LJ Idol 7, Week 11: Haute

[black_aspect]

"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

Comments

[solstice_singer]

I know very little about fashion. It's not high on my list of important things in life. However, I definitely agree with you that what little I do know of it seems to serve to objectify women. Perhaps not so much in recent times, but definitely historically.

[black_aspect]

I'm usually more of an arty-person than a fashionista, but I don't think there has been a time up until perhaps very, very recently when women were allowed to dictate their own style. It's always something that has been dictated for them, and purely by coincidence it always manages to display whatever body part is the object of male admiration.

[comedychick]

I'm quite a fan of Salvador Dalí so reading this interested me. Though I admit I was also uncomfortable with the idea that women are just there to be looked at, but I think that was the point. You illustrated that really well.

[black_aspect]

If you're strong of stomach, there is a pretty amazing book called Exquisite Corpse: Surrealism and the Black Dahlia Murder that makes a flawed but very compelling argument that the death of the Black Dahlia was very similar visually with what the Surrealist movement was doing figuratively with the human (female) body. Just from that description you can probably see where the HUGE flaw in the reasoning comes from.

But once it gets away from the murder case, it makes some very interesting statements about how the image of disjointed, disconnected parts is very strong in surrealism, forcing the eye to acknowledge that objectifying a human body into discrete parts is very jarring and unnatural.

[comedychick]

Um. I'm not sure I do have the stomach for that! Wow. o.O

[black_aspect]

I know. If they'd release it in a version without illustrations, they'd make a fortune.

[xo_kizzy_xo]

For a time as a teenager I collected books about fashion and cosmetics. One of the books was by the actress Marisa Berenson. Schiap was her grandmother. Berenson devoted a couple of chapters to her and made it her mission, through her clothing, to carry on Schiap's designs, right down to the colors (IIRC Schiap was the one who started the blinding pink/screaming green color combo -- there was a centerplate in the book showing Marisa wearing not only that, but all sorts of loud colors).

Hm, wonder if my love for funky colors stems from her?

[black_aspect]

Schiap is definitely one of those people about whom there is a tiny fascinating universe of information--so much so that, once you start looking, you wonder how on earth she's slipped through the cracks when some of her contemporaries (Coco Chanel being the shining example) are still very much present in the collective subconscious. Sometimes it seems that the only thing about her that has really endured is that shade of pink.

Jennifer Lawrence wore a gorgeous Schiaparelli pink gown to the SAG awards Sunday night. So it's still out there, getting air-time.

[xo_kizzy_xo]

The sad thing is, unless you're into fashion, you've probably never heard of her unless you're of a certain age. Her whimsy, certainly. But not her.

ETA: Now I wish I knew where that book is -- you're making me want to re-read it :)

[hammaboo]

There was so much in this that read like poetry to me, yet I also learned something. Nice job!

[black_aspect]

Thank you! I liked your take on this topic too.

[momebie]

That Hieronymus Bosch. What a weirdo.

;)

I found this really inviting as a read. I like the straightforward way you lay it out for us.