Tear Dress, 1938, Elsa Schiaparelli
A coastal town, rocky beaches, ochre buildings. Somewhere beautiful and Catholic. Italy? Spain? The Hotel Cipriani, Venice. The coffeehouse. Alfresco. Everything is pale and perfect. It's either breakfast or dinner. Not lunch; too un-chic. She is, perhaps, alone. She reads Faust. Absentmindedly, she brushes the just barely translucent headscarf to one shoulder. A peek of an austere, fiercely beautiful widow's peak. She has dark hair, dark eyes, pale skin burnt olive by summer. A young wife?
Don't you love when a dress, deceptively simple, is so magnificently, provocatively, incredibly fun-ly evocative? And it's such a personal thing too. One dress can conjure up ten different scenes in as many people. I always have these little visions when I look at a dress I am particularly fond of. Where, who, when. This feels like an old movie dress to me, from the time when movie dresses were memorable and had personalities. Isn't Elsa Schiaparelli wonderful? Obviously her posthumous reputation hasn't held up as Chanel's has, but in the day, they were contemporaries and rivals. Coco famously dismissed Schiaparelli as "that Italian artist who makes clothes". Legendary female designers cat fight? I'm totally there. Forget girl's gone wild, can I please please watch?
I can totally imagine the exchange. Round One: Bias-cutting. Ding Ding. I'll show you. I know my way around a pair of scissors. Okay, that's sleepy, high on pretty dresses me talking. No, stopping talking.
Hotel Cipriani
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