial creations with the real metropolis where these garments were worn, this study reveals fashion’s potential to express women’s desires for an improved urban reality.