Megan O'Brian

Date of Award

2021

Document Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Bachelors

Department

Humanities

First Advisor

Brion, Katherine

Area of Concentration

Art History

Abstract

Elsa Schiaparelli was an Italian fashion designer based in Paris during the interwar period of the early twentieth century. This thesis will examine her career from a feminist perspective and contextualize her unusual womenswear designs within the Surrealist movement and 1930s Paris, when “New Women” experienced increased freedom and agency, but also, as a consequence, backlash from society. As an active and independent business owner experiencing international success for her unique and “shocking” pieces, Schiaparelli herself was an exemplary New Woman. However, her triumphs did not come without a number of difficulties, and these obstacles and Schiaparelli’s complicated self-image inspired her to explore identity, vulnerability, and objectification in her work. I argue that Schiaparelli reveled in the artifice of feminine performance, using it to fashion a new, empowered image for the wearer of her designs by employing Surrealist strategies that include mirroring/doubling, shocking juxtapositions, and uncanny illusions. Her use of a layered Surrealist visual language in fashion allowed her to test the boundaries of this movement by deflecting the over-sexualization of the female body in the context of commercial fashion. In her countering of Surrealist misogyny, she contributed not only to the avant-garde group but to the zeitgeist of Parisian society in the 1930s. Though Schiaparelli’s work has often been dismissed by critics as less radical and impactful than Surrealism in the fine arts, it is my argument she introduced an entirely new and innovative expansion of the movement by extending onto the physical body in a manner that questioned and critiqued the performed identity.

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