LJ Idol 7, Week 11: Haute
"I gave to a pink the nerve of a red." --Elsa Schiaparelli
Schiap was what the French, with their gift for impeccably polite backhanded compliments, might call jolie-laide, vivacious and charming enough that her unconventional beauty could be forgiven (ugliness of course being unforgivable in a female).
And so she created clothes to conceal the unbeautiful, clothes that would distract from the wearer's plainness. She made harlequin frockcoats garnished with black and red and yellow diamonds, and snow-white dresses stained by a handpainted lobster that, to the unprepared, looked from afar like a huge blot of menstrual blood. In direct contradiction to the then-current trend of concealing fasteners in order to give the impression that the wearer had never undertaken anything so mundane as getting dressed, Schiap made them part of the act. The buttons were bright and gaudy, taking the forms of novelty brooches: bumblebees, crabs, clown faces, hopelessly tacky and wholly original. She painted bright red fingernails on the tips of gloves to remind the wearer that these were now her hands. She hung out with the high priests of the blossoming cult of surrealism--Man Ray, Jean Cocteau, Salvador Dalí--and all of them flowed without reservation between their various mediums, canvas, film, or fabric.
It was art. Possibly even Art, with a big A. It was contradiction. The clothes screamed look at me, look at me! while obliterating the faces of the women who wore them. She chose tall, thin, shapeless women to model her clothes, because women with shapes would distract from the shape of the dresses. A half-hour later, you might not remember what color hair she had. Fifty years later, you still hadn't forgotten that dress.
The impression was that the clothing had outshone the woman, and perhaps it was not surprising. What was a woman if not an object? Woman served a twofold purpose: to be decorative, and to be decorated. It was objectification taken to its most logical extreme. Woman was no longer art, but canvas.
All of it made people slightly uncomfortable, as good art should do. Somehow it was all tied up in the taboo of pointing out that the painting is, after all, just a painting: Ceci n'est pas une pipe. It was accepted that women were, after all, mere decoration, but for their sake it was considered bad form to say as much. Schiap gleefully snatched up the idea and made off with it.
The name that made her famous was shocking, although like all true acts of innovation she did little more than label it and point it out to the world. What could be feminine than pink? What could be more closely associated with the idea of "girl"? She seized hold of pink; she saturated it until it screamed. The name of her signature scent was Shocking, sold in a blinding pink box and contained in a bottle shaped like a woman with no head and no limbs, a mere voluptuous torso. An exquisite corpse.
Her critics were upset. High fashion was not supposed to be amusing, goddammit. They gave her all the usual brush-offs: She's an upstart, a flash in the pan, a clown in the house of couture; maybe she would go away if everyone stopped paying her so much attention.
And to be honest we weren't paying that much attention. As a rule, fashion is so transient that it never quite pays to get involved in its ever-churning mechanics. It produces a lot of variations on a theme but nothing permanent.
One of my colleagues had been wrapped up in the surrealist movement for a number of years--he'd done the same thing with Hieronymus Bosch a while back--but we assumed he was just screwing with people, with no real goal in mind, so we figured we'd leave him to it. Until he turned up one day with a little box in a color the world had never seen before. He gave it to the infamous Non-Smoking Colleague. And when I say gave, he got down on one knee and gave it to her, like a knight with his lady.
She took the box away. Sometimes she's a little clueless, but no one could fail to catch the drift this time: he wasn't giving her the perfume. "What is it?"
And he grinned at her and said, "It's a pink that wants to be red."
Schiap was what the French, with their gift for impeccably polite backhanded compliments, might call jolie-laide, vivacious and charming enough that her unconventional beauty could be forgiven (ugliness of course being unforgivable in a female).
And so she created clothes to conceal the unbeautiful, clothes that would distract from the wearer's plainness. She made harlequin frockcoats garnished with black and red and yellow diamonds, and snow-white dresses stained by a handpainted lobster that, to the unprepared, looked from afar like a huge blot of menstrual blood. In direct contradiction to the then-current trend of concealing fasteners in order to give the impression that the wearer had never undertaken anything so mundane as getting dressed, Schiap made them part of the act. The buttons were bright and gaudy, taking the forms of novelty brooches: bumblebees, crabs, clown faces, hopelessly tacky and wholly original. She painted bright red fingernails on the tips of gloves to remind the wearer that these were now her hands. She hung out with the high priests of the blossoming cult of surrealism--Man Ray, Jean Cocteau, Salvador Dalí--and all of them flowed without reservation between their various mediums, canvas, film, or fabric.
It was art. Possibly even Art, with a big A. It was contradiction. The clothes screamed look at me, look at me! while obliterating the faces of the women who wore them. She chose tall, thin, shapeless women to model her clothes, because women with shapes would distract from the shape of the dresses. A half-hour later, you might not remember what color hair she had. Fifty years later, you still hadn't forgotten that dress.
The impression was that the clothing had outshone the woman, and perhaps it was not surprising. What was a woman if not an object? Woman served a twofold purpose: to be decorative, and to be decorated. It was objectification taken to its most logical extreme. Woman was no longer art, but canvas.
All of it made people slightly uncomfortable, as good art should do. Somehow it was all tied up in the taboo of pointing out that the painting is, after all, just a painting: Ceci n'est pas une pipe. It was accepted that women were, after all, mere decoration, but for their sake it was considered bad form to say as much. Schiap gleefully snatched up the idea and made off with it.
The name that made her famous was shocking, although like all true acts of innovation she did little more than label it and point it out to the world. What could be feminine than pink? What could be more closely associated with the idea of "girl"? She seized hold of pink; she saturated it until it screamed. The name of her signature scent was Shocking, sold in a blinding pink box and contained in a bottle shaped like a woman with no head and no limbs, a mere voluptuous torso. An exquisite corpse.
Her critics were upset. High fashion was not supposed to be amusing, goddammit. They gave her all the usual brush-offs: She's an upstart, a flash in the pan, a clown in the house of couture; maybe she would go away if everyone stopped paying her so much attention.
And to be honest we weren't paying that much attention. As a rule, fashion is so transient that it never quite pays to get involved in its ever-churning mechanics. It produces a lot of variations on a theme but nothing permanent.
One of my colleagues had been wrapped up in the surrealist movement for a number of years--he'd done the same thing with Hieronymus Bosch a while back--but we assumed he was just screwing with people, with no real goal in mind, so we figured we'd leave him to it. Until he turned up one day with a little box in a color the world had never seen before. He gave it to the infamous Non-Smoking Colleague. And when I say gave, he got down on one knee and gave it to her, like a knight with his lady.
She took the box away. Sometimes she's a little clueless, but no one could fail to catch the drift this time: he wasn't giving her the perfume. "What is it?"
And he grinned at her and said, "It's a pink that wants to be red."