Surrealist? Modernist? Artist? - The Vicissitudes of Elsa Schiaparelli

Elsa Schiaparelli has been variously portrayed as a surrealist, a modernist, an artist and a designer. Described by Chanel as 'that Italian artist who makes clothes', in her three decades as a couturier Schiaparelli drew on, engaged with and transformed schools of modernist and surrealist art and design, working with figures such as Marcel Duchamp, Jean Cocteau and Salvador Dalí.

This article considers Schiaparelli's interactions with both modernism and surrealism, asking how her experience as a woman and designer affected her status as artist/surrealist/modernist. In reference to writing about and by Schiaparelli, her fashion designs, and theorisations of modernism and surrealism, I question the usefulness of such categories while also utilising them to explore the vicissitudes of Schiaparelli's liminal position - both and neither artist/designer, modernist/surrealist.

In incorporating elements from these often contradictory categories, all within the "feminine" sphere of fashion, Schiaparelli's work destabilises prevailing definitions of modernist and surrealist art, revealing parallels and tensions between the two movements. In performing aspects of both modernism and surrealism, Schiaparelli's designs resist definition as either. Drawing on the work of Yuri Lotman, I argue that her designs are 'cultural translations' of both surrealist and modernist art. In them, she adapts, embodies and popularises niche, abstract, 'masculine' notions into garments that women actually wore, subverting ideas of femininity, the 'modern woman', fashion, and modernist/surrealist art in the process.