The Great Fashion Designers by Brenda Polan Page B

now, she had 600 employees producing 10,000 pieces a year, promoted through two major and two minor collections a year.
    Her willingness to experiment with fabric is the less-appreciated story of her career. Schiaparelli worked with rayon and nylon, paper and Cellophane, even rubber and latex. In 1934, she created glass-look tunics that were fashioned from a synthetic calledRhodophane. Even more conventional fabrics were used in unconventional ways. Tweeds were introduced to evening wear, a waterproof taffeta was explored for raincoats and cotton was passed off as linen. After her retirement, she was quick to appreciate the emerging influence of denim. Every detail required rethinking by Schiaparelli, who derided the mundane. Her buttons, for instance, were legendary. ‘The most incredible things were used,’ she recalled later in life. ‘Animals and feathers, caricatures and paperweights, chains, locks, clips and lollipops. Some were of wood and others of plastic, but not one looked like what a button was supposed to look like.’
    Although Schiaparelli breezed through the challenges of the Great Depression, the same could not be said of the Second World War. Deeply hostile to Nazi Germany and to Mussolini’s fascists in her Italian homeland, she hung on in Paris for a while, producing a series of underrated but inspired collections that made the best of the shortage of materials and responded to the mood of the times for functional, practical clothes. In May 1941, on the advice of the American consul, she left Paris and spent most of the war in America, where she worked as a fund-raiser and nurse. With the end of the war, Schiaparelli hoped to pick up where she had left off, but Christian Dior’s New Look swept most of the pre-war designers away. Schiaparelli’s weaknesses—a tendency to overstate, a reliance on gimmicks—were exposed. A series of collections in the 1940s were politely but not enthusiastically received. The spirit of innovation was still there, such as her Constellation travel coat and bag for the new generation of air travelers, but her timing was off. Post-war women wanted escapism and a return to traditional femininity.
    Only in America, a country that Schiaparelli had come to know well during prolonged residences in the early 1920s and early 1940s, did she appear to retain the same magical touch. In 1949 she opened a branch of her company at 530 Seventh Avenue, New York City, to mass-produce suits, dresses and coats. Her ‘shortie’ jackets, Pyramid line of coats and shocking pink lingerie were all well received. Back home in France, the business continued to bleed financially into the early 1950s. Despite this, she went on creating collections until 1954, with the continued success of her perfumes, most notably Shocking, carrying the financial burden. In retirement, she led an active peripatetic life, enjoying her home in Tunisia, until a series of strokes confined her to her home at 22 rue de Berri, Paris. Schiaparelli never married again after the disaster of her first marriage. Although she had affairs, she deliberately avoided serious attachments. Aged 83, she died in her sleep in 1973.
    As an employer, Schiaparelli was demanding and sparing with compliments. That said, she paid well and inspired fierce loyalty among her staff. She also formed long-lasting professional liaisons that served her well, championing the embroidery house of Lesage and exploring new synthetic fabrics with Charles Colcombet. As for artists, there were few who did not know or collaborate with Schiaparelli, the results varying from a Salvador Dali lobster on an evening dress to a spirited Jean Cocteau sketch transformed into a Lesage embroidery. Such a symbiosis between art and fashion has never been equalled since. American curator Richard Martin called her ‘a visionary [who] touched clothing with the capacity to be art.’
    Schiaparelli was often frustrated by the