ELSA SOULÈVE TOUS: AN ASTROLOGICAL JOURNEY

The nineteenth century's imagosphere is scattered  by astronomical illustrations, engraving and lithographs of celestial bodies which fierce flow above the vault of heaven. The illustrated (and now, of course, controversial) volume Astronomie des Dames. Précis d’Astronomie Descriptive published in 1903 by the French astronomer Camille Flammarion, accounts how this 19th and 20th-century fascination had progressively aroused the interest of the female public. Dedicated to Mme. Cavaré, the first woman member of La Société Astronomique de France, these lectures directly addressed to [de] women and not for [pour] women, providing a seminal compendium to penetrate the mysteries of the celestial vault, it simultaneously unfolds a throbbing narrative of images. More precisely, the volume offers a constellation of iconographies recorded from the deep darkness of spaces light-years distant, giving a look iconique to such pulsating astral bodies.

Amidst the pictures and charts that punctuate Flammarion's treatise, ecstatic Selenes of the machine age are caught star-gazing the breathing epidermis of the nocturnal sky. On the grainy paper surface, the geometries of Constellation de Pégase and Cassiopée unseal linear embroideries composed of stars and threadlike vectors. While the Nébuleuse des Chiens de Chasse gleams like a twisted tissu plissé, arcana miniatures garnish each chapter’s conclusion like precious bijoux. 

I cannot stop thinking of an illustration, or rather a figure, that I would like to mention introducing the revolutionary genius of Elsa Schiaparelli. Extraordinary attention is given by early 20th-century French publications to the transit of comets. From the storm of étoiles filantes that fell on earth on 12 November 1790 to the Grand Comète, which rushed inflamed above Notre Dame on the Parisian night of 1858, comets, from being phenomena observed with suspicion and fear, have risen to privileged objects of observation. From the ancient Greek (aster) komētēs, literally, an “astre chevelu” [long-haired star], results in a stylish conglomerate made of crystals, water, ammonia and metal dust. Hovering around the sun, this elongated star follows eccentric trajectories foreshadowing exceptional events and bearing an unprecedented “excitation électrique”, almost as if “Phébus”, the deity of light,  “soufflait sur elles avec une force inouïe”.

Schiaparelli not only embodies a comet's exceptionality in having deconstructed the rules of Parisian haute couture since the last quarter of the Twenties but demonstrates with astronomy a biographical and suitably inventive relation. There is no biographer of Schiaparelli, who was born in Rome in September 1890, who does not report the anecdote that her paternal uncle Giovanni Virgilio Schiaparelli had recognized the configuration of Ursa Major in the pleiad of moles that sprinkled on her left cheek. As the second-born of a prominent Roman family, the influence exerted on the young Schiaparelli by Giovanni, an astronomer of Emilian origin and director of the Brera Observatory, emerges from critical literature. From Meryle Secrest's biographical recognition, we know that the adolescent Elsa fondly recalled her stays at her Napoleonic uncle's dwelling. From him, she had adopted the inclination to contemplate the sky employing a large telescope, and her curiosity for the most extravagant aspects of the solar system — the publication of a scientific study by Giovanni Schiaparelli on Mars’ topography dates back to 1903.

On the other hand, like any guiding star, the young Schiaparelli seems destined to cover eccentric trajectories. At 20, in 1911, the future couturière published a collection of erotic poems with the virginal title Arethusa, protégée of hunter Artemis. From her subsequent move to a Swiss boarding school to her brief London marriage to the theosophist William de Wendt de Kerlor, Schiaparelli arrived in the Ville Lumière in 1922. In Paris, còmete Schiaparelli thinks in movement, winding through the arteries of the metropolis, driving an equally futuristic means of transportation: une voiture rugissante. Compared to her illustrated ancestress, however, the creator does not merely contemplate the celestial vault: ideally handling the astrolabe with her fingers, she experiments with its figures, lemmas and rules.

The sophisticated embroideries, the geometries constructed by the removable inserts and the reflection on an astrological iconography, perhaps inspired by frequenting Giovanni's essays, find a crucial interlocutor in the French cultural milieu shaken by the Dadaist revolution and close to the Surrealist one. Blending haute couture and sportswear ante litteram, in January 1927, Schiaparelli launched a line of hand-woven knitwear with black and white geometric elements and a four-dimensional detail: a collar and a charming vermilion bow sewed in trompe-l’œil. Wandering through time and space can mean keeping the body firmly on the ground extending the boundaries of fashion and giving rise to singularly tasteful garments such as the jupe-culotte launched in 1931. Or, it can mean making objects plummet from their centre of gravity, as with the disorienting Chapeau-chaussure created in collaboration with Salvador Dali for the 1937-38 winter collection.

While in July 1934, the illustrated magazine “Les Modes” celebrated Elsa Schiaparelli with a photographic portrait under the heading 'Les leaders de la mode', the connections among the couturière and Surrealist artists originated a series of legendary pieces. Salvador Dali, Meret Oppenheim, Alberto Giacometti, Jean Cocteau, Man Ray are few names in this revolutionary weave. Besides the iconic Lobster Dress (1937) designed by Salvador Dali with Schiaparelli, the following Evening Dress (Skeleton Dress) from a drawing by the Spanish artist took shape in 1938. The female exoskeleton, embossed on a black evening dress, generates a nocturnal diagram in relief that one would be inclined to feel with one's fingers.

A tireless experimenter with the most heterogeneous materials, among which the transparent cellophane and inventeur of the unique “shocking pink”, it is in the Cosmique Collection showing for winter 1938-39 that the stellar influence, transpired so far by formal means, reveals itself as a luminous iconographic reference. As Dylis Blum has already pointed out, this collection represents the most sumptuous imagined by the eccentric créatrice. Designing garments whose wearability appears to be inspired by “Euclidean geometry” and studded with astrological, mythological and even Roi Soleil references, it seems that the legacy of Giovanni Schiaparelli — and also of his brother Ernesto, a renowned Italian Egyptologist — now becomes structural. I'm not just thinking of the Phoebus Cape produced by Albert Lesage et Cie, a sumptuous pink cape which presents embroidered the irradiated face of the solar deity, as much as of the Evening Jacket (Zodiac) disclosed in the summer of 1937.

Lightly embroidered on a base of precious midnight-blue silk, the garment seems to bring together and finely orchestrate the numerous illustrations that punctuate Giovanni Schiaparelli's Astronomia Popolare, the second edition of which was printed ten years earlier, in 1927. The diurnal motion of comets, the planetary orbits intersecting tiny suns, and the flaming blurred tails portrayed in the volume glow in an exquisite firmament of metal, rhinestones and glass. In its pictographic logic this bijou du zodiaque echoes the impenetrable Egyptian codes that Ernesto Schiaparelli passionately decrypted.

Aligning my writing to the astral course, I recall how Camille Flammarion and Giovanni Schiaparelli emphasized the periodic temporality possessed by certain comets. In 2022, Maison Schiaparelli reopened the shutters under the leadership of Canadian designer Daniel Roseberry. The Nouvelle Maison weaved an accurate dialogue with Elsa Schiaparelli's legacy, understanding her disruptive surrealist vocation, her innate sensitivity for materials and her authentic concern for symbolic representations. Therefore, it is not surprising to glimpse, among the magnificent garments presented for the Haute Couture Summer Collection 2022, a theory of tinned golden rays, helioform nimbuses and an architectonic buster emulates in its structure an astronomical apparatus. Likewise, the auspices of the eternal Schiaparelli còmete, which doubles its perihelion in a way that can only be described as très chic, echo in time light years.