The Mother of Strange Fashion

PARIS — A woman wears a long thermometer on a hook hanging from her ear, her chin up and her eyes softly closed, in a photograph taken by artist Man Ray around 1920, shortly time after the 1918 influenza pandemic.

One ​​hundred years later, another woman hangs a negative Covid-19 rapid test, adorned with rhinestones and gold, from her ear. a heart of gold hanging down. This photo was taken at the end of 2021.

These are the images — which have absolutely nothing to do with designer Elsa Schiaparelli — that came to mind browsing a new exhibition devoted to the Italian-born seamstress, who founded her brand in 1927.

Schiaparelli was a designer who put things where they weren't shouldn't have been: hands on belts, aspirin on necklaces, cicadas on buttons, claws on fingertips of gloves. But these "little jokes", as The New Yorker wrote of his style in 1932, "turned out to be big influences". (The jokes were also, at times, so practical that they became less funny: During Prohibition, Schiaparelli sold an evening suit with a bustle capable of concealing a gourd; later, she made a jumpsuit to wear in bomb shelters. -aerial.)

But the creator has also forged a reputation as "underestimated", believes Olivier Gabet, director of the Museum of Decorative Arts, who will present " Shocking! The Surreal World of Elsa Schiaparelli" Wednesday through January 22.

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