If Elsa Schiaparelli is remembered at all outside the world of fashion, it is usually for her signature hue of shocking pink, or her once-famous perfume, Shocking de Schiaparelli, launched in 1937. But this month, almost 60 years after she presented her last collection in the salons of the Place Vendôme, the designer’s imaginative legacy is getting some long-overdue attention thanks to the Metropolitan Museum of Art Costume Institute’s spring exhibition, “Schiaparelli and Prada: Impossible Conversations,” opening to the public on May 10.
Schiaparelli’s designs deliberately subverted traditional notions of beauty—fanciful, bizarre, and irreverent ideas that she developed early in life. Berated by her mother for her homely looks, she grew up thinking of whimsical ways to beautify herself. Her astronomer uncle tried to allay her concerns about a cluster of moles on her cheek by noting their resemblance to the Big Dipper; years later, she recreated the constellation on the chairs in her salon, in embroideries, and on a cherished brooch. Schiap once took flower seeds and sowed them in her ears, mouth, and nose, in the hopes that she would blossom into a beauty. “To have a face covered with flowers like a heavenly garden would indeed be a wonderful thing!” she wrote in her autobiography.
That Surrealist conceit can be seen in the bottle of her popular perfume. The artist Leonor Fini created a glass torso, based on a dress-form of Mae West’s shapely curves, topped off with a heady bouquet of vibrant Dalí-esque flowers—a face like a heavenly garden. The fragrance was a hit, and the Shocking line expanded into lipsticks and powders. Years after Schiap’s workshops and salons were shuttered, her influence on beauty and makeup would live on.
François Nars, who would grow up to be one of the world’s most famous makeup artists, took notice of her when he was just ten or eleven years old. “I probably heard my mom talking about her or came across her work in magazines,” he says.
Nars was fascinated by Schiaparelli’s artistic collaborations—eccentricities like monkey-fur booties inspired by René Magritte and dresses with skeleton-like padding and giant lobster motifs that she created with Salvador Dalí. “It was a time when connections between designers and artists were so rich and fantastic,” he says.
Though Nars was not able to collaborate with Schiaparelli in her lifetime, years later, he was able to create his own tribute to her. It was an original Shocking by Schiaparelli loose powder box, found at an L.A. flea market by a friend, that inspired 1998’s now-classic shocking-pink lipstick, Schiap.
With his lipstick (now also available as a nail polish), Nars wanted “an exact homage to Schiaparelli because it was her color.” It took a few attempts to nail down the precise shade that Schiap herself dubbed “bright, impossible, impudent, becoming, life-giving, like all the light and the birds and the fish in the world put together.” Perfect for Monday night’s gala.