Fashion ang Surreal

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Fashion and Surrealism
Richard Martin

Here are some of the most extravagant and

ingenious images ever created in art and in haute
couture: fruits of the love affair between fashion
and Surrealism. Their relationship began in
the Paris of the 1920s when Surrealist artists
experimented not only with the fine arts but
with photography, film and costume design.
They plundered the imagery of fashion for their
paintings and graphic arts, and in turn they
raised fashion beyond the level of mere style
to an important expression of culture. Elsa
Schiaparelli collaborated with Salvador Dali to
make Surrealist dresses that shocked her clients;
photographers Horst P. Horst, Cecil Beaton
and George Hoyningen-Huene experimented
with Surrealist techniques and produced an
astonishingly creative counterpart in fashion
photography to the images of Giorgio de Chirico,
Reneé Magritte and Max Ernst. Illustrators
Marcel Vertes and A.M. Cassandre also adopted
imagery from Surrealism’s pioneers — some of
whom, like Dali, entered the field of fashion
themselves.
Although the force of Surrealism as an
art movement had declined by the end of the
Second World War, its influence on dress design,
window display and advertising has continued,
particularly among new generations of fashion
designers — Olivier Guillemin, Marc Jacobs,
Cinzia Ruggieri and Vivienne Westwood have
all brought fresh Surrealist imagery into
clothing and accessories.
With 300 startling illustrations, this is an
entertaining and absorbing account of the
dialogue between fashion and Surrealism over
more than half a century.

‘Explores the continuing relationship

2
between high art and the creative world of
clothes’ — The Times
‘Provokes, amuses and raises questions
about the ambiguous interaction between
subversion and commerce’ — i-D

With 300 illustrations, 50 in colour

ON THE COVER: Tony Viramontes

Fashion Editorial: Rifat Ozbek. Published The Face, June 1986
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 ASHION AND

THAMES AND HUDSON

RICHARD MARTIN
 PAGES 2—3
MAN RAY (American, 1890—1976)
Beautiful as the Fortuitous Encounter on a
Dissecting Table of a Sewing Machine and an
Umbrella, 1933
Photograph
Man Ray Archives, Paris

PAGES 4—5
THIERRY MUGLER
Bird Dresses with Bird Cage, 1982
Photograph Scott Heiser

.. First published in Great Britain in 1988 by

Thames and Hudson Ltd, London
First paperback edition 1989 Reprinted 1996

Originally published in the United States of America in 1987

by Rizzoli International Publications, Inc.
300 Park Avenue South, New York NY 10010

Copyright © 1987 The Fashion Institute of Technology

Any copy of this book issued by the publisher as a paperback

is sold subject to the condition that it shall not by way of
trade or otherwise be lent, resold, hired out or otherwise
circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form
of binding or cover other than that in which it is first pub-
lished and without a similar condition including these words
being imposed on a subsequent purchaser

All Rights Reserved. No part of this publication may be

reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means,
electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording
or any other information storage and retrieval system, without
prior permission in writing from the publisher

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN 0-500-27550-5

Printed and bound by Toppan Printing Co., Ltd., Japan

CONTENTS

Introduction 9
Metaphor and Metamorphosis rag
Bodies and Parts 48
Displacements and Illusions 106
| Nanural and Unnatural Worlds 138
Doyenne and Dandy 196
Surrealism and the World
of Fashion 216
etrowledetent: 235
Index 237
 ~~

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INTRODUCTION

The Surrealist revolution was, like any other, dressed in style.

The first generation of Surrealists—André Breton, Paul
Eluard, Louis Aragon, and others, who founded the move-
ment in the 1920s—in the ardor and rigor of their definitions
and exclusions may not have concerned themselves with the
garb of their revolutionary pose, but Surrealism’s impulse
and compulsion to revolt was necessarily accompanied by_
fashion suitable tothe revolution. Moreover, the metaphor
and meaning of fashion were at the heart of Surrealist visual
language and offered a natural correspondence tothe physi-_
cal properties of disfigurement that became apparent in Sur-
realist style.
As the initial incendiary eruptions of Surrealism reified
into an artistic style in the 1930s and thereafter, the fashion
arts came to serve as a statement of the Surrealist vision and
of the Surrealist faith in the connections between the every-
day and the exceptional. Fashion became Surrealism’s most
compelling friction between the ordinary and extraordinary,
between disfigurement and embellishment, body and con-
cept, artifice and the real. Fashion’s persistent preoccupation
with Surrealism and Surrealism’s fascination with fashion
serve to identify the insurrection art offers to daily life and
the accommodations style can make to the commanding vi-
sion of art. That is, art of an inherently revolutionary charac-
ter can make manifest its ideas in fashion. To some, it may
seem difficult to imagine that an art initially composed of
concepts and words and subsequently of images generated in
the complexities of the intellect and subconscious imagina-
tion would have its substantive consequence in the fashion
arts, but that political picaresque is neither a denial of Surre-
alism’s values nor a depreciation of the fashion arts. Issues
abide as readily and lastingly in dress and its conventions as
in any other art. In fact, matters of fashion are especially
powerful in their social and political implications and inti-
mate contact with human values.
Concepts may be naked at birth, but they are soon swad-
dled in realities. The clothing that embraced the naked con-
cepts of Surrealism became the inevitable signifier of the
concepts it dressed and addressed. Surrealism’s traffic be-
tween the interior and exterior worlds was not diminished by
the role of apparel in art; rather, the substantive participation
of fashion in the definition of Surrealism and Surrealist
style—the insinuation of fashion’s tissue between the naked
and the profane, the nude and the profound—yielded a deli-
cate membrane of vibration between Surrealism’s abiding
antipodes of art and life. 9
IO
 METAPHOR AND
METAMORPHOSIS
In the beginning was the word. Surrealism began with the
spoken and written word. Its early documents and richly
evocative texts testify to an art of theoretical initiatives and
verbal foundation. The first-generation Surrealists were, after
all, convened by the words of Dada, the ideas of Freud, and
the polemics of social conviction about art. While the word
plays a resonant role throughout Surrealism, even in the fash-
ion arts, that preoccupation was soon complemented by a
fascination with objects. And almost immediately objects
were accompanied by the fine arts. Only later, primarily
through the premier Surrealists working in Paris in the
1930s, did Surrealism fully seize the fashion arts. But when
Surrealism came to fashion it was with fervor. Overtaking the
fashion arts with zeal, Surrealism has never left. Ideas about
fashion presentation in magazines, window display, and ap-
parel have changed in the intervening years, but Surrealism
remains fashion’s favorite art.
Fashion and its instruments were at the heart of the Surre-
alist metaphor, touching on the imagery of woman and the
correlation between the world of real objects and the life of
objects in the mind. The Surrealist propensity to probe the
epic description by Isidore Ducasse, Comte de Lautréamont,
of the beautiful as “the chance encounter of a sewing ma-
chine and an umbrella on a dissecting table” reveals Surreal-
ism’s need for language, imagery, and fashion. The recourse
to Lautréamont, in a line from his poem Les Chants de Mal-
doror (1868—70), is also indicative of the Surrealist fascina-
tion with the heritage of French literary Symbolism of the
nineteenth century. As the Surrealists would have it, beauty
comes by chance because of the innately superior conditions
of the subconscious to those that are controlled and regu-
lated by reason. The rational would always subjugate the true
impulses of language, the Surrealists assert, but for the unan-
ticipated, the extraordinary, and the aleatory. Lautréamont’s
example depends upon the trio of objects as well as their jux-
taposition. His description was used both literally and evoc-
atively by the American artist Man Ray. In his photograph
OPPOSITE
MAN RAY Beautiful as the Fortuitous Encounter on a Dissecting Table
Gift, 1921 (replica c. 1958) of a Sewing Machine and an Umbrella (1933; frontispiece),
Flatiron with metal tacks, 6% X 35/s X 4¥2in. he saw the image in a clear-eyed manner, almost banal in its
The Museum of Modern Art, New York obvious depiction of an odd juxtaposition. In the sculpture
James Thrall Soby Fund The Enigma ofIsidore Ducasse (1920; pp. 12-13), Man Ray
In the nineteenth century, the depiction of offered his vision clairvoyantly and mystically, allowing us to
ironing in art identified the remorseless labor of understand the contents of the work by what we know intel-
women; Man Ray’s Gift is the ironic Surrealist lectually and by our assumptions based on the title. Even as
object that thwarts its utility and titillates the
imagination.
we believe we know what lies beneath the hemp and twine, 11
 the shape maintains its hulking uncertainty. Like Surrealism MAN RAY (American, 1890-1976)
in general, the object cherishes its secrecy. The dissecting ta- The Enigma of Isidore Ducasse, 1920 (replica
ble, in its uninflected whiteness, variously interpreted as the 1967)
Cloth and rope over sewing machine,
bed and the clear plane of examination, provides the place 16 in. high
of confrontation for the umbrella, symbol of the male, and The Museum of Modern Art, New York
the sewing machine, an updating of the distaff as symbol of the Study Collection
female. Furthermore, the sewing machine could represent the Provocative, mysterious, the Man Ray
female worker who in the early years of this century worked photograph (paGEs 2—3) and object are based
in the clothing industry, but it could also represent woman’s ona line from Les Chants de Maldoror by the
industriousness in the home in the task of providing dress. nineteenth-century French poet Isidore
Ducasse, who wrote under the name ““Comte de
Becoming an easy aphorism for Surrealist chance and juxta-
Lautréamont.” Published by André Breton in
position, the encounter proposed by Lautréamont establishes Littérature in 1919, Ducasse’s text offered a
the sewing machine as an essential surrogate for the woman. premise for the Surrealist examination of
Its process is deemed female and its consequence—fashion— objects, particularly the sewing machine.
is also preeminently female. When Man Ray attempted to
give a mysterious presence to the poetic encounter in The
Enigma of Isidore Ducasse, he created a visual sign, even in
its absence of sight within, for the poet’s declaration. What
poetry had thereby declared to be possible, art could
substantiate.
But the sewing machine and its products were not invisible
in the Surrealist world. The technology of the machine held
its own special allure for the artists of the modern revolution,
and the sewing machine itself was a palpable presence. Jo-
seph Cornell, the American artist who became famous for his
idiosyncratic Surrealist-inspired collages, was employed in
the 1930s as a textile designer for the Traphagen Commercial
Textile Studio in New York. There he recognized the sewing
machine as an instrument of fabrication and fantasy. The
sewing machine makes the clothing, but it also makes the
woman, as if sewn/sown from the fruition of the machine.
Cornell’s understanding of the fertility of the sewing machine
was already apparent in his untitled 1931 collage (p. 15), sub-
sequently published in Harper’s Bazaar as one of two images
dealing with sewing; in them the sewing machine creates not
only the garment but also the woman within it. In the back-
ground, women work at sewing machines along an assembly
line. Flowers and corn appear as the raw materials of textile
and ultimately of the fashionable woman who emerges as the
machine’s creation. Redolent of the Lautréamont metaphor
for beauty, Cornell’s model ex machina is fashion’s creation
from the raw and psychologically charged materials of the
sewing machine. Cornell shared with many Surrealists an
obsession with the image of woman and a reticence about
women. Such contradictory impulses in image-making could
be reconciled by the sewing machine as woman’s symbol.
The sewing machine had always been present in the Surre-
alist vision, from an early occurrence in an object, Here Lies
Giorgio de Chirico (reproduced in La Révolution Surréaliste,
March 15, 1928), by Louis Aragon and André Breton, which
places a small sewing machine in front of a model of the
Tower of Pisa, through such examples as Salvador Dali’s cat-
alog cover for an exhibition of his prints at the Julien Levy
Gallery in New York in 1934 (an early and critical Surrealist
exhibition in the United States) and a sewing machine within
a landscape in the Prague Surrealist bulletin of April 9, 1935.
What Man Ray saw within the enigma of a package, Oscar
Dominguez viewed as specifically sexual in his Electrosexual
Sewing Machine (1934; p. 14), again with the woman and
fertility as the machine’s production. In a 1934 edition of
Lautréamont’s Chants de Maldoror (p. 15), Dali illustrates
12 the sewing machine in the process of creating woman, a me-
 OSCAR DOMINGUEZ (French, born
Spain, 1906-1957)
Electrosexual Sewing Machine, 1934
Oilon canvas, 39 ¥s X 31 Ys in.
Private collection, Paris

Enigmatic, erotic, even exploitative,

Dominguez’s perception of the sewing machine
draws on other Surrealist objects.

unchanging aspects of the fine arts. The mechanistic fantasies

of mannequins, machines, quasi-equations, and animated
dress forms provided Ernst with the translation of the me-
chanical devices favored by Dada into a more implicitly hu-
manized or anthropomorphic art preferred by the Surrealists.
It is as if Goya’s image of the mannequin as surrogate for the
human being was being brought into the new century and a
new context. The precise measurements and anthropometric
calculations of Fiat modes offer another device in fashion’s
comprehension and metamorphosis. Whereas Vitruvian the-
ory and the Renaissance study of perspective had placed man
and his optic at the center of all quantification and viewing,
Ernst placed the mannequin there as the measure of all that
surrounds. To see the tailor as the artist and the mannequin
as form is to make of Pygmalion a story about clothing. In de-
claring pereat ars, Ernst denounced the pretension of the fine
arts in favor of the creative energy of fashion. Although this
gesture was finally no more than a symbolic action on Ernst’s
part, it permitted subsequent artists to present their work in
“low art’ formats, like that of the lithograph on inexpensive
chanistic version of the tale from Genesis. The God-Creator paper utilized in Fiat modes. Ernst proffered the possibility
for Dali is the male force, not necessarily the Godhead, but of mistaking his art for a sales catalog, a commerical adver-
the male who creates, cannibalizes, and controls. To the tisement, or the popular newspaper and magazine represen-
aphorism that clothes make the man, the Surrealists offered tations of fashion that were becoming commonplace in the
their alternative: the sewing machine makes the woman. By new century. It is, then, not entirely startling to realize that in
extension, the beauty residing in the woman—and all those 1927 and 1928 Belgian Surrealist artist René Magritte il-
other forces the Surrealists associated with beauty and with lustrated the fur catalogs for Maison Samuel, a fashionable
women—was the compression of clothing and form as if in- boutique in Brussels (p. 17). Commercial fashion art and il-
dissolubly sewn together. Sown and sewn by man and ma- lustration could hardly be an inappropriate enterprise if
‘chine, woman emerges clothed. Ernst had sought fashion’s effects while ennobling its func-
tions. Twentieth-century ready-to-wear has generated sub-
Max Ernst anticipated the Surrealist fascination with fashion stantial popular imagery through advertising, and that
in his 1919 lithographs Fiat modes, pereat ars (Let There Be imagery was examined and plundered not only by Surrealism
Fashion, Down with Art; p. 16), a suite of fashion plates that but also by Cubist collage. Moreover, Ernst’s particular de-
are a justification of the mode as well as its humor. Undenia- pictions of fashion addressed its internationalism, employing
bly important within the Ernst oeuvre, these lithographs texts in French, German, and Latin along with mathematical
show the artist’s stylistic affinity to Giorgio de Chirico and formulas. If fashion were wholly frivolous, as some would
derivation of the mannequin surrogate for the human figure have it, then its representation could hardly be so linked with
from the Italian artist. De Chirico stood as a precursor to the languages of cognition and expression.
Surrealists rather than a colleague, but his role was essential Ernst’s appropriation of images from commerce is also ev-
to the Surrealist imaging of woman in an inanimate form. ident in his collage The Hat Makes the Man (1920; p. 18). A
That de Chirico’s particular interest was the mannequin is a work of pasted paper with its constituent elements taken
commitment to the possibility of fashion as human meta- from popular advertising for men’s hats, it offers the repeti-
phor. The de Chirico mannequin is both an individual and a tions found in commerce as a means to art. Further, the
standard, both a single human being and the generic human. variations on the hat suggest its inference as psychic synec-
Ernst played with the significance of luxury and fashion, doche, Freud having readily identified the man with his hat.
substituting fiat modes for the more likely fiat lux (let there be Although the Surrealists refused to grant Freud the literal ac-
light, of biblical text, but recognizing the equivalence of luxe curacy of his interpretation of symbols, they used many of his
and mode as interpretations of fashion. His express denial of psychoanalytic constructions to advance their own intuitions
art and ostensible preference for fashion avow a sense of the of meaning. Thus, in a popular image—and a popular
freshness and changing aspect of fashion, not an undesirable expression—Enrnst realized the dramatic and suggestive po-
quality to Ernst and many others involved with Dada and tential of the fashion object, but also that moment when the
Surrealism. Because fashion presented a more ephemeral ar- article of clothing is the metaphor, metamorphosis, and
14 tistic mode, it enjoyed an advantage over the obdurate and metaphysics of the man.
 LEFT BELOW
SALVADOR DALI (Spanish, born 1904) JOSEPH CORNELL (American, 1903—
Plate 14 from Les Chants de Maldoror, by the 1972)
Comte de Lautréamont, 1934 Untitled, 1931
Etching, 13 %s X 10 ¥% in. (sheet) Collage, 5 °/%, X 8 ¥sin.
The Museum of Modern Art, New York Published Harper’s Bazaar, New York,
The Louis E. Stern Collection February 1937
The sewing machine was a sinister, saturnine, Reproduced under the rubric “The Pulse of
—_ diabolical, and even destroying machine in Fashion,’ Cornell’s collage was the embodiment
Dali’s imagination. of woman as garment and of the sewing
machine as creative enterprise.

Likewise, two images of hats photographed by Man Ray in with a tip can be construed as Surrealist symbol and genitalia
the 1930s (p. 18) and published together in an article by Tris- when it is sufficiently dissociated from the figure to become
tan Tzara in Minotaure (more or less a house journal of Sur- its own independent object.
realism), in 1933, may indicate the specific interpretive The isolating, modifying, and comprehending of ordinary
possibilities of fashion even, as contemporary critic Rosalind objects and their meanings had been sanctioned by the Surre-
Krauss has pointed out, in the paradoxical relationship be- alist movement’s Dada progenitors. In the transition from
tween the camera’s witness and the Surrealist vision. In an Dada to Surrealism, the object provided an important har-
article devoted to the automatism of taste, Tzara contended mony, suggesting that all things, even those achieved by
that a certain large hat with an opening was specifically vag- chance or presented in new associations or radical dissocia-
inal and that hats could be argued to be expressions of spe- tions, could be said to have meaning. Furthermore, the artis-
cific conscious and unconscious ideas. In these instances, the tic sanctification of the ordinary object could challenge
hat makes the woman in every regard. The brim of a hat may customary definitions of art as a lofty and separate achieve-
obscure the wearer, resulting in the disfigurement or literal ment. Accorded radical autonomy in Surrealist theory and
disembodiment of the hat, thus casting it on its own as an art, the object could be the surrogate of the figure, and it
item of apparel and as a symbol. The crease or crevice of the could be the powerful expression of all that is unseen and/or
hat becomes both an abstract field and a symbol offered in unexpressed in a given image. The fashion object, like the
association with eye and gender. Correspondingly, the hat fashion machine, could be a most powerful force in the simul- 15
 MAX ERNST (French, born Germany,
1891— 1976)
Plates from Fiat modes, pereat ars (Let There
Be Fashion, Down with Art), 1919
Lithographs, each 175/16 X 13 in. (sheet)
The Museum of Modern Art, New York
Purchase Fund
Working in Cologne in 1919, Dada artist Max
Ernst pronounced the dressmaker’s art to be the
equal of, if not superior to, the fine arts. Fiat
modes, a portfolio of eight lithographs, adopts
the mannequin figures of Giorgio de Chirico’s
Metaphysical paintings but transforms them
into creations that are uniquely Ernst’s own.

taneous deconstruction of the figure and remembrance of its

presence that inevitably dwells in the garment. The fashion-
related objects of Surrealism include Man Ray’s somewhat
_ sinister Gift (1921; replica p. 10), as well as hangers, thim-
bles, scissors, and mannequins and dress forms.

_ “Music remains confined,” de Chirico had written in dispar-

agement of the power of music to carry the full meaning of
the Surrealist impulse. Nonetheless, music played a role in the
_ Surrealist imagination, most especially in the form of musical
_ instruments, which were thought to bear resemblances to
- women. The objectification of woman (the notion of woman
as object), would include the concept of woman as surrogate
ee musical instrument, posed by Man Ray in Le Violon d’Ingres |_
(1924; p. 19). The woman as stringed instrument became a
preoccupation of many Surrealist artists, including Salvador
Dali, as in his Flamenco Dancer (1949-50; p. 22). From |-
these postulations, the transference to fashion was a simple
matter. If the shape of the body could be seen as similar to the
___ stringed instrument, then the body could take on the form of
_ the instrument as in Karl Lagerfeld’s design for Chloe (1983;
_ p.35) and Christian Lacroix’s creation for Jean Patou (1985; |
p. 24) of dresses that fulfill the concept of Man Ray. The pres-
ence of music in another form is also important to the possi-
bility of realizing the absolute and the mysterious through
_ the visible and real. The Romantic synaesthesia that sought
transference among the senses could also allow music to
serve as a metaphor for woman; siren and muse in the photo-
_ graphs of Serge Lutens (pp. 21, 33, 34), she might stand for
perfection in sound as well as for visual beauty. Musical notes
_ describe form in Valentine Hugo’s program design (1941; p.
_ 22), but so too does music become form in the musical-nota- |
tion dress (1937; p. 25) designed by Elsa Schiaparelli and the
ode to the treble clef (1984; p. 22) designed by Dominique
Lacoustille. As a form that has presence yet is invisible, music
held some intrigue for the Surrealists and necessarily had its
role in their depiction of woman as musical form. In dress, it
had its harmony as well.

__ Just as music could be envisioned as both an abstract form

and a physical presence, so too the biomorphic abstractions
that characterize much Surrealist art found their way into the
free forms of dress and the definition of the human being as
an abstract flow among units of the body. What could seem
almost nonrepresentational in some Surrealist art became in
 RIGHT
RENE MAGRITTE (Belgian, 1898—1967)
Pages from Fur Catalog for La Maison Samuel,
Brussels, 1928
Surrealist painter Magritte, commissioned by a
Brussels store in both 1927 and 1928 to create
its winter fur catalog, closely followed the style
of his mysterious paintings in his fashion
advertising.

Dali’s hands mutations on the body bulbous, emaciated, or

elongated, with the parts of the body achieving a new order
and dynamic in accordance with their psychosexual role as
perceived by Dali. The Surrealism of sculptor Jean Arp, as in
his Nose-Cheeks (1925-26; p. 30) and Human Concretion
(1933; p. 28), and later of painter Yves Tanguy, as in Multi-
plication of the Arcs (1954; pp. 26—27), which lacked the
narrative and representational modes found in the work of
their colleagues Dali and Magritte, did not immediately in-
fluence dress. In the 1980s, however, it came to affect many
designers who sought an abstraction that might surpass the
conventional description of the body in an analytical anat-
omy. Georgina Godley’s highly conceptual Shaped Under-
wear and Shaped Dress (both 1986; pp. 29, 31) reorder and
abstract forms derived from the body. Put to the extreme test
of adapting purely abstract, biomorphic form to a manner of
dress compatible with human anatomy, fashion has risen to
the challenge with humor in the 1985 dresses of Olivier Guil-
lemin (pp. 26, 27) and with élan in the carefully wrought
_ Sleeve of a 1984 Claude Montana coat (p. 30). Fashion is, like
art, capable of abstractions.

Seeking marvels and realizing dreams, the artists and design-

ers of Surrealism came to illusionism and to deceits of the eye
as primary devices for both concealing and revealing the mar-
velous in a mundane world. To René Magritte, his Magic
Mirror (1928-29; p. 46) seemed to be a place wherein the
reality reflected became an act of imagination. In Not to Be
Reproduced (1937; p. 44), the framed mirror enjoys an
ironic relationship with the framed picture in its representa-
tion of the purportedly real. In The Human Condition, I
(1934; p. 44), picture window and picture frame coincide,
providing variable elements in the determination of a Surre-
alist reality. Magritte’s passive observers in an absurd world
and his lambent observations on perceived worlds within 4
@a
frames made vexing mirror pictures. ¥

The superior image of the mirror obtained in clothing as in

art, with mirrors appearing as creative fastenings on an Elsa
Schiaparelli jacket (p. 38) and as a pictorial device on one by ime”
tee
Yves Saint Laurent (p. 39). But the mirror is only part of the
fantasy of reflections on appearance and illusion engaged in
by these designers. The creation of illusion, whether of a fig-
ure, candelabrum, or mirror, gives to clothing the full fran-
Var
=
chise of art, allowing implications of narrative, mystery, and
deep reflection to occur as a function of dress. The vesting of
clothing with this figurative and fantasied role marks Surre- tae
alism’s assimilation into dress. In photography, the process is
Bites 5 Le Violon d’ Ingres, 1924 (1971)
manifest in works by Cecil Beaton and Horst P. Horst (pp. Photograph ae: sai ‘
42, 43), who manipulate the spectator by creating an ambi- Man Ray Archives, Paris
guity between what is literally within the picture and the Published Littérature, Paris, June 1924
reality outside the image. In painting, the same possibilities Man Ray’s vision of woman as musical
for adjusted spectatorship prevail—whether to establish the instrument satirizes the Cubist obsession with
certainties of perceived realities and the security of a fixed the guitar and the Ingresque obsession with the
position for the observer or, in Surrealism, to exacerbate the odalisque. The process of synaesthesia between
music and physical beauty is perfectly realized
certainties of both. But dress that plays with the rea 1 ae ay
ea : : Pray e real and in this portrait
of Kiki de Montparnasse.
unreal is all but unanticipated. The mirror of vanity and
dress was shattered by the reflections and revelations of
Surrealism.

a ee LEFT
MAX ERNST
The Hat Makes the Man, 1920
Collage, pencil, ink, and watercolor on paper,
14 X 18in.
The Museum of Modern Art, New York
Purchase Fund
Using elements from a commercial advertise-
ment for hats, Ernst’s collage, realizing the
cliché, once more nods to the significance of
fashion.

BOTTOM LEFT AND RIGHT

MAN RAY
Illustrations for ““A Certain Automatism of
Taste,’ by Tristan Tzara, published Minotaure,
Paris, 1933
Photographs
Collection Rosabianca Skira, Geneva
L 4 Ernst believed that the hat made the man, but
S25 Man Ray and Tristan Tzara, switching gender,
a>, / saw woman embodied in the hat, a Tiresian
a 4
heehee 3 reversal.
rag eras
SedeckTiemiyer ste pel
mensch nacdttamiger wasserformer
(aedelformers) kleidSame nervatur
aud
! umpressnerven!
© (eert lechay

18
 LEFT
PAUL COLIN (French, born Russia, 1905—
1986)
L’Orchestre en Liberté: Costume for the Violin
(worn by Serge Lifar), 1933
Charcoal and gouache on paper, 23/16 X
15% in.
Wadsworth Atheneum, Hartford, Connecticut
From the Serge Lifar Collection, the Ella
Gallup Sumner and Mary Catlin Sumner
Collection

BELOW
PAUL COLIN
L’Orchestre en Liberté: Costume for Two
Woodwinds, 1931
Charcoal and gouache on two sheets of paper,
23% X 15%, in.
Wadsworth Atheneum, Hartford, Connecticut
From the Serge Lifar Collection, the Ella Gallup
Sumner and Mary Catlin Sumner Collection
On February 16, 1931, Serge Lifar’s ballet
L’ Orchestre en Liberté, its costumes designed
by Paul Colin, opened at the Paris Opera. Colin
animated the entire orchestra as living
instruments, giving form to the music of
composer Henri Sauyeplane.

OPPOSITE
SERGE LUTENS (French, born 1942)
Advertisement for Music Colors, by Shiseido >
1985
Photograph

20
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CENTRE D’ECHANGES ARTISTIQUES \\\
ET DE CULTURE FRANCAISE
Siege: 2, rue Duroc (Ségur 20-77)

JEUDI 27 AVRIL 1941 4 20 h. 30

de L'ANCIEN CONSERVATOIRE
2 bis, rue du Conseroatoire -- PARIS

La Société des Instruments 3 Vent

(Fondée en 1879 — DIRECTION FERNAND OUBRADOUS)
avecle concours de M™ Lucette DESCAVES, pianiste et Josette
RRE, cantatrice. Concert dirigé par Roger DESORMIERE
Charles GOUNOD
Quatuor (1 audition). . Florent SCHMITT
Invitation au voyage. .. E. CHABRIER
I. STRAWINSKY
Jacque, IBERT
I. STRAWINSKY

Salle; chez Durand, 4. pl. de la Madeleine :

le Gaveau et au sidge de Ia Socicté, 2.» rue Duroc.

ol ak Cf. Sof
OPPOSITE ABOVE LEFT
VALENTINE HUGO (French, 1887-1968)
Program for the Society of Wind Instruments,
Paris, April 13 1941
Collection Anne de Margerie, Paris
Music clothes the figure in artist Hugo’s
program design. She took part in Surrealist
exhibitions in Paris in the 1930s.

OPPOSITE ABOVE RIGHT

SALVADOR DALI
Flamenco Dancer, 1949-50
Published Flair, New York, March 1950
If Surrealist transformation allowed the body to
be viewed as stringed instrument, it also
permitted the instrument to become the body
making music and dance, the ultimate
synaesthesia.
OPPOSITE BELOW
DOMINIQUE LACOUSTILLE (French,
born 1956)
Treble-Clef Dress, 1984
The young French designer adapts the musical
motif for clothing.

BELOW AND RIGHT

KARL LAGERFELD (French, born
Germany 1938)
Keyboard Belt (for Chloe), 1982
Photograph Roxanne Lowit
Watercolor Antonio Lopez

23
CHRISTIAN LACROIX (French, born

s (for Jean Patou), 1985

Photograph Horst P Horst
Photographed in the setting of art, Christian
Lacroix’s Violin D is a musical evocation in
the spirit of Surrealism.
 \

ELSA SCHIAPARELLI (French, born Italy, Schiaparelli, the designer most influenced by
1890-1973) Surrealism, featured musical scores and
: Musical Notation Dress, 1937 embroidered instruments in her designs for the
Musée des Arts de la Mode, Paris spring collection of 1937 Her friendship with
Schiaparelli Studio Sketchbooks, U.EA.C. Dada and Surrealist artists Francis Picabia,
Man Ray, Marcel Duchamp, and Tristan Tzara
dated from the early 1920s in Paris.

2)
OLIVIER GUILLEMIN (French, born
1962)
Dress Design, Studio Bercot, Paris, 1985
Photograph Roxanne Lowit
Although the abstract biomorphic forms
devised by Surrealist artists Jean Arp and Yves
Tanguy are difficult to translate into wearable
garments, inventions such as Olivier
Guillemin’s, while still a student at Studio
Bercot, Paris, suggest some possibilities for
success.
ABOVE
YVES TANGUY (American, born France,
1900-195 5)
Multiplication of the Arcs (detail), 19 5 4
Oil on canvas, 40 X 60 in.
The Museum of Modern Art, New York
Mrs. Simon Guggenheim Fund

OLIVIER GUILLEMIN
Dress Design, Studio Bergot, Paris, 1985
Photograph Roxanne Lowit

27
LEFT
JEAN ARP
Human Concretion, 1933
Bronze, 2272 X 22¥s X 137 in.
Private collection. Courtesy Minneapolis
Institute of Arts
Deriving abstraction from recognized human
forms, Arp made possible the emergence of a
new Surrealist anatomy along with a Surrealist
style.

OPPOSITE
GEORGINA GODLEY (British, born 195 5)
Shaped Underwear, 1986
Photograph Cindy Palmano
The distortions of the body imposed in
Surrealist photography and sculpture were, in
part, motivated by eroticism. Godley’s designs
perform a like function.
ABOVE
CLAUDE MONTANA (French, born 1949)
Red-Satin Cocoon Coat (detail), 1984
Photograph Scott Heiser

In one of his 1984 collections, Mc

investigated the ballooning, volumetric,
sculptural possibilities of clothing, including
bulbous, Arp-like sleeves and champagne
glasses as figures.

RIGHT
JEAN ARP (French, born Strasbourg, 1
1966)
Nose-Cheeks, 1
cardboard relief, 16% X 12¥sin.
Galerie Beyeler, Basel

OPPOSITE
GEORGINA GODLEY
Shaped Dress, 1986
Photograph Cindy Palme
Cognizant of the history of Surrealist art,
British designer Georgina Godley explores the
possibilities of Surrealist dilation and variation
of the body in fantasies of exaggerated form.
ABOVE
DAVIDE MOSCONI (Italian, born 1941)
Fashion Photograph
Published Linea Italiana, Milan, December
1978

The imperatives of the fashion photograph

can prompt distortion of the body to empha-
size the detail over the whole, even with
unsettling Surrealist effects of distension and
repetition.

LEFT
SHEILA ROCK (British)
Leather Coif by Kirsten Woodward, 1986
Photograph
Ina millinery tour de force, Woodward
creates the semblance of hair in leather, skin
supplanting coiffure. The photograph by Rock
stresses the biomorphic transformation of the
figure in motion.
OPPOSITE
SERGE LUTENS
Advertisement for Les Rhythmiques, by
Christian Dior, 1979
Photograph
Sheet music, the graphic representation of the
ineffable sounds of music, becomes the physical
presence of clothing.
 OPPOSITE
ANTONIO
Guitar Dress, by Karl Lagerfeld (for Chloe),
1983
Watercolor

The dream of Le Violon d’Ingres assumes

sartorial form in Karl Lagerfeld’s design,
rendered by fashion illustrator Antonio.

TOP LEFT
LINDA FARGO (American, born 1957)
Window Display, R. H. Macy, New York, 1985
Taking a cue from Surrealism, this window
display features mannequins with guitar
torsoes.

CENTER LEFT
SERGE LUTENS
Advertisement for Les Rhythmiques, by
Christian Dior, 1979
Photograph

BOTTOM LEFT
CANDY PRATTS PRICE (American, born
19 50)
Window Display, Bloomingdale’s, New York,
1978

American designer and editor Price includes

music as a theme in windows for the New York
department store.

34
 LEFT
MARIA VITTORIA CORRADI (Italian)
Fashion Photograph
Published Linea Italiana, Milan, August 1981

Trompe l’oeil becomes a standard mode in

fashion imagery to reveal the fashion and
cosmetic process. The cosmetics jars are an
artifice, but they are “‘real;’ in the sense of being
three-dimensional objects placed on
photographic illusions.

OPPOSITE
SERGE LUTENS
Baroque and Poesy Advertising Campaign for
Inoui, by Shiseido, 1985
Photograph
Beauty is framed within the illusionism of living
forms, a suspension of disbelief, and a splendid
suspension of the image. Promotion of a line of
Japanese cosmetics is the purpose of the
campaign.

BELOW
Fashion Photograph
Published Linea Italiana, Milan, April 1981
KOSAK
Reality emerges from the mirrors and strides
into illusion, two sides of the same mirror.

36
BELOW Rococo hz mirrors with fractured faces
ELSA SCHIAPARELLI frame the breasts and suggest a window view
Rococo Mirror Jacket, 1939 into the figure. The shattering of the mirrors
may be the only mear ; to preclude visual entry
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
The Costume Institute, Gift of Baroness into the garment. Schiaparelli offers the
Philippe de Rothschild garment at its most provocative, rupturing
Photograph Taishi Hirokawa decorum, almost seeing within and seeing
reflections, and ending ironically witha -
cracked set of mirrors.

Wb
es,

ae,
ALAA
3

OPPOSITE Although the mirror has migrated on the body,

YVES SAINT LAURENT (French, born its mystery of imaging and its broken invisibility
Algeria 1936) remain. The cracked glass is reflective of the
phantasmagorical Surrealism of Jean Cocteau
Rococo Mirror Jacket, 1978-79
Claus Ohm and Cecil Beaton. The embroidery is executed
Photograph
by the House of Lesage, Paris, the same firm
that created embroidery for Schiaparelli.
a. **
ABOVE OPPOSITE
ERWIN BLUMENFELD (American, HORST P. HORST
born Germany, 1897—1969) Fashion Photograph, 1930s
John Frederics Hat, 1947
Photograph Horst’s photograph of shattered glass reflecting
a young girl is a counterpart of the fractured
Multiple reflective images together function as glass mirroring beauty in the jackets of
fashion’s fractured and exploratory image. The Schiaparelli and Saint Laurent.
camera substantiates the elusiveness of
perceptual reality as well as the many mirrors
thereof.

40
ABOVE OPPOSITE
CECIL BEATON (British, 1904—1980) HORST P. HORST (American, born
Fashion Photograph, 1938 Germany 1906)
Courtesy Sotheby’s, London Fashion Photograph, 1938
Published Vogue, New York, June 15, 1938
Framed and radiant behind a scrim, Beaton’s
model carries her own frame, like a medieval Horst’s photographic trompe l’oeil fabricates
saint depicted with the sign of her beatitude. and complicates all the circumstances of the
image as it moves from perception to deception,
real to Surreal.
 LEFT
RENE MAGRITTE
The Human Condition, I, 1934
Oil on canvas, 397/s X 317/2 in.
Private collection
To counter the traditional notion that art is the
simulacrum of nature, Magritte offered a
vexing inquiry into the continuity and
simultaneity of nature and art. As one’s
tendency to read the image as real is subverted,
the new reading of the image must be other than
real, despite appearances.

BELOW
RENE MAGRITTE
Not to Be Reproduced (Portrait of Edward
James), 1937
Oil on canvas, 31's X 253/, in.
Museum Boymans—van Beuningen, Rotterdam
Dogmatic in title, enigmatic in meaning,
Surrealist artist Magritte’s portrait with an
accompanying volume of Edgar Allen Poe
eludes the conventions of mirror and
representation.

44
DOMINIQUE LACOUSTILLE
Window Dress, 1985
Photographed next to the real thing, designer
Lacoustille’s witty dress realizes the Surrealist
metaphor. As a window conceals as well as
reveals, so the garment conceals and reveals the
body, affirming the visual congruity of window
and dress.
 BELOW
RENE MAGRITTE
The Magic Mirror, 1928-29
Oil on canvas, 29 x 21% In.
Private collection
The magic of the mirror resided for the
Surrealists in its similarity to and distinction
from observed phenomena. This mirror of
vanity is the corps humain, the human body, its
reflection becoming the very thing to which it
gives an image.

LEFT
MARCEL VERTES (French, born Hungary,
1895—196r)
Jacket with Hand-Mirror Closings, by Elsa
Schiaparelli, 1938
Ink and watercolor
Published Harper’s Bazaar, New York, April
1938

The paradoxical and discomforting aspect of

the Schiaparelli gesture is that the mirrors
reflected the vanity not only of the wearer but
also of the spectator. As images of the wearer
joined those from the external world, the effect
achieved was like that of Surrealist photo-
graphic trompe I’oeil.

46
ANDRE KERTESZ (American, born
Hungary, 1894-1985)
Distortion #86, 1933
Photograph
Courtesy Edwynn Houk Gallery, Chicago
A suite of nudes, Surrealist photographer
Kertész’s Distortion series had two main
objectives: to explore the erotics of
transformation and to develop the aesthetics of
body manipulation.
 BODIES AND PARTS

The Surrealist striving for an analogue to the human body

found fulfillment in the mannequin and dress form as well as
in classical statuary. These comparable sets of bodies af-
forded possibilities for both fashion and the fine arts to rep-
resent the figure and to demonstrate the transmutation into
art of the form found in nature. Thus Surrealist poet and
filmmaker Jean Cocteau, in his film The Blood of a Poet
(1930), would promote the entanglement between “living
drapery,” the classical form that becomes a kind of body, and
the statue, the structure that extends the life of the real body,
setting off a play in transitions between the real and the arti-
ficial. Adding theater and lived theatricality to the recipe of a
real world concocted from the ingredients of the imagination,
Cocteau (p. 52), who worked in virtually all the visual arts,
elided the real and the imagined with the same fluidity with
which he moved among the arts. Rejected by doctrinaire Sur-
realism, Cocteau’s film nonetheless called upon Surrealist
styles.
In diverse expressions over the next fifteen years, Cocteau’s
obsession with Hellenistic statuary would be played out in
fashion; for example, in 1936 Horst would photograph a
model in fashionable Grecian dress for Vogue (p. 51), placing
her against a draped column in an underwater setting; and in
1937 Mme Alix Grés would dress a statuarylike mannequin
in an elegant drapery for the couture pavilion of the Exposi-
tion Internationale in Paris (p. 51). Almost a decade later, the
illustrator A. M. Cassandre would bring the image of living
drapery to its ultimate incarnation (p. 65) by eliminating the
figure entirely.
Inhabiting the mysterious piazzas of Giorgio de Chirico, a
painter deeply admired by the first-generation Surrealists,
were mannequins derived from fashion. In The Disquieting
Muses (1917; p. 60), they are fitted with hat blocks for heads
(the one on the right having been removed like a hat and set
on the ground as if in respite). In the artist’s Metaphysical
KANSAI YAMAMOTO (Japanese, born landscapes, the figures are standard-bearers for the human,
1944) but their forms do not call to mind images of the Hellenistic
Advertisement, 1985
Published, Vogue, Paris, October 1985 ideal but rather, as William Rubin has pointed out, figures
“‘made of ‘stuff’... cloth, wood, metal, cardboard, as well as
An ambiguous form midway between sculpture
other materials.”
and human figure, the organic body emerges
from a rock complete with headdress. The diminutive mannequin forming the bottle for Elsa
Schiaparelli’s fragrance Shocking (p. 203) is likewise a
OPPOSITE standard for the human, but in this case it represents an ac-
JANET NOYCE (British)
tual body: that of movie star Mae West, whose hourglass fig-
Hats
Photograph Iain McKell ure was once favored by women of fashion. In a 1938
Published The Face, January 1982 advertisement, the bottle is metamorphosed into a dress form 49
 JEAN COCTEAU (French, 1889-1963)
The Blood ofa Poet, 1930
Film Still
In this image from Cocteau’s first film, a
calcified Lee Miller plays a figure in transition
between Hellenistic sculpture and real life. The
immobile, stonelike aspect of the body
envisions both the persistence of an artistic ideal
and the anticipation of death.

OPPOSITE ABOVE
Mannequin in Lamé Evening Dress,
by Alix Grés, Pavillon d’Elégance,
Exposition Internationale, Paris, 1937
Photograph Wols
Published Harper’s Bazaar, New York,
September 15, 1937
Tableaux featuring pitted, statuarylike
mannequins were used for the presentation of
couture fashion at the exhibition.
OPPOSITE BELOW
HORST P HORST (German, born 1906)
Fashion Photograph, 1936
Published Vogue, New York, March 15, 1936
Wearing an elegant Madeleine Vionnet gown,
the model is placed in an underwater grotto
against a classical drapery form. The fantasy
landscape isolates the figure and associates the
dress with both classical garments and the idyll
of the sea.

(p. 62), but the addition of a heart alludes to a living body, acters in a charade—a dormant and provocative masquer-
bringing the transmutation of forms full circle. Schiaparelli, ade—but the core of the effort was the bizarre collection of
in her autobiography Shocking Life (1954) dwells on the de- mannequins positioned along appropriate city thorough-
termination of the perfect mannequin from the calibration of fares, each figure demonstrating the essential traits of its art-
West’s measurements, thereby fostering the mythos of the fig- ist-creator and the possibilities for invention within a given
ure that becomes the mannequin and the Surrealist ideal of structure. These surrogates for living figures were inevitably
the transference between the living and the inanimate. Surre- subjected to greater distortion and display than living models
alism also offered an archaic twist on the identification of the and perhaps were even more imaginatively dressed than con-
real and less than real. The wandering women of Paul Del- ventional representation would allow. Live models were also
' vaux’s painting The Staircase (1948; p. 60) were, like Mae used in the exhibition, however, creating real uncertainty as
West, Edwardian recollections dressed to historicist stan- to which were alive and which were not. That these works
dards rather than contemporary taste. The ideal Surrealist were achieved in 1938, when many of the Surrealists had em-
woman was unattainable for any number of reasons, but in braced disciplines related to fashion suggests the possibility
this rendering of Delvaux’s imagination, it was primarily be- that Surrealism envisioned fashion phenomena as the experi-
cause she was of another vintage, a woman placed in the past ence of art and that art had the attributes of fashion. Had the
never to be wholly retrieved or realized in the present. The same demonstration of virtuoso talent been presented as a
juxtaposition of figure and dress form serves as counterpart magazine article or a window display, it might have been de-
to the artist’s Dance of Death motif in other paintings, where nied the outrageous and memorable impact of this exhibition
a living figure confronts a skeleton. That the symbol is a dress in 1938. At the 1937 Exposition Internationale in Paris, the
form and not a skeleton implies a living other and not neces- Pavillon d’Elégance had, in fact, already presented manne-
sarily death. Thus, the spiritual and living equivalence may quins in a manner to engage Surrealist duplicity regarding
be found in the fashion form. Similarly, Man Ray’s Aviary objects and the real (pp. 51, 56).
(1919; p. 72) employs a dress form in place of the living figure The appropriation of mannequins into art in 1938 had
and makes the formal armature of the body a place of sanc- specifically been anticipated earlier in the decade by artist-
tuary or a cage, the figure eviscerated. poet Marcel Jean and others. Jean’s Horoscope (1937; p. 72),
A suite of mannequins were presented as apparitions which also appeared in the 1938 Surrealist exhibition, used a
d’étres-objets (phantom object-beings) by a group of artists painted dressmaker’s dummy to establish the connection be-
at the Galerie Beaux-Arts in the 1938 Exposition Interna- tween the living figure and the form in fashion. Herbert Bay-
tionale du Surréalisme in Paris (pp. 58—59). The last major er’s Self-Portrait (1930; p. 66) saw the photographer as a
Surrealist exhibition before the Second World War, it was or- mannequin being disassembled on the spot.
ganized by Paul Eluard, André Breton, and Marcel Du- The proposition of Surrealist art as a simulacrum of either
champ, with the participation of all the major Surrealist sculpture or dressmaking allowed the art a particularly per-
artists in France. Related works such as Salvador Dali’s verse twist on the associations between the artificial and the
50 Rainy Taxi (1938) pressed mannequins into service as char- real. Pygmalion was meeting Freud in a dramatic encounter.
The result was a remarkable analysis of the probity of cloth-
ing and its relation to the naked figure. Dali’s Night and Day
Clothes of the Body (1936; p. 69) provided a metaphor for
undress and dress. Magritte’s Homage to Mack Sennett
(1934; p. 75) offered the dream and reality of clothing in
canny anticipation of a famous advertising slogan, which, be-
ginning in 1949, proclaimed: “I dreamed I was...in my
Maidenform bra,” and sent the protagonist seminaked into
adventures of importance. Magritte established the paradox
of clothing as a lesson in body revelation and concealment,
the interplay, especially in women’s clothing, between the
body and its clothing in modesty, but with intimations of the
body exposed.
René Magritte admired a brief poem by Paul Eluard: “Inthe
darkest eyes, the brightest eyes have secluded themselves.”
The Surrealist fascination with the eye, its optical complexity
in conscious vision and in unconscious dreaming, sight and
voyeurism, blindness and acuity, rendered it as both object to
be seen and seeing device. Of the latter, its role in relation to
the Freudian tilt of Surrealist interpretation was manifest in
Surrealist literature and art, though some artists such as Ma-
gritte objected to the purely Freudian interpretation of his
optical imagery. Nonetheless, the mutilated eye of Un Chien
Andalou (1929; p. 79), by Dali and Luis Bunuel would seem
to be an unambiguous example of the psychosexual interpre-
tation of autonomous body parts. The eye could achieve in-
dependence from the rest of the body and venture into the
imagination as both object and subject. Sometimes severed,
occasionally Cyclopic, perversely propped up or injured by
the presence of a crutch, the eye was both seeing and seen.
The migrations and transmutations of the eye appear in
Surrealist objects as diverse as a metronome (Man Ray’s In-
destructible Object, 1923; p. 78), and in garments that bring ~
the eye to the surface (a Schiaparelli dress, providing indis-
pensable testimony to the anthropos of what might otherwise
seem to be only a vase of flowers). The Surrealist eye was sim-
ulated by Yves Saint Laurent in Les Yeux d’Elsa (1980; p.
71), a dress emulating Schiaparelli’s style of the 1930s and a
tour de force in admiration and advancement of the idea of
the eye. Schiaparelli mingled the eye with celestial themes in
her Astrology Collection of 1938, a concept also adopted by
Larry Shox in his Celestial Eye Suit (1985; p. 70). Shox’s hy-
brid suggests the possibilities latent in the eye motif as a Sur-
realist theme: it is cosmic and at the same time personal and
intimate, vision being a shared, world-defining experience of
all humans and the specific optic of dreams, both collective
and individual. As the eye could be conceived as the represen-
tation of a disembodied, derationalized part of the body, its
role was both rational in the analytical matters of perception
and irrational in the instinctive matters of reverie and imagi-
nation. Magritte’s The False Mirror (1928; p. 78) had, after
all, implied the eye to be a representation of the real world, its
reality a deeper enigma for its reversal into the self and the
“falseness”’ of the eye being its way of traducing the observed
phenomena of the world. If the same dissociated eye is able to
transport itself, Horuslike, to the garment, it makes of the
apparel a transitional point between the real and reflected,
optical and artificial. Indeed, designers such as Schiaparelli
and Saint Laurent delight in such a paradox about clothing
and use the eye to bring clothing’s voyeurism and its specta-
torship to the very surface of what Surrealist-inflected fashion
might be.
 nN
rot
a

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ROSSA
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~— Pet Pe E Bed Pet bee bad fot .
——
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52
OPPOSITE Lovers (1932-34; p. 99), which then became the paradigm
CECIL BEATON (British, 1904-1980) for fashion advertisements, with the model placed under the
Jean Cocteau, 1932
large sign of the lips (p. 85). To establish the lips as the larger
Courtesy Sotheby’s, London
and unchanging sign with the variation of figures beneath
was essentially to use the Surrealist symbol as a fixed idea.
When lips were liberated, they had the power to migrate to
other parts of the body and to serve as the fundamental aper-
ture of the beautiful woman—and conceivably of art itself.
As envisioned by Schiaparelli, lips could have their mischie-
vous and erotic aspects; in the Lip Coat (1971; p. 86) by Saint
Laurent they might appear to be tamer. That they could be
interpretive and suggestive of physical sensuality through
symbolic indirection made them a preeminent Surrealist sym-
bol. Furthermore, that Surrealism saw such a symbolic de-
vice through transformations in media, level of discourse,
changes in decoration, and standards of decorum should
serve as an example of Surrealism’s latitude with its image-
making. The lips of Surrealism give no sign of elitism. Their
Surrealist sensuality and symbolism were broadly effective.

Of all the disembodied parts, perhaps the one most vulnera-

ble to fantasy is the hand. Creative yet only obliquely sexual,
a composition of parts on its own, functional and essential,
the hand provided a protagonist for the Surrealist theater of
the body. Perceived as an independent actor visually sepa-
rated from the body in a photograph by Lee Miller, it could
cast shadows in the vision of Maurice Tabard (both 1931; p.
89). It could be observed with clinical clarity, become the evil
hand with tapering talons, or serve a useful purpose in clos-
ing a garment. The clawlike fingertips and nails of Schiapa-
relli’s Black-Suede Gloves (1938; p. 102) have the sinister
charm of the invented and disembodied hand, yet are still re-
cognizably long gloves. The gnarled, withered hands of Dali’s
apparitional figures in Woman with a Head of Roses (1935;
p. 90) clutch with the paradox of their utility and their ugli-
ness. For Dali, these grizzled hands can close around the bust
or waist, while for a succession of designers the hands pro-
vide a natural belting of the waist. Schiaparelli’s evening
jacket with embroidery by Cocteau (1937; p. 100) benefits
from the description of its waist by the hand that holds the
cloth, a seemingly natural belt for closing the waist; Francois
The most voluptuous symbol of Surrealism was lips. From Lesage’s Hand Belt (1986; p. 101) provides a similar effect;
their first appearance in the December 1929 Second Surreal- and Marc Jacobs’s Trompe |’Oeil Beaded Dress (1986; p. 91),
ist Manifesto (p. 84) through their long picaresque adventure with hands at the waist, is an homage to Schiaparelli. The
in the activities of Man Ray, Schiaparelli, Charles James, and perambulating hand thus fulfills a function and performs an
Yves Saint Laurent—their contrived dissociation from the act we readily associate with its normal utility even while it is
figure in the first instance and their placement on a field, re- sufficiently removed from the body to affirm its indepen-
sembling a device of ornament in the last—they were both dence and to declare its Surrealist volition.
decorative and descriptive. Ironically, Surrealism began with
the spoor and only later moved to the lips. The 1929 lips were Surrealist feet likewise reveal themselves independently and
lipstick traces, signs of the impress of lips, lingering but not impertinently. They appear as the interior trace on the exte-
entirely palpable shadows of what had existed. The lips of rior and a reminder of the corporeality that is Surrealism’s
Surrealism become more real even as they became increas- foothold. Michel Foucault considers the shoes in The Red
ingly decorative. Their revisions and reinterpretations—even Model (1935; p. 96) by René Magritte as “resemblance” and
to the citation of different models for the lips themselves (in- “affirmation” in their mutual presence. They travel through
cluding Kiki of Montparnasse as one source)—took the form Surrealist form and transmutation, from painting to book
of the Lip Sofa (p. 86) designed by Dali and acquired by cover to window display, and back to shoes. The verisimili-
Schiaparelli for display in her Place Vendéme boutique; an- tude of Pierre Cardin’s men’s shoes (1986; p. 97) may be
other lip (alternatively identified as a butterfly) sofa by James lacking in the models by Anne-Marie Beretta and Manolo
(p. 147), and the surface decoration of lips on works by Saint Blahnik (both 1982; p. 104), but their debt to Magritte is as
Laurent (p. 86) and Hubert de Givenchy (p. 99). Perhaps the real. The painting of apparel came first, but fashion followed
prime embodiment was Man Ray’s Observatory Time—The in art’s footsteps. 3
OPPOSITE ABOVE
ISSEY MIYAKE (Japanese, born 1938)
Draped Gowns, 1984
Photograph Scott Heiser
Depicting drapery in such a manner as to
appear wet, Miyake creates a Hellenistic
sculpture of the torso and freezes the movement
of the flying folds.

OPPOSITE BELOW
THIERRY MUGLER (French, born 1948)
Gilded Accessories, 1984
Photograph Roxanne Lowit
Classical drapery and its reference to a
Hellenistic past is transferred from the garment
to accessories, where they take wing on a flight
of fantasy.

RIGHT
SALVADOR DALI (Spanish, born 1904)
Shades of Night Descending, 1931
Oil on canvas, 24 x 19 7/, in.
Collection Mr. and Mrs. A. Reynolds Morse on
loan to the Salvador Dali Museum, Saint
Petersburg, Florida
Within the mysterious space of the barren
Surrealist plain, a phantom drapery takes on a
living form.

ey)
LEFT
Nude Mannequin Partially Covered with
Flowers, by Elsa Schiaparelli, Pavillon
d’Elégance, Exposition Internationale, Paris,
1937
Photograph Wols
Published Harper’s Bazaar, New York,
September 15, 1937
Schiaparelli’s tableau caught public attention
at the exhibition; she placed the nude figure on
the ground and hung an evening dress ona
nearby line. A guest left a calling card with the
mannequin expressing condolences.

OPPOSITE
MAN RAY (American, 1890-1976)
Coat Stand, 1920
Photograph
Published as Dadaphoto in New York Dada,
1921
Man Ray’s Coat Stand “‘stands in” for the
living figure behind it. Moreover, the coat’s role
as outerwear is subverted by the complete
absence of dress. Man Ray, in large measure
responsible for the Surrealist passion for
photography, published the single issue of New
York Dada in collaboration with Marcel
Duchamp.
ertiee'eal iratimeneinieiin:
trette PRR
Three Mannequins from the Exposition
Internationale du Surréalisme, Galerie Beaux-
Arts, Paris, 1938
Photographs Man Ray Archives, Paris

Surrealist street lined with mannequins dressed

by artists Man Ray, Salvador Dali, Leo Malet,
and others (see also p. 193) led to the rooms
where the exhibition took place.

a re et

a
OPPOSITE RIGHT
GABRIELLA GIANDELLI JORGE SILVETTI (American, born
(Italian, born 1963) Argentina 1942)
LORENZO MATOTTI Mannequins, Portantina,
(Itahan, born 1954) New York, 1986
Fashion Editorial Photograph Paul Warchol
Published Vanity, Milan, November—December
1986

Giandelli and Matotti collaborated in this

evocation of the de Chirico mannequin,
substituting architectural elements for the
human form. The head is topstitched in a
manner similar to that of a de Chirico model.

C88
GIORGIO DE CHIRICO (Italian, born PAUL DELVAUX (Belgian, born 1897)
Greece, 1888—1978) The Staircase, 1948
The Disquieting Muses, 1917 Oil on panel
Oil on canvas, 387, X 26 in Yokohama City Museum
Private collection As in the 1930s Mae West in Victorian clothing
The altered dress form is a metaphor combining was Schiaparelli’s paladin of beauty, so Delvaux
mechanistic and personal elements to create a dressed his ideal visions in period costume a
symbol of the human. Like a puppet, the decade later. The alternative pure vision is the
mannequin clearly refers to the figure, and the dress form at left, offering the inanimate or the
assemblage of parts is a mechanical equivalent historical.
to anatomy.

60
ote
ieee
ABOVE Schiaparelli’s flacon for her perfume Shocking, OPPOSITE
Advertisement for Shocking, by Elsa the artist made the allusion more pronounced ALFA CASTALDI (Italian, born 1926)
Schiaparelli, 1938 by pinning a heart in the right place on the Jacket by Silvano Malta
Published Harper’s Bazaar, New York, bottle-figure-dress form. Film actress Mae West Published Vanity, Milan, October 1984
November 1938 served as model for the bottle’s hourglass
Acknowledging the provocative form of shape. The aggressive, imaginative dress form in this
fashion-editorial presentation plays with the
body’s geometry.

62
 MARGH
I5** 1938

LEFT
A. M. CASSANDRE (French, born the
Ukraine, 1901-1968)
Paris Openings, 1938
Cover for Harper’s Bazaar, New York,
March 15, 1938
The inherent abstraction of the dress form is
made manifest through the play of light and
dark and assembly of forms in Cassandre’s
design. The Surrealist eye peers through the
keyhole formed by their conjunction.

OPPOSITE
A. M. CASSANDRE
Advertisement for Lesur
Published 1946
Even without the presence of a figure, the
animation of the drapery suggests a living form,
a classical apparition within the Surrealist
landscape.

ISFR.IN PARIS °

64
 LEFT
HERBERT BAYER (American, born
Germany, 1900-1985)
Self-Portrait, 1930
Photograph
Collection Drs. William and Martha Heineman
Pieper, Chicago

ABOVE
JEAN-PAUL GAULTIER (French, born
ABOVE 1952)
MEL ODOM (American, born 1950) Mannequin, 1986
Men’s Shirts, 1981 Photograph Frangois Halard
Published Playboy Fashion Guides, Chicago, Published The World of Interiors, London, May
Spring—Summer 1981 1986

Converging in Odom’s drawing are the Synthesizing classical beauty with the
mechanomorph, the mannequin, and the world mechanical and technical aspects of the
of the Apollo Belvedere. mannequin’s functional anatomy, Gaultier
exaggerates the androgyny of the classical ideal
by the clothing he selects to attire the
mannequin.

66
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striking resemblance to Bayer’s Self-Portrait

(opposite) of some fifty years before. 67
 ABOVE
MARISOL (Venezuelan, born France 1930)
Body Coat (painted on a design by Jacques
Kaplan), 1960
Photograph Taishi Hirokawa
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
The Costume Institute. Gift of Pascal Kaplan,
Ph.D.
Photograph Taishi Hirokawa
Audaciously feigning nudity through the coat,
Marisol recapitulates the concept of Man Ray’s
Coat Stand (p. 57).

OPPOSITE BOTTOM
JEAN-PAUL GAULTIER
Velvet Conical Bust Top, 1984
Photograph Roxanne Lowit
Gaultier’s fascination with the bust is a playful
erogeny as well as an analytical view of
structure. His conical constructions of the
breast show his delight in anatomy but also in
the history of style, reflecting tastes of the
1950S.

68
SSR pseees

ABOVE
SALVADOR DALI
Night and Day Clothes of the Body, 1936
Gouache, 113/16 x 15 7/, in.
Private collection
Dali’s ingenious antipodes of night and day,
revelation and concealment, stiffness and
softness, and light and dark give form to the
concept of clothing as possessing its own life.
The mystery that Dali offers is the essential
paradox of clothing.

69
 OPPOSITE
YVES SAINT LAURENT (French, born
Algeria 1936)
Les Yeux d’Elsa, 1980
Photograph Claus Ohm
Borrowing a title from Surrealist poet Louis
Aragon and paying homage to Elsa
Schiaparelli, Saint Laurent’s caprice honors
words and eyes as Surrealist conventions and
Schiaparelli as the great transmitter of
Surrealist invention to the world of fashion.

TOP
CLAUDE CAHUN (French)
Object, 1936
Mixed media, 5% X 6%%16 X 37 in.
Courtesy Zabriskie Gallery, New York
The Exposition Surréaliste d’Objets at the
Galerie Charles Ratton, Paris, in 1936, included
this displaced eye, which moves about in all-
seeing autonomy from the body, a Cyclops that
finds itself in unexpected places.
CENTER
LARRY SHOX (American, born 1951)
Celestial Eye Suit, 1985
Fashion Institute of Technology, New York
Edward C. Blum Design Laboratory
Photograph Taishi Hirokawa
The eye proliferates and is externalized on this
hand-painted suit. An inner label reads: “Eye
can see.”

BOTTOM
SALVADOR DALI
The Eye of Time, 1949
Watch with diamond and cabochon rubies
Minami Art Museum, Tokyo
Understanding more than the flexibility of time,
Dali, the artist of soft watches, considers the
abstractness and the palpable ‘‘sense”’ of time.
He offers time as a dimension and time as a
sixth sense, but he also affirms that time is
never seen except through abstractions.

70
 RIGHT
MARCEL JEAN (French, born 1900)
The Horoscope, 1937
Painted dressmaker’s dummy with plaster
ornaments and watch, 28 in. high
Morton G. Neumann Family Collection,
Chicago
Photograph Michael Tropea
Although Man Ray explored the internal
structure of the dress form, Jean restored its role
in reproducing the anatomy, suggesting in his
map that the world is neither round nor flat but
composed of an oddly familiar terrain.

ABOVE
MAN RAY
Aviary, 1919
Aerograph and tempera on cardboard
Private collection
Man Ray views the dress form as part figure,
part bird cage.

72
 ANDRE BRETON

QU’EST-CE QUE LE
SURREALISME?

Moyrittn

RENE HENRIQUEZ, Editeur

Rue d’Edimbourg, 13, BRUXELLES

ABOVE
RENE MAGRITTE
Cover for André Breton’s Ou’est-ce que le
Surréalisme? (What Is Surrealism?), 193 4
The Art Institute of Chicago
The Mary Reynolds Collection, Ryerson
Library
The body is transformed into a faceinthis _
classic image of Surrealist enterprise, combining
unresolved misogyny and obsession with
women.

RIGHT
SALVADOR DALI
Invitation to Dali Exhibition, Julien Levy
Gallery, New York, 1936—37 | om : ‘ THe tpderrncs of orekestre
Courtesy Zabriskie Gallery, New York mee A) A, Sabiva Ghfed
Dali’s fascination with the body is a matter of
fetishism, most especially in his breast
obsession.

73
 J \ pa a

OPPOSITE copped A:
GEORGE PLATT LYNES (American,
1907-1965)
Elizabeth Gibbons with Umbrella and Mask,
c. 1940
Photograph
Courtesy Robert Miller Gallery, New York
The scrimlike transparency of the garment,
more cocoon than clothing, softens the figure to
an elegant nudity while the mask and umbrella
accompany such idealism with prurient
mischief.

RIGHT
RENE MAGRITTE (Belgian, 1898-1967)
Homage to Mack Sennett, 1934
Oil on canvas, 283/, X 21. in.
Musée Communal, La Louviére, Belgium
Magritte explores the intimate eroticism of
clothing and the undeniable sense of the
individual within the garment. Both the
memory of the body and the anticipation of its
presence obtain even as the clothing may hang
in a wardrobe.

75
LEFT
HANS BELLMER (German, born Poland,
1902-1975)
The Top, 1938
Painted bronze, 13 in. high
Collection Joseph and Jory Shapiro, Chicago
Bellmer’s voyeuristic sculpture revolves around
the artist’s fascination with breasts. So '
clustered, they enjoy an equation with fruit and
convey the artist’s fascination with his subject
even when it is separated from the torso. A
classical prototype, the Diana of Ephesus, is
evoked.
Gon
 ABOVE
RIGHT RENE MAGRITTE
MAN RAY The False Mirror, 1928
Indestructible Object (or.Object To Be Oil on canvas, 21%, X 317s in.
Destroyed), 1923 (replica 1964) The Museum of Modern Art, New York
Metronome with cutout photograph of eye, Purchase
8% X 47% X 4¥sin. Perhaps the most familiar and most
The Museum of Modern Art, New York, James characteristic Surrealist painting of the eye, The
Thrall Soby Fund False Mirror, acquired by the New York
Like Dali, Man Ray offers the conjunction of museum at the time of its exhibition Fantastic
time and seeing. The regular intervals by which Art, Dada, Surrealism in 1936, expands the
the metronome marks time are perceived optic to a broad vista and floats the pupil as a
through the passage of the eye, a blink that void centered in deep space. Understanding all
becomes a moving interval of time. optical experience to be insufficient without
cognitive or subconscious phenomena in its
support, the Surrealist view as expressed by
Magritte was deeply discriminating and
78 penetrating.
LUIS BUNUEL (Spanish, 1900-1983)
SALVADOR DALI
Un Chien Andalou, 1929
The Museum of Modern Art, New York
Film Stills Archive
Bunuel’s and Dali’s violent image suggests the
essential role of seeing and the visceral response
to the cutting of an eye.

4?
ABOVE OPPOSITE
TONY VIRAMONTES (American, born GEORGE PLATT LYNES
1956) Mythology Series: Cyclops, Man with Eye and
Fashion Editorial: Rifat Ozbek, 1986 Wood, 1937-39
Published The Face, June 1986 Photograph
Courtesy Robert Miller Gallery, New York
Through photocollage, Viramontes cuts an
enlarged Surrealist eye into a hat worn ata Seeking the resonance of mythology in
rakish angle to obscure the real eye. Thus, the contemporary life, Platt Lynes explored
metaphorical eye intrudes vision even as it is photographic distortion as a means to mythic
vision’s symbol. presence in the most ordinary circumstances.

80
 LEFT
ENRICO DONATI
Evil Eye, 1946
Mixed media
Courtesy Zabriskie Gallery, New York
Donati’s refracted vision of the eye as object
took form in a work created for the Exposition
Internationale du Surréalisme at the Galerie
Maeght, Paris, in 1947.

GENE MOORE (American, born 1910)

Three Window Displays, Bonwit Teller, New
York, 1952
Realizing the window as optic, Moore created
scenes within the pupil of the eye, a tour de
force based on the Surrealist fascination with
the eye as viewer and vista.

82
 Pourquoi Ia Révolution Surrdéaliste avait cessé de parattre LEFT
ANDRE BRETON (French, 1896—1966)
Second Surrealist Manifesto, 1929
Published La Révolution Surréaliste, Paris,
December 1929
The impress of lips on this crucial document of
Surrealist ideology gives literal expression to
the body in Surrealist parlance. This frottage
initiated a succession of lips in various media.

SECOND MANIFESTE DU SURREALISME

En dépit, des déemarches particuliéres A le communicable et Pincommauanicable, le haut
elareun de ceux quis’en sont reclames ou son ul le bas cessent d'etre pergus contradietoire-
réelament, on finira bien par aceorder que le ment, Or, est en vain qwon chereherait
surréalisme ne tendit A rien tant qua prove Vactivite surréaliste un autre mobile que
quer. au point de vue intellvetucl ef moral Vesporr de détermination de ee point, On voit
une crise de consetence de Vespeee la plas gene assez par la comibien if serait absurde de lui
yale ct la plusgrave et que Vobtention ow To preter uo sens uniquement destructeur, on
norohlention de ce résultat peut seule decider constructear :le point dont il est question est
He sa reussife ou de san cehee historique a fortior’ eolui ot la construction et la destruc
Au point de vue intellectuel il s‘agissait, lion cessent de pouvoir étre brondies Pune
il s'agit encore d'éprouver par tous les movens contre Pautre, Tl est clair, aussi, que le sur-
vl de faire reconnaitre & tout prix le caractore roalisme nest pas intéressé a tenir grand
faclice des Vieilles antinomies destinées hypo comple de ce qui se produit A été de lui sous
eritement & prévenir toute agitation insclitc pretexte @art, voire d'anti-art, de philosophic
de ta part de homme, ne serait-ce qu'en Tui ou Wanti-philosophic, en an mot de tout ce
donnant une idée Infligente de ses moyens, qui n'a pas pour fin Panéantissement de Petre
quien Je défiant d’tchapper dios une mesure en un brillant, interieur et avoughs, quic ne
valuble a la contrainte universelle. 1 épou soil pas plus l’ame de Ia glace que celle du
vaniail de la amort, les cafésechantants de feu, Que pourraient bien attendre de Vexpe-
Vau-deky Je naulrage de lo plus belle rmison rienee surtéaliste ceux qui gurdent quelqus
dans le sommeil, Pécrasant rideau de Uavenir, souci de la place quwils oceuperont dans le
les Lours de . les mniroirs d'inconsistince, monde? En co lett mental doi Pon ne peut
Vinfranchissable mur d'argent éclaboussé de plus entreprendre que pour soi-méme une
cervelle, ces images trop saisissantes de la catas- perilleuse mais, pensons-nous, une supreme
trophe humaine ne sont pent-etre que des recormpaissance, i ne saul etre question
images, Tout porte A croire qu'il existe un non plus Mattacher Ia moindre importance
certain point de Pesprit-d’ot li vie vt la mort, aux pas de ceux gui arrivent on aux pas de
le réel ef Vimaginaire, le passé et le futur, ceux qui sertent, ces pas se produtsant dans

ABOVE
SALVADOR DALI
Lip Brooch, 1949
Gold with rubies and pearls
Minami Art Museum, Tokyo
Dali added Surrealist lips to the trite
compliment of teeth like pearls.

LEFT
VALENTINE HUGO (French, 1890-1968)
Des Gueules (Three Gold Mouths, Two and
One), 1934
Oil on wood
Private collection, Paris
To lips made even more erotically charged by
their Surrealist displacement to the erogenous
zones, Hugo added the sensuality of gold.
 ABOVE
MAN RAY
Observatory Time—Venus, 1935-38
Photograph
Man Ray Archives, Paris

BELOW
MAN RAY
Observatory Time—Mode, 1936
Photograph
Man Ray Archives, Paris
Published Harper’s Bazaar, 1936
Using his painting Observatory Time—The
Lovers (p. 99) as a background, Man Ray
photographed a reclining figure in a Jacques
Fath gown in an imitation and interpretation
of the painting. Indeed the suite of
photographs became Man Ray’s reaction to
and evaluation of his own painting.

ABOVE
MAN RAY
Lip Necklace
Collection Robert Lee Morris, New York
 ABOVE
YVES SAINT LAURENT
Lip Dress, 1966
Photograph Claus Ohm
Seized by Saint Laurent for the bodice of his
dress in a manner suggesting Pop art as well as
Surrealism, the lips align with the breasts in
traditional Surrealist provocation and sexual
innuendo.

OPPOSITE
HORST P. HORST
Photograph for Cartier’s, New York, 1938
One seeing eye, one hand, and one
disembodied head join the other elements of
modernist autonomy, rectilinear structure, and
tabletop ina fashion study rendering
accessories as the primary focus of the
photograph.
ABOVE
YVES SAINT LAURENT
Sequined Lip Coat, 1971

RIGHT
SALVADOR DALI
Lip Sofa, c. 1937
Published “Why Don’t You...” Column,
Harper’s Bazaar, New York, April 1938
Lips become three-dimensional in Dali’s sofa,
an extravagant transformation of the love seat.
Elsa Schiaparelli’s Place Vendome boutique in
Paris featured the Dali lip sofa in “shocking
pink,” attracting much attention. The model,
however, wears Vionnet for languorous
seduction “when you are dining alone with
your husband,” according to Diana Vreeland in
her column.

86
88
OPPOSITE
ART KANE (American, born 1925)
Fashion Photograph, 1960s
Courtesy the photographer
A touch of Michelangelo animates Kane’s
photograph; the figure floats and hands reach,
suggesting fashion to be an intangible, almost
ungraspable ideal.

ABOVE RIGHT
LEE MILLER (American, 1907?—1977)
Hand, 1931
Photograph
The Art Institute of Chicago
The Julien Levy Collection, Gift of Jean and
Julien Levy
Although the hand would logically remain
with the body, the forearm and hand visually
seem to be independent, their striving reach,
akin to that of symbolic partial figures of
modern sculpture, seeming to suggest an
emotion focused in one portion of the body.
The spiritualist innervation of specific body
parts was a mystical source of inspiration for
some Surrealists; a hand in expressive grasp
may achieve a like effect.

BELOW RIGHT
MAURICE TABARD (French, 1897-1984)
Composition, 1931
Photograph
Courtesy Lucien Treillard, Paris
The altered photograph has its counterpart in
the altered body, whereby the hand of the
photograph, either literally or figuratively,
assumes a role in the depiction. Manipulation
is literally the imposition of the hand.
 SALVADOR DALI
Woman with a Head of Roses, 1935
Oilon canvas, 13%/, X 10% in.
Kunsthaus, Ziirich

The hands wrapped around Dali’s figures are

both embracing and twisting, and their
connotation is both erotic and deadly. They
signify erotic engagement as well as physical
restriction and constriction.

90
MARC JACOBS (American, born 1963)
Trompe |’Oeil Beaded Dress, 1986
Photograph Josef Astor
The designer, who elsewhere acknowledges his
admiration of Schiaparelli, offers an illusion,
and the photographer’s use of hands in light
and dark extends the legerdemain.
ABOVE RIGHT
RENE MAGRITTE YVES SAINT LAURENT
The Titanic Days, 1928 “Pop Art” Dress, 1966
Oil on canvas, 455/s x 317s in.
Like Magritte’s invasion of the body by
Private collection, Brussels
another form, Saint Laurent’s dress shares the
Superimposed on the body with a figural form of the wearer with another figure seen in
credibility by outline, but in apparent discord silhouette. Thus the fictive figure is ever at odds
with the figure in narrative and specific with the form of the garment suggesting
description, the male attacks the female in a discomforts of body and veracity.
struggle made horrific by the merging of the
two figures in an ineluctable union of invasion
and molestation.

92
GEORGE HOYNINGEN-HUENE
(American, born Russia, 1900-1968)
Fashion Photograph, 1938
Published Harper’s Bazaar, New York,
September 15, 1938
Gold claws extend the fingernails into the
animal vestiges implied in Schiaparelli’s
articulated gloves (p. 102).

5)
 wits
es a
ABOVE
HORST P HORST
Fashion Photograph, late 1930s
Combining the extremities of classical statuary
with real feet, Horst grants them independence
from the rest of the body in a manner most
unseemly.

OPPOSITE
ART KANE
Men’s Trousers by Basile, 1981
Photograph
Published Uomo Harper's Bazaar, Milan,
December 1981
Gender invasion and inversion enhance the
allure of Basile’s slacks.
 ANDRE BRETON

LE SURREALISME ET LA PEINTURE

BRENTANO’S
 st

és
™

OPPOSITE TOP OPPOSITE BOTTOM ABOVE

RENE MAGRITTE MARCEL DUCHAMP PIERRE CARDIN (French, born Italy 1922)
The Red Model, 1935 ENRICO DONATI Men’s Shoes, 1986
Oil on canvas, 217/16 X 183/,in. Window Display, Brentano’s, New York, 1945 Fashion Institute of Technology, New York
Musée National d’Art Moderne, Paris Courtesy Zabriskie Gallery, New York Edward C. Blum Design Laboratory. Gift of
Richard Martin
Magritte’s The Red Model itself became a Photograph Irving Solero
model through its use as a cover for the second
edition of André Breton’s Le Surréalisme et la
Peinture. In 1945 Duchamp and Donati
collaborated on a window display promoting
the book at Brentano’s, the New York
bookstore. They reproduced the shoes in
emulation of Magritte.
ABOVE
Poster Dress, 1966—68
Fashion Institute of Technology, New York
Edward C. Blum Design Laboratory. Gift of
Stephen de Pietri
Photograph Taishi Hirokawa
A paper dress of the 1960s gives all-seeing
power to the e

I vii

TOM BINNS (British, born 19 51)

Eye Cufflinks, 1986
Photograph Taishi Hirokawa
A matched pair, but displaced to the wrists, the
eyes of Binn’s jewelry peek mysteriously from
the cuffs.
TOP LEFT TOP RIGHT ABOVE
MARCEL JEAN HUBERT DE GIVENCHY (French, born MAN RAY
The Specter of the Gardenia, 1936 (replica 1927) Observatory Time—The Lovers, 1932—34
Lip Jacket, 1979 (replica 1964)
1972)
Plaster covered with cloth, zippers, and strip of Oil on canvas, 39 X 99 in.
Merging decorative needs with the traditional Man Ray Archives, Paris
film, 10% in. high imagery of the lips, in the 1970s Givenchy
Morton G. Neumann Family Collection, adopted the frottage caress on the garment as it Realizing lips not only as a part of anatomy but
Chicago had initially been impressed on the page of the as synecdoche, Man Ray visualized lovers in
Zippers, relatively new in clothing in the 1930s Second Surrealist Manifesto. repose as the upper and lower lips.
and pioneered by Schiaparelli, close the
unseeing eyes of Jean’s object. The appro-
priation for art of a device for advanced
clothing separates The Specter of the Gardenia
from Jean’s world-view Horoscope (p. 72), an
adaption of the old-fashioned dress form.
ELSA SCHIAPARELLI
Jacket with Jean Cocteau Embroidery, 1937
Philadelphia Museum of Art. Gift of Elsa
Schiaparelli
Photograph Taishi Hirokawa
Based on a Cocteau drawing—even including
the artist’s signature—Schiaparelli’s illusion of
hands clasping the waist is complemented by
the placing of the full profile of a figure and a
cascade of hair down the arm. Schiaparelli
creates discord between the fictive figure and
the wearer, frustrating our attempt to place the
parts of the body in direct relationship to the
figure in the torso but providing accurate
placement of the waist.
FRANCOIS LESAGE (French, born 1929)
Hand Belt, 1986
The Lesage sleight of hand has long been
employed by various designers for embroidery,
but he brings his virtuoso illusion to a belt of
his own design, in which hands clasp the waist
as if in confirmation of the belt’s tightening of
the body. In'the 1980s, the House of Lesage
was expanded, not only creating embroidery
for the couture but also crafting its own
production. It now shares retail quarters on the
Place Vendome in Paris with Schiaparelli.

IO.L
TO2
OPPOSITE TOP LEFT
JEAN-CHARLES DE CASTELBAJAC
Glove Bag, 1984
Photograph Roxanne Lowit
The glove as metaphor for the hand and the
literalization of a hand bag affiliate the hand
with fashion: it plays the role of accessory in
the Castelbajac and perhaps serves the young
girl in sewing in the de Chirico.

OPPOSITE BOTTOM LEFT

GIORGIO DE CHIRICO
Amusements of a Young Girl, 1916
Oil on canvas, 183/, x 16 in.
The Museum of Modern Art, New York
James Thrall Soby Bequest

OPPOSITE TOP RIGHT

ELSA SCHIAPARELLI
Wrist-Length Black-Suede Gloves with Red
Snakeskin Nails, 1938
Philadelphia Museum of Art. Gift of Elsa
Schiaparelli
Photograph Taishi Hirokawa
When the glove both articulates and modifies
the hand, the relation between the perceived
hand and the hand underneath can be sinister
and elegant. When the articulation is subverted
by the materials and colors of the glove,
however, resemblance and discrepancy are
amplified.

OPPOSITE BOTTOM RIGHT

ROBERT LEE MORRIS (American, born
Germany 1947)
Fingers, 1980—81
Photograph Taishi Hirokawa
RIGHT
THIERRY MUGLER
Metal Fingertips, 1986
Photograph Michel Arnaud
Published Vogue, London, April 1986
As so much was present in the fascinating
interstices between the conscious and
subconscious for the Surrealist imagination, so,
too, much was evocative in the interval between
the primitive and human. When Mugler’s
golden fingertips appeared in 1986, British
Vogue called them “‘the ultimate gesture.”

103
ABOVE
ANNE-MARIE BERETTA (French, born —

1937)
Toe Sandal, 1982
Photograph Roxanne Lowit
Deriving their irony from Magritte (p. 96), Tat
subsequent versions of feet-shoes sustain a long
iconography, if seldom a practical style.

ABOVE RIGHT
MANOLO BLAHNIK (Spanish, born 1943)
Sketch for the Glove Shoes, 1982 Cog
OBI
1
Hdd
is1“WO
:
Blahnik creates a hand and foot metaphor and Cuth
nes
massage.
BELOW RIGHT

MANOLO BLAHNIK
Magritte “Siamese Twin” Shoe, 1982
Published Vanity, Milan, April 1982
Rendering homage to Magritte, Blahnik
considers the transposition into a practical and
extravagantly aesthetic shoe. The foot slips into
one-half the shoe and carries thereby the full
boot. MON
we:
BELG
6s Pe
mu
Sta

104
RIGHT
JOAN MIRO
Object; 1936
Mixed media, 317% X 117 X 10, in.
The Museum of Modern Art, New York
Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Pierre Matisse
Out of a hat emerges a lyric fantasy with a fetish
object composed of a suspended high-heeled
shoe. Derived in part from Dali’s Object of
Symbolic Function (1931), which gave like
primacy to a high-heeled shoe, Miré’s Object is
anomalous within his oeuvre as an object
construction, but it is consonant with his
obsession with the transmuted body.

105
 DISPLACEMENTS
AND ILLUSIONS
The Surrealist object was essentially an exercise in displace-
ment. Like the bottlerack Marcel Duchamp bought at a Paris
bazaar in 1914 and inscribed, the Surrealist object became
art as a function of its dysfunction and displacement. Altered
by its removal from its conventional milieu, causing disrup-
tions in role, association, and even scale, it shifted identity
through its new designation as Surrealist object. Thereafter,
it would offer a contradiction between the accustomed rec-
ognition and its new definition in art. In the painting Dream-
ing’s Key (1930; opposite) by Magritte, displacement
similarly plays on the discrepancy between our customary
apprehension of an object and its revised context. And in
fashion, a hand bag that appears to be a fan or clock can be
equally startling (p. 122). Knowledge is placed in jeopardy as
the unconscious offers interpretations for objects seen.
The hats of Surrealist fashion have offered some of the
most bizarre examples of displacement. Lobsters, pastries,
and mutton chops have disported themselves as hats, suggest-
ing the heady folly of the Surrealist enterprise. Whereas most
items of dress afford only limited opportunity for the display
of seemingly autonomous objects, the hat at the crest of the
living figure offers a perfect field. Moreover, the Surrealists
joined masqueraders and low comedians in perceiving the
antic potential of the silly hat. In its conventional association
with ceremony, propriety, and rank, the hat plays a symbolic
role. The object replacing the hat or the hat resembling an ob-
ject thus plays a symbolic role as well, even in the game of di-
minishing the propriety of the figure. When a miniature chair
is placed on the head (as Karl Lagerfeld so elegantly did, see
p. 123), one plays not only with the conventions of furniture
but also with the humorous dislocation of the entire process
of sitting.
Elsa Schiaparelli’s Shoe Hat (p. 111), a classic of the genre,
brings the foot to the head with the contortionism that de-
lighted the Surrealists. Proposed by Salvador Dali in a
OPPOSITE
RENE MAGRITTE (Belgian, 1898-1967)
sketch and confirmed by Schiaparelli’s own drawing (both
Dreaming’s Key, 1930 1937; pp. 110-11), the Shoe Hat has its antecedents in Sur-
Oil on canvas, 32 X 237, in. realist play. During a 1932 visit to Port Lligat, Dali was pho-
Private collection tographed next to a Surrealist object of obscure meaning
The Surrealist subversion of reasoning is and seemingly provisional fabrication (p. 110); he was al-
evident in the scramble of names and objects ready playing with the placement and purpose of the stray-
(egg = acacia; shoe = moon; hat= snow; ing shoe, for it served as both hat and epaulette for the artist.
candle = ceiling; glass = storm; hammer = Eventually Gala Dali was photographed wearing the Dali-
desert). The child’s play of learning specific
epistemological concepts becomes then a lesson
Schiaparelli Shoe Hat, by which time the reversal was not
in displacement, a substitution of unconscious only from bottom to top but also from husband to wife:
and antirational for rational meanings. who wears the shoe in a given photograph? The comic irony 107
with which Dali and Schiaparelli perceived the hat has been
pursued by many designers. In the 1980s, Kirsten Wood-
ward and Stephen Jones perched hats as daffy as a tilted
ewer and spilling French fries on the head (pp. 117, 125).
Hatmakers have also taken license with the conventional
materials of hatmaking. Beginning with feathers, they might
investigate the special possibilities Surrealism allowed for
the noncontextual displacement of the object and its role as
an amusement in complement to its being an aesthetic argu-
ment. Thus, the feather hat readily becomes a chicken hat—
a perched bird—now risible yet beautiful in its transforma-
tion into the mere barnyard chicken. Schiaparelli had con-
ceived of such organic millinery in 1937 (p. 113), and Bill
Cunningham did the same in the 1950s (p. 125). The
swathing of the hat around the head and the word “head”
became the field for a suite of heads of lettuce, cabbage, and
sundry other greens offered as hats (p. 124). That the dis-
placement is offered in language and meaning as well as in
an ironic view of objects certifies the literary and Surrealist
cast of these fashion heads. The expressive anti-utility of the
redefined object serves fashion as a powerful force, just as it
did the art of the twentieth century. But if the Surrealist am-
bition to marvel at the mundane is to be attained, perhaps
art is not necessarily its sole medium; rather, the displace-
ment that fashion allows in being both mundane and in af-
fording opportunities to be visually and _ intellectually
marvelous is equally important.

The inventive hats of Surrealism top the list of displacements,

but other possibilities exist as well. One article of clothing
may be substituted for another. Karl Lagerfeld cinches the
waist with gloves, a variation on the concept of the separable
hand. John Galliano invents the jacket to become pants, and
Jean-Charles de Castelbajac animates the skirt as a shirt,
again displacing our sense of top and bottom. Historical and
usually invisible clothing was made apparent when the cor-_
set, reminder of an earlier era, was employed as a bracelet by
Paul Flato (1939), as a hat by Lagerfeld (1985-86), and as a
dress by Jean-Paul Gaultier (1986; other versions as early as
1982; pp. 115-17). These displacements within the fashion
context are perhaps even more effective because the “‘ob-
jects” persist as apparel but alter their specific role or place
within the assembly of apparel items. The inebriated party-
goer may wear a lampshade on his head, but it is not neces-
sarily a viable hat; the Surrealist wearer with a shoe on her or MARCEL VERTES (French, born
his head may be more intoxicatingly provocative. Signifi- Hungary, 1895—196r)
cantly, the item of Surrealist apparel must offer some degree Schiaparelli Mutton Chop Hat, c. 1937
of authenticity. The Schiaparelli Mutton Chop Hat (c. 1937; Published Harper’s Bazaar, New York,
p. 108) is a millinery fiction, but in order to be fully accept- January 1938
able it has a white patent-leather frill on the end of the chop Delighting in the radical gesture of the mutton
as if offered in proper restaurant service. The Pastry Hats chop on the head, Schiaparelli made her hat
(p. 123) designed by Karl Lagerfeld are sufficiently detailed plausible by her specific and excellent detailing.
Her joke is a finesse to an already absurd
to seem delicious and not merely allusive; they look delecta- circumstance, the custom of “dressing” the
ble not deceitful. André Breton once expressed his admira- lamb chop with a paper frill or “panty” at its tip.
tion for Duchamp’s disdain of all thesis. It is the same device
that Surrealist disorientation of fashion provided: a license to
redesign all existing fashion objects and objects external to
the figure. The floating, somnambulant world of Surrealist
figures allowed for the misalliance of familiar objects and the
reevaluation of all objects, especially those which obtained
on the body as fashion.
A hat posing as a chair offers the possibility of transference
between furniture and apparel, but the prime example of this
crossover is the fusion of body as a bureau, of pockets as
drawers, and of the vestment as furniture. In its most sinister
example, the adornment of a dress could be, with deadly wit,
the handle of a casket, as in Francois Lesage’s embroidery (c.
1950; p. 133); but fashion also practiced a slightly less ma-
cabre interpretation of the furniture and apparel continuum
as well. Dali’s concept of the City of Drawers, or the penetra-
tion of drawers into the body (a “chest of drawers’’) was rep-
resented not only in his sculpture Venus de Milo with
Drawers but also in his pencil drawing Study for Anthropo-
morphic Cabinet (both 1936; p. 120). A talismanic image for
Dali, the woman as the place of drawers conflated two
themes of the artist: woman-as-object and the erotic penetra-
tion of the figure. Dali’s eroticism and the vanity of the sub-
ject were transformed in Schiaparelli’s Desk Suit (1936;
pp. 118-19). The artistic convention remains the same, but
certain stylistic aspects suggest an altered interpretation. In-
deed, the woman who wears the suit of drawers has become
conventionalized, in that Schiaparelli places this Surrealist
invention on a conservative suit, thus promoting its associa-
tion with furniture and displacing the naked eroticism of-
fered by Dali. More discreet, the Schiaparelli suit offers an
uncertain illusionism in that some of the drawers bear the
function of pockets and others appear only to simulate the
furniture. The designer’s fascination with novelty and her
choice of utilitarian objects for buttons achieves prominence
here, as the drawer pulls and buttons are one and the same.
Photographed by Cecil Beaton in a barren landscape sugges-
tive of a Dali painting, the image by a Surrealist artist is mod-
ified by a designer and then rendered in a Surrealist mode by
its photographer. By this move in and out of explicit Surreal-
ism, the suit holds us in its thrall, even as it seeks some degree
of conventional acceptance. The wilder invention is the
Painted-Silk Drawer Dress (1984; p. 121) created at the Paris
school of fashion Studio Ber¢ot; with its pockets and protu-
berances overflowing with jewelry, it returns to the eroticism
and flamboyance of Dali’s original image.
Just as Dali’s invention of the woman with drawers had im-
plicated the Venus de Milo, so has much Surrealist invention
come from the reinterpretation of classical beauty, endowing
that convention with the convulsiveness and dreamlike qual-
ity that Surrealism considered appropriate to the artistic
state. Classical forms underwent multiple transformations in
the Surrealist imagination, and even classical architecture MARCEL VERTES
was appropriated by Surrealist designers—in theater and Schiaparelli Inkpot Hat, 1938
film, as has been demonstrated, as well as in fashion. The Published Harper’s Bazaar, New York,
canon of classical forms in architecture, most especially the March 15, 1938
column, was incorporated into all aspects of design. It is said Schiaparelli transforms the thinking cap into
that Schiaparelli called upon the classical column when cre- the convenience of the writing cap. She offers a
ating evening masks for galas, using them as the vertical ele- quill pen ever ready for inspiration, not the
least her own in appropriating objects to
ments by which the masks could be held before the eyes.
millinery.
Whole figures were incorporated into classical architecture,
whether by de Chirico in his inventions for the 1929 Ballets
Russes production of Le Bal (p. 130), where they became liv-
ing forms not merely of the column but of the classical tem-
ple—yet with modern intimations in the brick fabrication of
the lower legs and arms—or more recently by Adelle Lutz for
David Byrne’s film True Stories (1986), in which figures also
emerge from classical architecture as well as from contempo-
rary brick face (p. 128). Both Man Ray and Hans Bellmer im-
posed brick face in Surrealist painting, the former in’ his 109
 LEFT
SALVADOR DALI at Port Lligat, c. 1932
Photograph Gala Dali

As early as 1932, Dali anticipated his future

collaboration with Schiaparelli by posing with his
wife Gala’s slipper on his head. Five years later,
this histrionic move would be effected in clothing
resembling the actual object.

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ABOVE : ABOVE
ELSA SCHIAPARELLI (French, born Italy,
MARCEL VERTES
Schiaparelli Shoe Hat, 1937
1890-1973) Published Harper’s Bazaar, New York,
Sketch for Shoe Hat, 1937
September 15, 1937
Musée des Arts de la Mode, Paris
Schiaparelli Studio Sketchbook, U.F.A.C. The operagoer Vertés depicts may seem blasé,
but her astonishing shoe hat would
undoubtedly be startling to others. Schiaparelli
observed the formal similarities between a shoe
and a peaked hat with projecting cone, but
knew that her hat would ever be seen as a shoe
transplanted and transmogrified. The betrayal
of conventional meaning, Surrealism’s
revolution, achieves its tricorne here.

LEE
 OPPOSITE
ELSA SCHIAPARELLI
Hen in Nest Hat, 1938
Published Vogue, New York, March 15, 1938
Illustration by Eric
Sitting pretty is Schiaparelli’s “chicken in a
nest” hat. Vogue described it as “just for fun”
and a “foible,” but Schiaparelli’s hat alludes to
the materials of millinery, combining a straw
nest with the feathers of traditional hatmaking.
No advocate of animal rights, Schiaparelli
nonetheless scored an unforgettable point
about the folly of the conventional hat. Her
gesture is the Surrealist altering of traditional
images to suggest new possibilities.

ABOVE LEFT LEFT

MICHAEL ROBERTS (British) VALENTINE HUGO (French, 1890-1968)
Fashion Photograph, 1985 Woman with Chicks, 1937
Published Tatler, London, October 1985 Engraving
ABOVE RIGHT Courtesy Jacques Damase, Paris
LANCE STEADLER (American, born Whether Hugo realized that the world of
1955) engraved fantasy would be made real is
Fashion Photograph, 1986 uncertain, but its coincidence with the
Published Vogue Italia Pelle, Milan, May—June Schiaparelli Hen in Nest Hat suggests that little
1986 is stranger than fashion.
Each image puts its best shoe forward, taking
Dali’s joke into the 1980s. The artistic joke,
increasingly commonplace with such revivals
of interest in Surrealism as Bruce McLean’s
paintings and the 1985 film Brazil, becomes a
conventional epigram of disorientation.
 INCORPORATING VANITY FAIR

/ © © THE CONDE NAST PUBLICATIONS, INC

wae Soi ee ee 193 8 + PCE 3S CENTS

PAT aie
113
 Imaginary Portrait of D. A. FE. de Sade, II (1940) and the lat-
ter in his Child and Seeing Hands (1950; both p. 132). By this
literal animation of architecture and the past, the figure be-
comes architecture in the most arresting way and the flexibil-
ity of the figure becomes a construction on the apparent
solidity of architecture. Ionic column and Gallé lamp, which
seemingly have weight and fixity of place, are given license by
the designs of Lutz (p. 129) and Dominique Lacoustille (p.
127) to come to life, as in an animated cartoon.

As clothing offers the illusion of intractable forms made of

hard materials and photography and film allow for momen- ABOVE
tary uncertainty when confronted by living beauty and sculp- PAUL FLATO (American)
ture of the classical past, so the figures in the pristine plains Gold Corset Bracelet with Ruby and Diamond
of Dali’s Three Young Surrealist Women Holding in Their Garters, 1939
Arms the Skins of an Orchestra (1936; p. 135) appear to offer Published Harper’s Bazaar, New York,
November 1939
some uncertain transition between life and immortality.
In 1937, Dali and Schiaparelli collaborated on what has Moved to the wrist and transformed into gold
come to be known as the Tear-Illusion Dress. It featured a by the alchemy of the Surrealist imagination,
the corset no longer serves its initial purpose,
cape in which the tears were real and a dress on which the which is to constrict and therefore to achieve a
tears were fictive, playing with the integrity of material in fashionably slim waist. Here the normally
much the same way as de Chirico had played with the ele- flexible twentieth-century corset is supplanted
ments of classical architecture. ‘““Beauty will be convulsive or by a firm form that falsifies constriction but
it will not be,”’ said André Breton. To offer the dress with still achieves the end of showing a fashionably
slim wrist.
tears is to recreate the convulsive horror of the first apprehen-
sion of beauty. The modernist assumption of rejection can be OPPOSITE
a premise for fashion as much as any other artistic expres- KARL LAGERFELD
sion. In this instance, the dialogue between cape and dress Corset Hat, 1985—86
makes that friction between the perceived and the cognitive Photograph Roxanne Lowit
ineluctable. If in the lassitude of some fashion the dress were Of all the inappropriate places for this
eventually to dissolve into mere decoration, it could not do so normally concealed undergarment to perch,
in the presence of its cape, for the two styles support the plau- the head is perhaps the most improbable, a
disjunctive connection perfect for Lagerfeld’s
sibility of one another. Thus, we must perceive the real tears style of irony and decorum. Lagerfeld,
as much as we must acknowledge their illusion on the dress. however, also offers an anachronism along
Further, the mysticism of penetrating without tearing asun- with the movement of the garment to the head.
der becomes more viable when it is accompanied by the phys- By using an archaic garment, he confirms its
ical manifestation of the dress without rupture. Dress movement in time as well as around the body.
Further, that he gives external format to an
thereby becomes, as it does in assuming the attributes of fur-
undergarment exposes the devices of structure
niture, architecture, and sculpture, a resembling and referen- to external examination. In its several issues of
tial art form, not simply a matter of apparel, but a possibility displacement, the Corset Hat functions with
114 for art and its affinities. the complexity of any Surrealist object.
OPPOSITE
JEAN-PAUL GAULTIER (French, born
1952)
Corset Dress, 1986
Photograph Roxanne Lowit
Since 1982, Gaultier has made a succession of
studies of the corset, turning this traditional
undergarment into an external feature of dress,
an anticipation of popular-culture adaptation
of intimate apparel to external wear.

ABOVE RIGHT
MAN RAY (American,1890—1976)
Mina Loy, 1918
Man Ray Archives, Paris
The Dada-Surrealist appropriation of
vernacular objects extended to adapting them
for use as accessories. In this new role, the
object hovered between brilliant improvisation
and the testing of art’s premises, here a cool
calculation of a thermometer as an accessory.
Jasper Johns’s Thermometer (1960) might
seem to be the inheritor of this immodest
earring. Mina Loy, the wife of Arthur Cravan,
contributed to the New York Dada periodical
The Blind Man in its two issues of April and
May of 1917 and was part of the Surrealist
circle in Paris during the 1930s.

CENTER RIGHT
KIRSTEN WOODWARD (British, born
1960)
Vase Hat, 1986
Photograph Alastair Thain
Wonderfully misappropriated, precariously
unbalanced, and cannily tilted in readiness to
serve, Woodward’s ewer is an empty vessel, but
also a perfect topknot transformed into a
decorative object; it makes reference to women
carrying vessels on their heads, a leaning vase,
and the history of classical and neoclassical
decorative objects.

BELOW RIGHT
MAN RAY
Meret Oppenheim, c. 1950
Photograph
Man Ray Archives, Paris

For Oppenheim, artist of the Fur-Lined Teacup

(1936), it was not inappropriate to wear champagne-
cork earrings. The motif reappears in Stephen Jones's
Dom Perignon millinery and accessories of the 1980s
and may have a source in Salvador Dali’s Aphrodisiac
Dinner Jacket (1936), from which there hung an
abundance of drinking glasses.
 LEFT
ELSA SCHIAPARELLI
Sketch for Desk Suit, 1936
Musée des Arts de la Mode, Paris
Schiaparelli Studio Sketchbooks, U.F.A.C.

OPPOSITE
CECIL BEATON (British, 1904-1980)
Schiaparelli Desk Suit, 1936
Photograph
Courtesy Sotheby’s, London
The Schiaparelli Desk Suit may not represent a
direct collaboration with Dali, but it is inspired
by Dali’s concurrent works (see p. 120). The
suit, however, is a subdued variation on the
theme. It features pulls for the fictive drawers
that are ambiguous: some are “real,”
functioning as pockets, and others are false.
Beaton’s photograph avowedly places the
model in a Surrealist landscape.

118
119
 OPPOSITE
DOLINE DRITSAS (French, born 1963)
Painted-Silk Drawer Dress, 1984
Photograph Roxanne Lowit
Although Schiaparelli tamed the drawers
concept to a suit for the office, Dritsas returned
to the libido and lasciviousness of Dali’s
concept, creating half-painted surfaces and
drawers dripping with costume jewelry.

ABOVE
SALVADOR DALI
The City of Drawers: Study for
Anthropomorphic Cabinet, 1936
Pencil on paper, 12s X 20%, in.
The Art Institute of Chicago. Gift of Frank B.
Hubachek

LEFT
SALVADOR DALI
Venus de Milo with Drawers, 1936 (cast 1964)
Bronze
Private collection
Fraught with anxiety over entry into the body
of a woman, Dali offers a series of drawers as
possible access. The artist spoke of “kinds of
allegories” related to the drawers and the need
to smell the “innumerable narcissistic odors
emanating from each one.” Even the Venus de
Milo is subject to such corporeal access.

I20
 TOM BINNS (British, born 1951)
Electric-Bulb Earring, 1986
Photograph Taishi Hirokawa
A jeweler-artist working in London, Binns
probes the world of pure invention as well as
the history of Surrealism for transposed and
transformed objects. Bent forks and rubber
fishes in kinship with Dali, single mysterious
eyes, and bizarre clocks occur frequently in his
work. In this case, his earring is incandescent
with aesthetic inspiration.

LEFT

LEDERER (founded Vienna, r9th century)

Fan Bag of Gold-Stamped Black Satin
Collection Mark Walsh, New York
Clock Bag of Black Suede, 1950s
Fashion Institute of Technology, New York
Edward C. Blum Design Laboratory
Champagne-Bucket Bag of Black Suede and
Plastic, 1950s
Collection Mark Walsh, New York
Photograph Taishi Hirokawa
Fashion accessories may foster illusions
antithetical to clothing’s functions, as in the
three handbags here. A related 1950s telephone
handbag previously attributed to Schiaparelli
and her leek, eggplant, and cauliflower
“vegetarian” bracelet also set clothing’s real
function in antithesis to its seeming
identification. The still-life composition of
alternative forms is not unlike Magritte’s
arrangement of objects in Dreaming’s Key.

OPPOSITE ABOVE
KARL LAGERFELD (French, born
Germany 1938)
Pastry Hats, 1984
Photograph Roxanne Lowit
In Lagerfeld’s caprice of displacement and
substitution, one can have one’s cake and wear
it, too. Like Schiaparelli’s 1937 Mutton Chop
Hat , these patisserie accessories speak to the
Surrealist imagination of Dreaming’s Key, in
which a fictive identification of the object is
presented with sufficient declarative force to
seem convincing. No confection, however
delicious in sight or taste, matches the sweet
delight of Surrealist wit.

OPPOSITE BELOW
KARL LAGERFELD
Chair Hat and Upholstered Dress, 1985
Published Vanity Fair, New York, September
1985
Photograph Daniel Jouanneau
By wearing a fauteuil brooch, a tufted-
ottoman dress, and sitting on a chair matched
to the hat, the model is placed in an even more
incongruous, but strangely sympathetic,
relation to her chair hat.

I22
 FROM LEFT Inasmuch as they are referred to as “heads” of
GERMAINE VITTU lettuce and cabbage, these hats establish their
Head of Lettuce Hat, 1942 similarity to heads in language as well as in
Green silk visual displacement. Like certain other
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York Surrealist fashions, they provide in clothing a
Gift of Mrs. Alexander P. Morgan colloquial affiliation between body and food.
The female as serving tray for foods was a
ERIC BRAAGAARD party specialty developed by Salvador Dali in
Salad Hat, c. 1968 his Dream of Venus, the pavilion he designed
Green silk for the 1939 New York World’s Fair.
Fashion Institute of Technology, New York
Edward C. Blum Design Laboratory
Photograph Taishi Hirokawa

EMME (Ethel Price)

Head of Cabbage Hat, 1957
Green silk
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
124 Gift of Natalie Lieberman
TOP AND BOTTOM RIGHT
STEPHEN JONES (British, born 1957)
French Fries Hat, 1984
Colander Hat, 1984
Jones’s boldly inventive hats based on
vernacular items are beautifully made, not-for-
one-time-wear creations. Literally madcap in
their inventiveness, they take part in the
tradition of Surrealist objects—ever impudent
and inspired.

ABOVE
LOUISE BOURBON (French?)
Chicory Beret, 1938
Published Harper’s Bazaar, New York,
December 1938
Photograph Georges Saad
Surrealism’s more popular ramifications
involved introducing many everyday items into
the repertoire of millinery. Designer Bourbon
used whatever materials were at hand, froma
funnel to a feather duster to French rolls. In
this case, she worked with chicory—not a
semblance, but the real thing, a festoon from a
legume.

CENTER RIGHT
BILL CUNNINGHAM
(American)
Chicken Hat, 1950s
Photograph Taishi Hirokawa
Cunningham created a marvelously alive and
slightly sinister chicken, but one with pluck.

I25
 LEFT
MARINA KILLERY (British, born 1960)
Shortcake Hat of Straw, Satin, and Fake
Strawberries, 1985
Published Vogue, London, November 1985
Photograph Paolo Roversi
The British designer concocts a hat to be
carried on the head with the skill of the most
agile waiter.

OPPOSITE
DOMINIQUE LACOUSTILLE (French,
born 1956)
Gallé Lamp Dress, 1980s

A Gallé lamp is now seized from history and

given Pygmalion incarnation in a dress that
illuminates both the decorative arts and
clothing.

126
‘®
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OPPOSITE ABOVE AND BELOW
ADELLE LUTZ
Urban Camouflage Clothing, 1986
Photographs Annie Leibovitz
Published Vanity Fair, New York,
October 1986
The Ionic Column stands among its
architectural confrerés in Lutz’s Urban
Camouflage costumes for the David Byrne film
True Stories (1986). It was philosopher Roland
Barthes’s belief that there is a discrepancy
between clothing and the external world, but
Lutz seeks to resolve that separation. In
publishing the photograph of David Byrne in
Lutz’s Brick Suit (below), Vanity Fair wrote:
“Tf there’s any artist Byrne truly resembles in
his pallor, his perfected otherness, his powdered
aura, it’s the writer-director-artist Jean
Cocteau.”

RIGHT
ADELLE LUTZ
Urban Camouflage: Study for Classical Column, 1986

In simile, the body is often described as a

column: in fashion, pleating is said to resemble
the fluting of a column. Lutz goes beyond
simile to create the garment and column as one
and the same.

129
 ry1,oh Chis—ree” |
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BEAUTIFUL

Tiv-ror-or-tu E-TREE PRESENT... CMS E BREATHTAKING NYLONS!

ABOVE AND BELOW LEFT The vocabulary of classical architecture

GIORGIO DE CHIRICO (Italian, born provided the theme for de Chirico’s costume
Greece, 1888-1978) and decor design for Le Bal, produced by
Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes in 1929 and
Le Bal: Woman’s Costume, 1929
choreographed by George Balanchine. De
= ¢
MOIR i
MPR Pencil, watercolor, and gouache on paper,
Chirico’s sketch of the Woman’s Costume
1o% X 77s in.
invites speculation on clothing’s role in both
Le Bal: Program Design, 1929 enclosure and disclosure, as well as on the
Pencil, watercolor, and gouache on paper, solidity of classical architecture. The figure
157% X 1rin. seated in the comfortable armchair (below) is
attired in elements of a classical frieze, but
Wadsworth Atheneum, Hartford, Connecticut
comic relief is provided by his brick-faced lower
From the Serge Lifar Collection, the Ella Gallup
arms and legs, a departure from the
Sumner and Mary Catlin Sumner Collection
neoclassical theme. Derided by the first-
generation Surrealists for his association with
the ballet, de Chirico retained the faceless
mannequin figures that had appeared in his
work from the teens onward.
OPPOSITE RIGHT ABOVE
SALVADOR DALI KRIZIA (Italian company, founded 19 54)
Advertisement for Bryans Stockings, 1946 Ionic Column Bathing Suit, c. 1982
Published Vogue, New York, November 1, Illustration by Antonio
1946

Commerce also builds on the architectural

metaphor in Dali’s interpretation of the “bricks
as legs” simulation, a masonry quadrille
contrasting sheer stockings with brick legs. The
comparison of women to architecture (“built”
or “stacked’’) is a conventional and long-
standing vulgarism.

3
 LEFT
HANS BELLMER (German, born Poland,
1902-1975)
Child and Seeing Hands, 1950
Ink and watercolor on paper, 11% X 9/2 in.
Collection Joseph and Jory Shapiro, Chicago
Although Bellmer’s brick hands are manifestly
a construction of the mind, their mysterious
combination of sight and touch bears the
suggestion of dungeons and castles and the
latent sexual threat they imply.

LEFT
MAN RAY
Imaginary Portrait of D. A. F. de Sade, II,
1940
Oil on canvas, 20 X 16 in.
Private collection

The Marquis de Sade—man, monument,

emblem of Surrealist freedom and rebellion—is
seemingly being created from the stones of the
Bastille, the notorious Paris prison representing
oppression to partisans of the French
Revolution. In this, the ambiguity of the
Surrealist interpretation of history is evident.
While freedom and revolution are extolled, a
monument, even a fantasy one, is constructed
with the materials of the past detached from
one history to be newly encoded in another.
ABOVE
JACQUES GRIFFE (French, born 1917)
Casket Handle Embroidery, c. 1950
Embroidered by Lesage, Paris
Photograph Taishi Hirokawa
Although Dali’s drawers were lubricious,
Griffe’s Casket Handle, intended to decorate a
pocket, is sinister in its association with a
coffin and the abiding Surrealist premonition
of death.

ABOVE RIGHT
RENE MAGRITTE
Perspective, 1963
Crayon on paper, 14% X 10%/s in.
The Museum of Modern Art, New York
Gift of Harry Torczyner
133
MARCEL ROCHAS (French, 1902—1955)
Trompe !’Oeil Jacket, 1930s
Photograph Harry Meerson
Rochas’s substitution of solid forms of
architecture for the more pliant forms of the
body creates clothing as a built shelter for the
body.

134
ee ele Selatan aid 946

SALVADOR DALI Flower heads, a limp cello, and a soft piano are
Three Young Surrealist Women Holding in the music of this Dali painting. The middle
Their Arms the Skins of an Orchestra, 1936 figure wears a “tear” dress, as if in revelation of
Oil on canvas, 21, X 255s in. the body, but in decided contrast to the figure
Morse Charitable Trust, on loan to the on the left, which seems more radically
Salvador Dali Museum, Saint Petersburg, exposed through its drapery. Moreover,
Florida although the middle figure may be said to
reflect Dali’s collaboration with Schiaparelli on
the fabric for the Tear Dress (p. 137), which
appeared a year later, it also promotes the
illusion that the tears are on the body and that
no dress is there whatsoever.

135
 BELOW
REI KAWAKUBO (Japanese, born 1942?)
Lace Sweater, 1982
Photograph Peter Lindbergh
Like Schiaparelli, Kawakubo only teases the
viewer with the possibility of the torn
garment. Indeed, she respects the
integrity of the material, but offers the illusion
of a defiled garment.

’ RIGHT
ELSA SCHIAPARELLI
Tear-Illusion Dress and Head Scarf, 1937
Philadelphia Museum of Art
Gift of Elsa Schiaparelli
Photograph Taishi Hirokawa
To tear the dress is to deny its customary
decorum and utility and to question the matter
of concealment and revelation in the garment.
Although the Tear Dress, a collaboration
between Dali and Schiaparelli, is an evening
gown to be worn in the most formal
circumstances, it is presented as if it were in the
most aggressively deteriorated state. At the
time of the Spanish Civil War, when Fascism
was spreading throughout Europe, the
references to shattered glass and rent fabric
must have held strong implications for both the
political and visual worlds. A memento mori,
the garment was in a state of destruction even
when it was new. The Dali-Schiaparelli gesture
is extended in torn garments of 1970s and
1980s punk and in high design in Rei
Kawakubo’s 1982 “lace” sweater, slashed at its
inception and similarly counterpointing the
objectively perfect and the purposefully
imperfect.

136
138
 NATURAL AND UN:
- NATURAL WORLDS
Surrealism navigated strange waters. It was an art of the
depths, not only of psychological and intellectual immersion
but also of the actual depths of marine and aquatic life. Si-
rens, fish, and shells entered the worlds of Surrealism and
fashion. In a plate from Max Ernst’s collage-novel Une
Semaine de Bonté (1933-34; opposite), shell and head
converge in a Surrealist personification of water. One of Cha- \

nel’s rare Surrealist-inspired designs is a white-grosgrain hat

in the form of a shell (1938; p. 157), on which a Surrealist Ve-
nus could have been borne up. In the 1930s Surrealist beauty
was at its convulsive peak as it plunged into or emerged from
water and allowed earthly beauty to commingle with the
beauty of the sea. Stylistic extensions of the fish from the title
page of La Révolution Surréaliste of December 1, 1924
(p. 140) proliferated. The fish inscribed “Surrealism” would
swim through decades of imagery.
A strategically placed lobster became an important part
of an evening dress designed by Elsa Schiaparelli in collabo-
ration with Salvador Dali in 1937 (p. 146). Represented in
Harper’s Bazaar as la robe homarde, the lobster dress par-
took of many Surrealist motifs of the period. The lobster’s
prehistoric appearance in contrast with its rather refined as-
sociation with food—as well as its metamorphosis in color
as it goes from sea to table—made it an eminently suitable
symbol. Indeed, the Neptune theme had caught the imagi-
nation of the Surrealists and their patrons, inspiring a mas-
querade at the villa of the Comte de Noailles in 1929 (p. 142)
and the costume worn by the Comtesse de Noailles at a ball
the following year (p. 155). The lobster, however, was the pre-
— ferred symbol for Dali. Perhaps drawn to the claws, prehen-
sile pincers, feelers, and hard carapace for their resemblance
to certain insects, which recurred in his paintings, he may
OPPOSITE
have
a
found that it is the lobster as exemplar
i
of human primi-
f
MAX ERNST (French, born Germany, tivism that held the greatest attraction. Moreover, the history
1891— 1976) of the lobster submerges us in aqueous ancestral origins, al-
Plate 4 from Une Semaine de Bonté, vol. 2: . lowing us to realize a history of development that is not lim-
Water, 1933-34 ited to terrestrial life.
Collage-novel, published Paris, 1934
For Dali, the lobster could be associated with both the in-
Ernst’s personification of water, a little bit strument of the telephone and the instrumentality of the fig
dominatrix, wears ashell hat. leaf, the former affiliating the lobster with mouth and ear,
the latter with genitalia. The lobster is at once armored and
naked. Dali’s lobster telephone (1936; p. 145) coyly made
the receiver of the telephone (with the mouth and ear com-
bination new in the 1930s) into a point of erogenous and
amusing contact. Hand, mouth, and ear were all implicated
in the use of the new telephone; Dali understood their nexus
 to be as absurd as it was utilitarian. The lobster might also
crawl on a Dali head, but most frequently Dali associated the
lobster with covering female pudenda, where its role was both
LA REVOLUTION SURREALISTE menacing and modest. A series of photographs by George |
Directeurs :
Pierre NAVILLE et Benjamin PERET Platt Lynes of Dali in the company of a female model with a
45, Rue de Grenelle
PAR)S (7°) lobster testify to the discomfort of this imagery (c. 1939;
p. 144). Moreover, Dali’s 1939 water ballet The Dream of Ve-
Le surréalisme ne se présente pas comme l'exposition d'une doctrine.
Certaines idées qui lui servent actuellement de point d’appui ne permet- nus, designed for a pavilion at the New York World’s Fair,
tent en rien de préjuger de son développement ultérieur. Ce premier
numéro de la Révolution Surréaliste n’offre donc aucune révélation défi- combined the body and seafood in erotic and unsettling jux-
nitive. Les résultats obtenus par I'écriture automatique, le récit de réve,
par exemple, y sont représentés, mais aucun résultat d'enquétes, d’expé- tapositions. Dali placed a lobster over the body of a live
riences ou de travaux n'y est encore consigné : il faut tout attendre de
Vavenir. s model, encircled another with an eel, and made seafood a
necklace and an offering placed in the hands of still another
Nous sommes figure. Other Surrealist festivities associated the body with
food, but seldom with the clarity of Dali’s particular obses-
a la veille sion with the lobster.
Thus, as Guillaume Apollinaire had taken a lobster out
dune
for a walk on a leash in Paris, so Dali and Schiaparelli took a
REVOLUTION lobster to the evening dress, making of the Surrealist image
something even more elegant and bizarre. The dress places
Vous pouvez y
the lobster on a white field flecked with parsley. It is the red
prendre part.
lobster, the comestible—not the green-brown underwater
Le BUREAU live lobster—but its reference to the deep is present nonethe-
less. The dress serves as counterpart to the model in the
CENTRAL George Platt Lynes photographs, for the lobster is covering
DE RECHERCHES the genitals in its central position on the front of the dress.
Unseemly as dressmaking and conventional behavior, the
SURREALISTES * "rss": dress is perhaps even more outrageous and inappropriate
est ouvert tous les jours de 4h. 1/2 a6 h. 1/2
than it might at first seem. It alludes to the woman’s nudity
beneath her clothing and provides a Surrealist sign of sex or-
_ gans. Dali’s inspiration was as wicked as it was winsome and
the resulting dress is both a delight and an affront. American
designer Charles James created a lobster in dress form
(p. 147) that paid decorous homage to Schiaparelli.
~ The Surrealist vision of marine life has been sustained in
contemporary fashion by Cinzia Ruggieri’s Dress with Oc-
topus (1984; pp. 148-49) and Adam Kurtzman’s Manta
Hat (1986; p. 148). More sophisticated is the vision of Yves
Saint Laurent. The imbrication of fish scales in his richly se-
quined Sardine Dress (1983; p. 149) gives the mermaid new
life as a slinky siren. René Magritte’s Song of Love (c. 1950—
51; p. 143) transfers a human emotion to fish by means of two
strange hybrids in which the attributes of human and fish are
completely confused. Fish torsoes meet human legs, as if
floundering in a sea of love. The braided cone of Christian
Lacroix’s Shell Hat (1984-85; p. 156) is both the twisting of
cloth and the outline of sea shell.
André Breton had called the automatic pieces he published
in the First Surrealist Manifesto (1924) poisson soluble
(soluble fish). Primitivizing, unspeaking, mysterious, and
evocative, the undersea world held its Surrealist fascination.

Of all the sites of the natural world that were favored by the
Surrealists, the most mysterious was the forest. With rare
exception urban and sophisticated, the Surrealists would
seldom have found themselves in anything more dense than a
grove, but they depicted the forest as a place of fantasy and
adventure, alluding, perhaps, to the primeval forest of the
Symbolists. To be sure, an altered reality would seem to have
transformed the woods of Magritte’s Discovery (c. 1928;
p. 160) and Ernst’s portrait of Caresse Crosby (1932;
p- 161), but Paul Delvaux’s Birth of the Day (1937; p. 161)
tames nature and brings its trees and glades to a picturesque
and poetic form. In an animistic view, it was possible to see
the tree as achieving the form of woman and its natural
beauty cast in the female role. Natural and nurturing, the
tree-woman serves as a tranquil earth-mother in her leafy GALERIE des EDITIONS La BOETIE
beauty. What art imagined, fashion also depicts in Vivienne
Westwood’s Tree Coat (1986; p. 150) and Cinzia Ruggieri’s 36, RUE DE LOXUM, BRUXELLES
Weeds Dress (1983; p. 150). What fashion evokes, photog-
raphy saw in the transmutations of figure and environment,
the tree and woman becoming as one in Maurice Tabard’s
The Walking Tree (1947; p.159). Living pillars of vegeta-
tion become the option of fashion photography in Michael
Roberts’s depiction of Manolo Blahnik’s Leaf Shoes (1985;
p. 163).
If it was only the fantasy of nature that was compelling to
the Surrealists and not nature itself, the forest provided a
perfect exemplar. Not only its sinister darkness and uncer- DU 15 DECEMBRE 1945 AU 15 TANVIER 98
tainty could be suggested, but also its leafy fertility. The pre-
lapsarian nudity that Delvaux associated with the tree could |
make of all dress the counterpart to the foliage—fig leaf
leafage.
Exposition de Tableaux, Dessins, Objets, Photos et Textes de
The woman as an expression of ideal beauty is associated as_ | ARP, BATTISIN, BOTT, BOUMEESTER, BOUVET, BRADNER, BRYEN, BURY,
well with the flower. When feminine beauty is presented as_ | ee ae HAVRENNE, role ” LABISSE, LEFRANCQ,
the natural beauty of the flower, the woman becomes the ra- | MAGRITTE, MALET, MARIEN, NOUGE; NOVARINA, SANDERS, SAVIN,
: aes SCUTENAIRE, UBAC, VANDESPIEGELE, WERGIFOSSE, WITZ
diant form of a Christian Lacroix Rose Hat (1986; p. 172), a apne
Thierry Mugler Begonia Dress (1981—82; p. 170), or a Cris- TERE MAERIGIEN: ve aga
tobal Balenciaga Chou cape (1967; p. 179), as if in natural
reversion to beautiful form. While the swirling and fertile LE SAMEDI 5 JANV. A 21 H., CONFERENCE d’Ach. CHAVEE:
forms of nature have always been seen in relation to ideal fe- POINTS DE REPERE & ~ /
male beauty, the concept was especially attractive to the Sur- SaaSSs
realist desire for analogues, understandings that might arise
from dreams, representations of feminine beauty that are | Ammouncement for Surrealist Exhibition,
antirational, and the ever-present need to affiliate the natu- | Bruissels, 1945-46
ral with the beautiful. While many of the Surrealists were | Alwaysa leading city for Surrealism and the
misogynists and clinically descriptive of women, nature | homeof René Magritte and Paul Delvaux,
nevertheless offered the sublime paradigm of woman in _| Brusselsemerged from the Second World War
Mower with significant and tenacious proclivities for
Surrealist art and literature. This exhibition
: announcement “embodies” the fish, which
The butterfly was the Surrealist symbol of metamorphosis _| gepyes as partnertothe mermaid, each a
its transformation from the terrestrial to the transcendent | composite
of figure and fish.
paradoxically coupled with more sinister possibilities, as in |
Ernst’s And the Butterflies Begin to Sing (1929; p. 180),
where the memento mori signals the insect’s demise. In fash-
ion, the butterfly likewise assumed a life more symbolic than
that of merely decorative usage or pattern, its erupting
three-dimensionally from the surface of Schiaparelli gar-
ments giving testimony to its new role. The design brought
the butterfly to almost every part of the body, including but-
terfly gloves, soaring butterflies on a hat, and an echelon of
butterfly buttons on a suit jacket (p. 171). Their obstinate
three-dimensionality gives them flight, but also the role of a
semi-autonomous sculpture within the article of clothing. |
The light or alighting perch of the butterfly on the garment _ |
assures the sculptural integrity of the butterfly as an object, a
form rather than just a design.
Among such transformations, one of the most plausible
and elegant was the equation of woman and bird, the feath- |
ers of hat and/or dress, the lightness of flight, and even the
presence of bird cages corroborating the possibilities of the
bird as metaphor for the woman of beauty.

141
MAN RAY (American, 1890-1976)
Ball at the Chateau of the Vicomte de Noailles,
Grasse, 1929
Photograph
Man Ray Archives, Paris
A sea motif prevailed at this costume ball, held
at the Noailles villa during the filming of Les
Mystéres du Chateau du Dé, by Man Ray. The
photographer reclines in front and the host
stands in the center back. Until the beginning
of the Second World War, legendary Surrealist
parties and fétes, at which decorum was
abandoned, attracted the aristocratic,
powerful, and creative, and provided the
perfect setting for revolutionary styles of dress.

BELOW
DONATELLA (Italian)
Carp Dress, 1982
Photograph Roxanne Lowit
The designer poses in her own creation inthe
compatible setting of a fish store in Hoboken,
New Jersey.

142
RENE MAGRITTE (Belgian, 1898—1967) Magritte’s love story, simultaneously human
Song of Love, c. 1950-51 and fish, suggests the origin of love to be an
Oil on canvas, 307%. X 38s in. inexplicable hybrid of the rational and
Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago irrational.
Partial Gift of Joseph and Jory Shapiro

143
144
 OPPOSITE
GEORGE PLATT LYNES (American,
1907-1965 )
Salvador Dali, c. 1939
Photograph
In a photographic fantasy, Dali combines living
model with live lobsters. As fascinated by the
lobster’s atavistic grotesquery as by its
association with genitalia, Dali hides behind
the model in an image of passive aggression. In
adopting the lobster as symbol, Dali took
license with Surrealist concepts and sympathies
and developed a personal iconography.

SALVADOR DALI (Spanish, born 1904)

Lobster Telephone, 1936
Mixed media, actual size
The Tate Gallery, London

I45
ELSA SCHIAPARELLI
Organza Dress with Painted Lobster, 1937
Philadelphia Museum of Art
Photograph Taishi Hirokawa
Schiaparelli, with the assistance of Dali,
depicted the lobster with a certain demureness.
It does not come directly from sea but has
entered the world of edibles, having been
cooked to its rose-pink color and set in a field of
parsley. Its potentially sinister aspect is thus
mitigated, but not entirely absent, in the
traditional manner of Surrealist provocation,
which allows a party dress to conjure up icons.
146
ABOVE
CHARLES JAMES (American, born
England, 1906-1978)
Siren-Crustacean Dress, on James’s Butterfly
Sofa -
Watercolor on paper by Antonio
Published Vanity, Milan, April 1982
Antonio’s illustration of the dress by designer
James renders it as a segmented crustacean in its
languorous passage from the depths to a sofa
emulating Dali’s famous lip design.
Furthermore, the dress is rose, in reference to
the cooked lobster of the Schiaparelli gown.

RIGHT
SALVADOR DALI
Study for Jewelry: Leaf-Veined Case, Unicorn
Brooch, Mobile, and Lobster Bracelet, 1949
Pencil and watercolor on paper
Minami Art Museum, Tokyo
In Dali’s jewelry designs he indicates his
preoccupation with the forms of nature, seeing
the leaf as an analogue for the human hand,
synthesizing the natural and unnatural worlds
to make a unicorn brooch, and devising what
becomes the perfect accessory to the 1937
Schiaparelli dress in the lobster bracelet.

147
TOP LEFT
ADAM KURTZMAN (American, born
1957)
Fish Hat in Window Display, Barney’s, New
York, 1986
Shown in both boutiques and art galleries,
Kurtzman’s hats are both art and apparel.

BELOW RIGHT
CINZIA RUGGIERI (Italian, born 1953)
Dress with Octopus, 1984
Perhaps not even Dali in the 1930s would have
been so perversely inventive with the creatures
of the sea.

“Sa

ABOVE
KRIZIA (Italian company, founded 19 54)
Shell Hat, 1980
Fashion Institute of Technology, New York
Edward C. Blum Design Laboratory
Photograph Taishi Hirokawa
Affording protection in the natural world, the
shell fulfills a similar function as a hat.

LEFT
ADAM KURTZMAN
Manta Hat, 1986
Photograph Noelle Hoeppe
ABOVE
YVES SAINT LAURENT (French, born
Algeria 1936)
Sardine Dress, 1983
Photograph Claus Ohm
Sequining in a fish-scale pattern creates a
shimmering, subtle suggestion of marine
marvels and beauty.

RIGHT
FRANCOIS LESAGE (French, born 1929)
Sardine-Can Handbag and Fish Belt, 1987
As the embroidered imbrications of the garment
create sardines of Saint Laurent dresses, so the
Lesage embroidery creates not only the fishes
but their trompe l’oeil presentation in a can
with its lid being folded back.
OPPOSITE RIGHT
CHRISTIAN LACROIX SALVADOR DALI
Divine Folly (for Jean Patou), 1985 Leaf-Veined Hand Pendants, 1949
Photograph Roxanne Lowit Sculpted gold with cabochon rubies and a
single cabochon emerald
Acclaimed for his adventurous design at the
Minami Art Museum, Tokyo
Parisian House of Patou (where Karl Lagerfeld
and Jean-Paul Gaultier had once been Symbolist poet Charles Baudelaire called
designers), Lacroix launched his own couture nature a temple where living columns
house in 1987 At Patou his inventive design occasionally permit “confused” words. The
often had a Surrealist cast. Trained as an art recourse to nature as a spiritual home and the
historian and originally intending to be a ultimate confusion between comprehension and
museum curator, he was subsequently drawn to the natural order were touchstones of Surrealist
fashion, where his artistic impulses led to thought and represent the affinity of Surrealist
dresses such as this, embodying the spirit of the arts and letters with Symbolism.
forest.
BELOW RIGHT
CINZIA RUGGIERI
Weeds Dress, 1983
Ruggieri’s dress puts the wearer in the authentic
habiliment of the first woman.

ABOVE
VIVIENNE WESTWOOD (British, born
1941)
Tree Coat, 1986
Collection Suzanne Bartsch, New York
Photograph Taishi Hirokawa
Beneath designer Westwood’s tree coat there is
a tree dress with a face suggesting a tree spirit
within. The Surrealist imagination
encompassed the indwelling of spirits in nature.
For Westwood, the tree is more than pattern; it
is a process of conforming to nature and of
acknowledging animism in nature.

150
OPPOSITE
ADELLE LUTZ (American, born 1948)
Ivy Jacket with Wood Slacks, 1986
Published Vanity Fair, New York, October 1986
Photograph Annie Leibovitz
Lutz’s camouflage, worn by David Byrne,
blatantly fails in its chameleon objective of
readapting and absorbing the figure into the
natural environment.

RIGHT
BRUCE WEBER (American, born 1946)
Dress by Karl Lagerfeld, 1984
Photograph
Twigs and moss become not surface decoration
but the setting for a dress by Karl Lagerfeld and
its embroidery by the hand of nature.

T53
Hyp
JULY
BAZAM
1938

LEFT
A. M. CASSANDRE (French, born the
Ukraine, 1901-1968)
Cover for Harper’s Bazaar, New York, July
1938

Graphic designer Cassandre merged the

dressmaker’s art with images from the sea in
this Harper’s Bazaar cover; a veil becomes a net
mipsuM™ and a mannequin becomes a hybrid of sea aiid
dress form—a mer-form.

BELOW
MIGUEL COVARRUBIAS (Mexican, born
1904)
Cover for Vogue, New York, July 1, 1937
A bather wearing a wool-jersey bathing suit by
Sacony transcends the waters but also floats
with a bather’s grace.
RIGHT
EILEEN AGAR (British, born 1904)
Ceremonial Hat for Eating Bouillabaisse, c. 1938
Courtesy Birch and Conran Fine Art, London
Surrealist artist Agar inverted a cork basket to
create the structure of a hat compounded of
shells, coral, and other collage elements.

BELOW
MAN RAY
Marie-Laure, Vicomtesse de Noailles, c. 1930
Photograph
Courtesy Robert Miller Gallery, New York
The Vicomtesse de Noailles, noted for her
adventuresome style of dress, wears a costume
in the form of a squid.
 CHANEL’S IMMACULATE SMELL OF WHITE
GROSGRAIN. JAY THORPE.

MARCEL VERTES (French, born Hungary, KIRSTEN WOODWARD (British, born

1895-1961) 1960)
White-Grosgrain Shell Hat, by Gabrielle (Coco) Sketch for Hat Like a Shell, in Black Leather,
Chanel, 1938 1986-87
Published Harper’s Bazaar, New York, January Ink on paper
1938
British hat designer Woodward employs leather
Although Chanel (1883-1971) was a friend of in a turban-style configuration that has the shell
many Surrealists and traveled in the circles as its ultimate source. Woodward’s hat designs
connecting art and fashion in Paris for several often simulate coiffures (see p. 32) and recreate
decades, her fashions seldom assumed a objects in leather and other millinery materials.
Surrealist cast. A singular instance is the shell
hat affiliating her with the seashell motif of the
early Surrealists.

T57
 LEFT
DOROTHEA TANNING (American, born
1912)
The Birthday, 1942
Oil on canvas, 40% X 259s in.
Collection of the artist
Tanning, who met Max Ernst in 1942 and
became his wife in 1946, presents a cryptic,
mythic, and perhaps even autobiographic tree-
woman, who has roots in nature but also lives
in a world of mystery.
OPPOSITE
MAURICE TABARD (French, 1897-1984)
The Walking Tree, 1947
Photomontage
Courtesy Lucien Treillard, Paris
In Surrealist photographer Tabard’s image, the
reflection of a tree assumes the silhouette and
structure of a dress—a play on words between
tree trunk and body’s trunk.

158
“Ste, PE)
ca= te een ae
RIGHT
PAUL DELVAUX (Belgian, born 1897)
Birth of the Day, 1937
Oil on canvas, 47% X 59%, in.
The Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice
Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, New
York
Perceiving woman as the personification of day,
Delvaux gives her roots and a woodgrain base
from which the torso grows. In this, his
archaism and passive obsession with women is
made manifest. Delvaux is able to show
complete nudity and yet conceal the genitals as
if they were dressed in the clothes of nature. It is
difficult to look upon these tree skirts as high
art in view of their roughly contemporary
counterparts in the animated trees of Walt
Disney, but Delvaux sees the living tree with an
almost medieval earnestness of purpose.

OPPOSITE
RENE MAGRITTE
Discovery, c. 1928
Oil on canvas, 25° X 193/,in.
Private collection, Brussels
The revelation of this painting, which Magritte
pronounces a discovery and not the more
customary Surrealist ambiguity, seems to be the
affinity between woman and nature. In making
her alternatively woodgrain and physical form,
Magritte plays with the conventions of Cubist
collage established some two decades earlier
but asserts the primacy of the figure and the
spiritual connection between figure and natural
world.

RIGHT
MAX ERNST
Caresse Crosby, 1932
Gouache and pencil on wood, 9 x 72 in.
Collection Mr. and Mrs. Marshall Padorr,
Chicago
Ernst permits the perceptual play between the
natural grain of the wood and the supposition
that such grain may only be surface pattern—
leaving room for the ever-present uncertainty
about the truth of the object and its fictions.
Caresse Crosby and her husband Harry were
the owners of Black Sun Press, which published
many Surrealist books in America.

cme lan aie

~ ‘© N
OPPOSITE
PAUL DELVAUX (Belgian, born 1897)
Call of the Night, 1938
Oil on canvas, 43, X 57% in.
Collection Anthony Penrose, Chiddingly,
England
As the day yields to night in Delvaux’s parable
of time’s passage, the treetop branches affix
themselves to the figures’ heads and the trees
stand denuded in the background.

OPPOSITE BELOW
MAN RAY (American, 1890-1976)
Rien dans le puis du Nord, 1935
Photograph
Man Ray Archives, Paris
Whereas the subconscious offered the ideal
reintegration of man with his natural
emotional and intellectual state, the new
assimilation of nature could assume form as
figures become a part of nature.
RIGHT
MANOLO BLAHNIK (Spanish, born 1943)
Leaf Shoes, 1985
Published Tatler, London, December 198 5—
January 1986
Photograph Michael Roberts
The comfort, quiet, and stealth of natural
walking are evoked in Blahnik’ s leaf shoes,
made of the softest natural materials. In this
photograph the shoes, partially camouflaged by
the bark, hang from the tree as if natural
protuberances—or tree caterpillars in slow
descent. Similarly, model Jason Connery is
laced into nature by his idealized lattice of ivy.

163
 LEFT
GENE MOORE (American, born 1910)
Window Display, Kenneth Beauty Salon,
New York, 1970
Photograph Malan Studio, Inc.
Display artist Moore created a fantastic bird’s
nest as hair for the hair salon of Kenneth.

OPPOSITE
BRUCE WEBER
Dress by Karl Lagerfeld, 1984
Photograph
To the assumption that fashion is artifice,
Weber provides the axiom that clothing finds
itself in complete harmony with nature.
Distinguished as a naturalist photographer,
Weber plays here with the synthesis of the
natural and antinatural.

ia
e
a

164
 OPPOSITE
PAUL DYSON (British, born 1951)
INTERNATIONAL SURREALIST BULLETIN Window Display, Harvey Nichols, London
ISSUED BY THE SURREALIST GROUP IN ENGLAND
No. PUBLIE PAR LE GROUPE SURREALISIE EN ANGLETERRE Photograph Anthony Lawrence
BULLETIN INTERNATIONAL DU SURREALISME : P : : 5
PRICE ONE SHILLING SEPTEMBER 1936 Conceived in emulation of Dali, the window
designed by Paul Dyson in association with
Mark Langston demonstrates the continuity of
Surrealist themes in British design,
acknowledging Surrealist appropriation as a
matter for easy recognition by the viewer.

VMCORFORATING VANITY FAIR

THE INTERNATIONAL SURREALIST L'EXPOSITION INTERNATIONAL

EXHIBITIO! DU SURREALISME
The liernsatioinnal5 thin vas held TL'hayen

TOP
Title Page from International Surrealist
Bulletin, London, No. 4, September 1936
Courtesy Zabriskie Gallery, New York
Celebrating the exhibition at the New
Burlington Galleries, London, of June 11—July 4,
1936, the International Surrealist Bulletin
places a flowering head in the midst of Trafalgar
af 35 CENTS
I} i
Square. T EAS Ih, RE)

ABOVE
BOTTOM
PAUL DELVAUX SALVADOR DALI
Pygmalion, 1939 Cover of Vogue, New York, June 1 1939
Oil on canvas The floriate head of the 1936 International
Musée d’Art Moderne, Brussels Surrealist Bulletin reappears on the cover of
Vogue three years later.

166
BELOW AND OPPOSITE
JOHN GALLIANO (British, born 1962)
Clock Wig, 1985
Magpie-Nest Wig, 1985
Photograph Martin Brading
In two extravagant hairpieces (below and
opposite), Galliano, working in collaboration
with Amanda Grieve, finds the counterpart to
his highly intelligent clothing filled with wit and
with knowledge of the history of art and of
clothing.

TOP AND CENTER

DANUTA RYDER (Polish, born 1952)
Window Display, Henri Bendel, New York,
1986

Not scarecrows but wood spirits seem to exist

in a Manhattan store window.

169
BELOW
THIERRY MUGLER (French, born 1948)
Flora (Begonia), 1981-82
Photograph Roxanne Lowit _
The dress and the wearer become the flower, a
soft transformation of the entire figure.

|:
ie Denes sty i, 4

CENTER
ELSA SCHIAPARELLI (French, born Italy,
1890-1973)
Bug Necklace, c. 1937-38
The Brooklyn Museum, New York
Photograph Irving Solero
The transparency of the necklace would allow
one to think that the bugs are crawling directly
on the neck, in a macabre concept of fashion.
Although Schiaparelli may have drawn
inspiration from scarab jewelry in Egyptian art,
her interpretation of the theme is markedly
cryptic and discomforting.

INSET
THIERRY MUGLER
Flora (Bouquet), 1981-82
Photograph Roxanne Lowit
Of a fantasy exceeding even that of Walter
Crane, Flora becomes the complete dress of the
figure, and the wearer is either the flower or the
spirit-dweller therein.

170
TOP RIGHT
ELSA SCHIAPARELLI
Jacket with Cicada Buttons, Autumn 1938
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
The Costume Institute
Photograph Taishi Hirokawa
Schiaparelli’s modern scarabs function as
fastenings.

RIGHT
ELSA SCHIAPARELLI
Jacket with Butterfly Buttons, 1937
Photograph Hideoki
A formation of butterflies takes wing on a
Schiaparelli jacket. A tireless investigator of the
world of nature, Schiaparelli seldom translated
nature into decorative pattern, but rather saw it
as incarnate on the garment.
 OPPOSITE
ISSEY MIYAKE (Japanese, born 1938)
Butterfly Dress, 1982

ABOVE LEFT
CHRISTIAN LACROIX
Rose Hat (for Jean Patou), 1986
Photograph Oliviero Toscani
A brilliant explosion of petals subsumes the
figure in Lacroix’s hat.

ABOVE RIGHT
BERT STERN (American, born 1929)
Butterfly Eyes, 1964
Photograph
Published Vogue, New York, December 15,
1964 o

EZ
ABOVE AND BELOW LEFT
CHRISTOPHE TONY THORIMBERT
(Swiss, born 1957)
Fashion Editorial, 1986
Published Uomo Harper’s Bazaar, Milan,
November—December 1986
The perversity of the seductress with turkey
head gives an edge to the presentation of men’s
clothing that the subject itself often lacks.

OPPOSITE
BERT STERN
Fashion Photograph, 1965
Published Vogue, New York, January 1 1965
Stern attributes sovereign plumage to the
woman of animal grace and of natural beauty.
 pee

hii

—eee
— es
ay
was

BS
OPPOSITE
YVES SAINT LAURENT (French, born
Algeria 1936)
“Bouquet” Bridal Gown in White Gazar, 1980
Traditional associations with the bride as
embodiment of spring are amplified by Saint
Laurent’s elegant transformation of the bride
into the full presence of nature in flower.

RIGHT
Cover of Flair, New York, May 1950
The die-cut covers of Flair customarily opened
to reveal something quite different on the inside.
Thus, the outer petals of the flower become the
woman at their center.

THE MONTHLY MAGAZINE

FIFTY CENTS

LG.
178
OPPOSITE
Advertisement for Calugi e Giannelli
Published Vanity, Milan, November—December
1986

Nature, having always provided the literal

means for reflection, affords as well the
opportunity to oscillate between the image of
woman and flower.

RIGHT
CRISTOBAL BALENCIAGA (French, born
Spain, 1895-1972)
Black Gazar Chou Cape, 1967
Photograph Kublin
Courtesy Archives Balenciaga, Paris
An efflorescent garment atop the long narrow
stem of the body simulates a most exotic garden
flower.

179
 LEFT
MAX ERNST
And the Butterflies Begin to Sing, plate 120
from La Femme too Tétes, 1929
Collage-novel, published Paris, 1929
The metamorphosis of caterpillar to butterfly—
the transformation of the commonplace into the
beautiful—is mitigated by the tandem
representation of the sinister and perverse. The
title of Ernst’s book is typical of his puns: it
may be read as ““The Hundred-Headed
Woman” or “The Woman without (sams) a
Head.”

OPPOSITE
GENE MOORE (American, born 1910)
Butterflies and Egg, Window Display,
Tiffany & Co., New York, 1980

——

180
 Dia

ABOVE LEFT
Peggy Guggenheim, Venice, 1968
Photograph David Seymour
Published Vanity Fair, New York, February
1986

Wearing fanciful butterfly sunglasses, Peggy

Guggenheim, friend and patron of Surrealist
artists, posed on the roof of her palazzo on the
Grand Canal, Venice. Her New York gallery,
Art of This Century, provided an important
venue for Surrealist artists between 1942 and
1947
BELOW LEFT
SALVADOR DALI
Fashion Advertisement, 1946
Published Vogue, New York, July 1946
The butterfly motif was favored by the
Surrealists, in particular by Dali, whose zeal for
the creature’s flamboyant beauty took
precedence here over connations of the
transformed and ugly.

a BEAUTIFUL
B szanps ron seavry...nx iv surrenriirs on
BEAUTIFUL a CMS
THE BREATHTAKING NYLONS!
ABOVE RIGHT
MAX ERNST
Butterflies, 1931 or 1933
Collage, oil, gouache, and pencil on paper,
197/, X 257/,in.
The Museum of Modern Art, New York
Purchase
BELOW RIGHT
SALVADOR DALI
Fashion Advertisement, 1957
Published Harper’s Bazaar, October 1957
The butterfly transformed in Surrealist collage
and advertising.

ea 2 TY aah ir i a iy Spas Pega oh

INTERNATIONAL SILK CONGRESS OCTOBER 1957
 LEFT
JEAN-CHARLES DE CASTELBAJAC
(French, born Morocco 1950)
Eagle Dress, 1986
The plumage of the bird is the source of the
metaphor, but the imagery is operative even in
the form of the bird itself.

OPPOSITE
MAN RAY
1” 4 LEte re |
\\ Elsa Schiaparelli, c. 1934
Mein :* Photograph
his) Man Ray Archives, Paris
Although Schiaparelli was associated with
some of the maddest adventures in Surrealist
dress, she also possessed serene grace, as in this
portrait by Man Ray. The birdlike character of
the portrait does not vitiate its dignity but
rather corroborates it.

184
 Tebwaney 1450

THE MONTHLY MAGAZINE FIFTY CENTS

ABOVE AND OPPOSITE

Cover of Flair, New York, February 1950
The die-cut wing without provides a glimpse of
the bird woman within.
 ABOVE
ANTONIO
Design by Roberto Capucci, 1983
Published Vanity, Milan, April 1983
In the feathery touch of the gifted illustrator’s
line, the woman becomes a bird.

OPPOSITE
THIERRY MUGLER
Feather Dresses, 1982
Photograph Scott Heiser

188
189
190
ABOVE
THIERRY MUGLER
Bird Dresses with Bird Cage, 1982
Photograph Niall McInerney

OPPOSITE
MAX ERNST
The Robing of the Bride, 1940
Oil on canvas, 51 X 377% in.
The Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice
Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation,
New York
Photograph Carmalo Guadagno
In Ernst’s conception, the vestment of the bride
is her metamorphosis into a bird.

I9I
 LEFT
RENE MAGRITTE
The Therapeutist, 1937
Oil on canvas, 35% X 25%
Urvator Collection, Belgium
The substitution of bird cage for figure offers a
Surrealist adventure in interpretation. In
assigning a particular psychoanalytic
association to the image (yet avoiding a specific
interpretation), Magritte affords himself the
luxury of therapy through symbol, even in the
enigma of an itinerant figure who imprisons
birds.

OPPOSITE ABOVE
ENGLISH ECCENTRICS (British, founded
1984)
Fashion Presentation, 1986

A canny group of young British designers

calling themselves the English Eccentrics self-
consciously keep the spirit of Surrealism alive,
not only in their design but also in the manner
of their runway presentations. They plumb
Dada and Surrealist sources for an avowedly
eccentric style.

OPPOSITE BELOW
ANDRE MASSON (French, born 1896)
Mannequin with Bird Cage, 1938
Photograph Man Ray
Man Ray Archives, Paris
Among the mannequins created for the 1938
Exposition Internationale du Surréalisme in
Paris, Masson’s is one of the most cryptic in its
contrasts of liberty and caging.

192
fa: peda’
<n MtW,
f

al
—

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CU peewee,
Fe 1344 t aad
JEAN-CHARLES DE CASTELBAJAC
Seagull Coat Worn by Dianne B., Winter
1980-81
Photograph Robert Mapplethorpe
Castelbajac sets his seagulls free with abandon
as the uppermost gull emerges three-
dimensionally from the coat as if to soar beyond
the garment, an ultimate testimony to the flight
of a Surrealist ambition to be in clothing and to
surpass it.
MARCEL ROCHAS (French, 1902—1955)
Bird Dress, 193.4
Photograph Harry Meerson
Published Harper's Bazaar, New York, April 1934
A bird, Charles Lamb wrote, “appears a
thoughtless thing?’ and Rochas’s bird seems to
have been set free with an elegance and grace of
flight to accentuate the airy/aery lightness of the
wearer.

I9S
 DOYENNE
AND DANDY
For Elsa Schiaparelli, it was more passion than fashion. The
energy, “moment,” and inspiration of her work were more im-
portant than a line or the development of a style. Her clothing
is an expression of desire, not merely of design. Although
Schiaparelli maintained her own business over a quarter of
a century, she is preeminently remembered for a first trompe
loeil gesture of 1928—a sweater—and for her bravura work of
the late 1930s. What lies between these breathtakingly bold,
brilliant achievements are lesser efforts and a terrain of intriguing
yet uninspired clothes. But when Schiaparelli was good, she was
sensational.
In some measure, Schiaparelli acknowledged the momen-
tary and inspired nature of her creation when she discussed
design in her autobiography Shocking Life:

Dress designing . .. is to me not a profession but an art. I found

it was a most difficult and unsatisfying art, because as soon as
the dress is born it has already become a thing of the past....
A dress has no life of its own unless it is worn, and as soon as
this happens another personality takes over from you and
animates it, or tries to, glorifies it or destroys it, or makes it into
a song of beauty. More often it becomes an indifferent object,
or even a pitiful caricature of what you wanted it to be—a
dream, an expression.

Conversant with mysticism as much as with the atelier,

Schiaparelli ascribed near-magical inspiration to the creation
of clothing. Born in Rome of aristocratic parents in 1890, she
knew the world of the spirit and perceived the post-sacred era
largely in terms of mystical cause and magical effects. In 1914
she married William de Wendt de Kerlor, a theosophist;
smitten and “spellbound,” she had heard him lecture in
London on “the powers of the soul over the body, of magic and
eternal youth.” Shocking Life is told as if she were in an out-of-
body trance, observing her lifetime at a spiritualized remove
and presenting her story with moralizing (and memorializing)
tales. In accounts of her work, there is a suggestion of recurring
exhilarations and enthusiasms about new ideas in design, but
OPPOSITE ; not of an evolving concept for her clothes. By this disposition
HORST P HORST (American, born and by its design consequences, she was ever the artistic
Germany 1906) ; me F ; } i
:
Elsa Schiaparelli, 1937
designer, seizing at ideas, grasping many : with a quickness
rare:
of
Photograph gesture; but she was not the refined designer, cogitating and
: : coaxing a style from a garment. Instead, verve, vivacity, and the
Schiaparelli, preeminent figure in Surrealist : : ;
; ‘ : :;
fashion design, posed in Horst’s ambiguous
supreme instantaneous
;
moment
se
operated for Schiaparelli—
‘ :
mirror—picture frame. always an elation, never a dilation. Her self-conscious equation 197
 of the designer’s objective with that of the artist is at the heart of
her work. She believed that the garment was the place for
artistic expression rather than the medium for the couturier’s
craft. To be sure, she employed some of the world’s finest
craftspersons—such as the splendid embroiderers of the House ELSA SCHIAPARELLI
of Lesage—but she herself was never a craftswoman. Snuff Flacon, c. 1939
What is important about Schiaparelli is that she dared and Collection Tina Chow, New York
dreamed, allowing clothing created out of pure, unmitigated, Photograph Taishi Hirokawa
almost divine inspiration to become a choice for twentieth- Schiaparelli’s fragrance for men, called Snuff,
century dress. Her influence today is widely felt in the witty, came in tobacco-brown packaging, and the
flacon—this, after all, is not a pipe—was
imaginative work of Karl Lagerfeld, the fabulous folies of
surrounded by brown tissue, perhaps to
Christian Lacroix, and the chicly clever masterpieces of Yves reassure hesitant masculine customers.
Saint Laurent.
Schiaparelli’s inspired moments had a tinge of perversity.
Her festive 1938 collections, the Pagan, Harlequin, and
especially the Circus collection, seem to the fashion historian a
testament to the perverse. As Europe headed toward war,
Schiaparelli went to the circus, an adventure filled with beauty
but also with naughty insouciance to the sober world outside a
circus tent. The Circus collection—prime examples from it
were shown in the exhibition Moments de Mode (1986), which
inaugurated the Musée des Arts de la Mode in Paris—included
fitted jackets, a backward suit (p. 208), a suit appliquéd with
diagonal stripes of fur, “tent” veils, prints of balloons and
clowns, and embroidered boleros with sequences of acrobats,
posing elephants, and prancing horses. Summer 1938 would
seem a strange season for such frolic, but Schiaparelli’s
inspiration knew no season nor world-clock. She was at her
most inspired in that year, owing to her association, perhaps,
with many artists, decorators, and illustrators, including
Christian Bérard, Jean-Michel Frank, Salvador Dali, Jean
Cocteau (pp. 202, 204, 205), and Etienne de Beaumont. Such
relationships were clearly stimulating to Schiaparelli, but they
were equally important for the artists themselves. Etienne de
Beaumont worked with Schiaparelli on jewelry in 1938; when
he later designed the costumes for the Circus Polka (1942),
George Balanchine’s choreography for the performing
elephants of the Ringling Brothers Circus in New York’s
Madison Square Garden, he must have realized how farsighted
Schiaparelli’s inventions in 1938 had been. At her most
irrepressible at a time when Nazi rallies were supplanting
circuses, Schiaparelli fulfilled a destiny without time. For her as
for many great visual artists and writers, anything even
glimpsed as possible became an aesthetic necessity; the idea
must be seized, and it must be realized as soon as it is perceived.
Picasso, reviewing his early Cubist work, remarked in 1923:
“To search means nothing in painting. To find is the thing.”
This avowal of artistic discovery could also describe
Schiaparelli’s special genius.

Schiaparelli’s first design combined inspiration and

improvisation with little likelihood of realization, despite her
headstrong determination to do what she thought she might do.
It was a trompe l’oeil sweater created from a quick sketch; a
black-wool model, it had a simulation of a white butterfly bow
at the neck. Schiaparelli was apparently as startled as anyone
else by the immediate success of the sweater and had no
resource at hand for producing the popular garment herself.
She recruited a group of Armenian women to knit according to
her design. On receiving demands for a knitted skirt to go along
with it, Schiaparelli reportedly accepted orders for a product
8 she could not conceive of making and recruited many more
 Ceci nest nas une fupee.
RENE MAGRITTE (Belgian, 1898-1967)
The Betrayal of Images, 1929
Oil on canvas, 23%, X 31% in.
Los Angeles County Museum of Art
Although Schiaparelli made the strange new
concept of male cologne more familiar by her
pipe, Magritte’s odd inscription, ““Ceci n’est
pas une pipe” (This is not a pipe), suddenly
makes the familiar strange.

199
 Armenian women, filling orders in a frenzy. For the skirts, she OPPOSITE
KARL LAGERFELD (French, born
claims to have bought “good and cheap material in the bargain
Germany 1938)
counter” at the Galeries Lafayette in Paris. In an industry of Candelabrum Dress, 1985
legends, this tale is especially noteworthy. A novice without Photograph Michael Roberts
design experience, not even able to secure materials at Published Tatler, London, December—January
wholesale, Schiaparelli was immediately catapulted to fashion 1986
attention. With the promotion of the writer Anita Loos and As the symbol and guide for a perfume named
others, the trompe l’oeil sweater became an international hit. Sleeping may be a single candlestick, so an
In her description of the sweater, the designer feigned evening dress may require the full-scale
indifference to its meaning: “It was the time when abstract illumination of a candelabrum. Lagerfeld’s
romantic evocation is, like Schiaparelli’s,
Dadaism and Futurism were the talk of the world, the time anachronistic.
when chairs looked like tables, and tables like footstools, when
it was not done to ask what a painting represented or what a
poem meant.” But this account is somewhat ingenuous, for
although Schiaparelli was not yet part of the circle of artists and
writers in Paris, she was aware of the powerful forces of
vanguard art at the time. Her willful illusionism was not
without precedent for fashion, and in 1928 it succeeded as a
} age
perfect gesture of art, artifice, and apparel. Variations on the
idea followed, and illusionism lurked behind many of
Schiaparelli’s designs. Nevertheless the trompe l’oeil sweater
was a one-time thrill, an invention, a fad. We all know, said
Corneille, how the French love novelty. Schiap’s sweater was as
much a novelty as Duchamp’s bottlerack, a readymade lesson
in art, a specific moment in history.
The business Schiaparelli founded on the rue de la Paix in
Paris flourished in sportswear, tailored clothing, and evening
wear. The early 1930s represented a consolidation of tech-
niques for Schiaparelli, as she increasingly brought together
expert craftsmen for the couture. The coalescence of a skilled
atelier meant a finished garment and excellent construction fol-
lowing from Schiaparelli’s talents as an inventor. The designer
kept some edge to the creation by her particular interest in
unusual materials. She was indefatigable in finding new fabrics
for fashion, especially manmade fibers that announced their
difference from the accustomed natural stuffs. She chose a
cellophanelike fabric simulating glass, which played with
illusions of transparency and the hard rendered soft and defied
all conventional notions about the properties of material. The eS

House of Colcombet in Lyons created to Schiaparelli’s parfums sehiaparelli....made in france

specifications a newspaper-clipping fabric (printed with news

stories about the designer) setting up a friction between the
expectation of paper and ink and the reality of the softness of MARCEL VERTES (French, born Hungary,
1895-1961)
fabric. These inventions were complemented by a range of Advertisement for Sleeping, by Elsa
accessories made in accordance with Schiaparelli’s whims and Schiaparelli, c. 1940
incredible inventions. Lucite illusions in costume jewelry and Published Harper’s Bazaar, New York,
buttons; hand bags as bird cages (in 1936); ceramic vegetables March I5, 1940
and even aspirins as necklaces (the latter designed in The candle, renamed le plafond (the ceiling) in
collaboration with Surrealist poet Louis Aragon) were in Magritte’s Dreaming’s Key (p. 106), “lights the
Schiaparelli’s vast repertory of accessories, many of which had way to ecstasy,’ according to Schiaparelli’s
more to do with making a statement than with being worn on advertising copy. The literalism of the candle
shape is reinforced by the packaging in the form
city streets. Nonetheless, throughout the 1930s Schiaparelli
of a candle snuff. The candle not only suggests
gathered an affluent, adventurous clientele that bought with a nocturnal reverie but also the transition
recklessness almost as free as the designer’s imagination. In between the darkly subconscious and the
that decade Paris was the site of the great Surrealist balls, which, illumined conscious.
in their mixture of masquerade with couture elegance, provided
the perfect context for Schiaparelli’s innovations and illusions.
If fancy-dress Surrealism was not enough to stimulate
Schiaparelli’s imagination, the Surrealism of life in 1930s Paris
would have affirmed her ambition to let the synthetic stand for
the natural and the bizarre take the place of the expected.
200 Furthermore, Schiaparelli was as ready to accept the real as
 al

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Sohwapcarret tae proaigpode PAE at thir Tay, LSU Ad.

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OPPOSITE
JEAN COCTEAU (French, 1889-1963)
Dress by Elsa Schiaparelli, 1937
Published Harper’s Bazaar, New York,
September 15, 1937
Art and fashion intersected as Cocteau designed
for Schiaparelli and also illustrated her work for
Harper’s Bazaar. Cocteau identified his role in
this drawing with a precision Magritte would
have admired: “‘Schiaparelli made this dress for
the dance and I copied it for Harper’s Bazaar.”

ABOVE RIGHT
ELSA SCHIAPARELLI (French, born Italy,
1890-1973)
Fragrance Flacons, 1937-48
Collection Tina Chow, New York
Photograph Taishi Hirokawa
Schiaparelli evoked Surrealist notions regarding
fragrance, dream, and language in her bottles
for the perfumes Shocking (1937), Sleeping
(1938), and Zut (1948). The Shocking and Zut
flacons take their shapes from the body, so that
by inversion fragrance emanates from within
rather than from the surface of the body. The
bottle for Sleeping takes the form of a candle, an
allusion to the world of dream. Language plays
a role, as well: the names of all the perfumes
begin with a sibillant sound, and all but Zut, an
expletive, were exotically titled in English, even
for the French market.

BELOW RIGHT
SALVADOR DALI
Fashion Advertisement for Bergdorf Goodman,
New York, 1943
Published Vogue, New York, October 1, 1943
Although it is really the scarf and other
accessories that are for sale, Surrealism offered
war-torn America and Europe dreams for sale
at a better price than any other illusion.

203
 ABOVE
ELSA SCHIAPARELLI
JEAN COCTEAU
LEFT Embroidered Evening Coat, c. 1937
SALVADOR DALI Philadelphia Museum of Art
Face-Chalice Profiles Pin, 1949 Photograph Taishi Hirokawa
Gold In this collaboration between the designer and
Minami Art Museum, Tokyo the multifaceted artist, the cleverly embroidered
What could be embroidered on a coat could profiles of faces drawn by Cocteau form the
also be fashioned in gold. Dali’s image is the illusion of a vase. The embroidery was executed
same as that on the Cocteau-Schiaparelli coat. by the House of Lesage, Paris.
 she was to embrace the artificial. Her zealous use of the zipper,
newly invented in 1936, was efficient and technological, but at
the same time wondrously imaginative and innovative, as she
incorporated the fastening into her design of a garment. Her
artist confreres would readily play with the same idea,
salaciously unzipping figures to see the naked body beneath, as
if by aperture into flesh. A simple wool dress with a zipper in a
contrasting color may not have been Surrealism at its most
sublime, but it was novelty at its newest and invention at its
most impudent. Schiaparelli’s inventive promptings neither
began nor ended with clothes and accessories. In 1934, she
opened a London shop on Upper Grosvenor Street, where her
displays were famous for their Surrealist tricks. Her Paris
quarters on the Place Vend6éme, which opened in 1936, became
the place for Dali’s shocking-pink bear (with drawers in the
torso) perched on his Mae West Lip Sofa (p. 86). According to
historian Caroline Milbank in Couture, the Paris shop’s
“window displays were likewise outré, something to see on the
way to and from the Hotel Ritz, which was nearby.” Today the
Schiaparelli boutique, still in close proximity to the Ritz, seems
tame in comparison to the hotel’s own guests, who would outshine
anything Schiaparelli could have dreamed of; but Paris in the
1930s was quite different. Schiaparelli’s international
reputation for high-style hi-jinks contrasted with the more
understated clientele of the Ritz. Mrs. Reginald (Daisy)
Fellowes, Millicent Rogers, and Lady Elsie Mend! were among
her clients. She dressed movie stars both on- and off-screen.
Schiaparelli’s great fashion frenzy with Mae West has
become as legendary as the star herself, but the designer’s
account of the episode in her autobiography is unchar-
acteristically austere, offering this diffident and clinical
description: ““Mae West came to Paris. She was stretched out on
the operating table of my workroom, and measured and
probed with care and curiosity.” The moment, in 1937, had its
intensity, given Mae West’s popularity in America and Europe
aie at the time and given Schiaparelli’s inventive desires regarding
o (retean deceralin the back ofSchi the hourglass silhouette—but also because of that encounter
os * ele aye on a dissecting table. The Surrealist artist Leonor Fini created
an hourglass-shaped bottle, based on the Mae West silhouette,
CECIL BEATON (British, 1904—1980)
for the new fragrance Schiaparelli dubbed “Shocking” in her
Jean Cocteau—Elsa Schiaparelli Evening Coat,
oo predilection for names starting with “S” and her sensitivity to
Published Vogue, New York, July 15, 1937 the effect of her work on some people. While Schiaparelli had
Fee actviork oF aricexsitorounding been involved with licensing as early as 1934, perfume became
Schiaparelli included Beaton, whose illustration an important foundation of her business thereafter (pp. 198,
of the evening coat on which Cocteau-and 200, 203). But her “shocking” clothing seldom offended in the
Schiaparelli collaborated was published in 1937 1930s. As Schiaparelli herself wrote of the 1938 collections in
their independent, artistic themes: “The typical tempo of the
time was marked by great enthusiasm. There was no criticism
of ‘Who can wear it?’ As an amazing fact, Schiap did not lose a
single one of her wealthy conservative old-fashioned clients but
got a lot of new ones.”
Although Schiaparelli had been shocking her clients for
nearly a decade, the 1937-38 season was her moment to startle
the world. She returned to trompe l’oeil with an invention so
complete the body seemed to be embraced by another; her 1937
Jean Cocteau jacket (p. 100) incorporated head and hair that
seemed to lean across the body of the wearer. With the
inspiration of Dali, Schiaparelli created the remarkable lobster
dress of 1937 (p. 146), a splendid giant lobster in an organdy
field with parsley sprigs. Dali’s lobster fully involved
Schiaparelli in the Surrealist vocabulary of forms, offering the
crustacean as aesthetic and animal surrogate of female 205
 sexuality. Schiaparelli offered the most discreet form of Dali’s
pixilated musings about the lobster and the woman and one of
the most elegant servings of seafood ever made in dress form.
Dali also designed the textile for Schiaparelli’s tear dress (pp.
136—37) with the illusion of its having been torn repeatedly.
For the master of slit eyeball, soft clock, and stained underwear,
a tattered and torn dress seemed only mildly radical, but for the
couture it was an insane and wild premise. Since then perhaps
only Rei Kawakubo (p. 136) has matched the gesture in sheer
and tearing eccentricity and audacity. In fact, it was
Schiaparelli’s 1937—38 association with artists that gave her
special boldness, as if ideas were being generated by the artists
and Schiaparelli became the natural creator of dresses in
collaboration with their ideas. Butterflies flew into Schiap-
arelli’s already vast zoo with artistic abandon because of her
association with Surrealist artists, for whom the butterfly was
the symbol of feminine beauty and of Surrealism’s promised
metamorphosis between beast and beauty.
With Dali, Schiaparelli invented both the Shoe Hat (p. 111)
and the Mutton Chop Hat (p. 108). The Shoe Hat’s topsy-
turvy dislocation of purpose was and still is a great joke, but its
elegance abides as well. Dali had been obsessed with shoes and
their dislocation for a long time, but it was Schiaparelli who
guided him to his supreme statement of the footloose pump.
The hat was a personal favorite for Schiaparelli, who had Gala
Dali photographed wearing it with a lips-embroidered suit, a
perfect Surrealist ensemble. The Mutton Chop Hat, along with
its cutlet-embroidered suit, was another of Dali’s Surrealist
suppers and allowed the couture to examine what its
associations and its allusions might be. Schiaparelli’s gesture
was quietly subversive and outrageously creative. By the time
of the three great fantasy collections of 1938, Schiaparelli was
making clothing as an armature for ideas. Art seemed to be her
preeminent thought. Her excellent workshops made severe
structures of clothing, but the pink-and-blue children’s world of
the Circus collection, the lush naturalism and country and
insect life of the Pagan collection, and the frolic (which became
the name of Schiaparelli’s purple lipstick) of the Harlequin
collection created a last Parisian masquerade. Ideas cascaded
over forms in the 1938 collections, both in clothing and acces-
sories: in the Harlequin collection, a domino form became a
hat and pockets became little nest-caches; in the Circus
collection, the old Surrealist joke attention a la peinture (be-
ware of fresh paint) is written on a dress; a hen nests coolly ona
head (p. 113); and a hat becomes a quill pen and an inkwell (p.
ABOVE
109).
CECIL BEATON
There can be no doubt that the 1937—38 season, at the Salvador and Gala Dali, 1937
juncture of art and war, was Schiaparelli’s moment. On the Photograph
reopening of the Paris salon after the Second World War, she Courtesy Sotheby’s, London
offered examples of artistic clothing, but never with the Beaton made a series of portraits in which he
inspired madness and exuberance of this brief efflorescence. A posed Dali and his wife Gala behind the artist’s
designer who was primarily a dressmaker would never have marionettelike landscape silhouettes.
followed such an erratic pattern of achievement. No stylist
OPPOSITE
would ignite such a flame, however briefly. Schiaparelli was SALVADOR DALI (Spanish, born 1904)
Cover for Vogue, New York, December 1, 1946
Art’s illusions were commonplace in fashion
periodicals of the 1940s, not only in clothing
but also in graphics. Dali created faces within
architecture in this holiday cover for Vogue,
bringing the Surrealist vocabulary to vernacular
forms.
206
 x See eo different. She was distinctively an artist in the world of couture.
it.) aoe | She believed in inspiration and in the merger and magic of the
gots arts together as a source of artistic germination. She managed
artisans and dressmakers in her atelier, but she was not such a
| person herself. She was not a designer involved in the evolution
; of designs. She was an artist in the mystical tradition of creative
| inspiration and its consequence in art. A visionary, she touched
. clothing with the capacity to be art. Neither dressmaker nor
designer, Schiaparelli gave clothing the romantic and inventive
emancipation to become art even more than apparel.

As Meret Oppenheim had once offered as a Dada-Surrealist

object her Fur-Lined Tea Cup (1936), so Salvador Dali offered
his Aphrodisiac Dinner Jacket (1936), as much an object of
consuming Surrealism as an invention of clothing. The dinner
jacket with liquor glasses affixed to the surface is the counter-
part to his creation with Schiaparelli of the Tear Dress and
Fabric. In both, Dali brings the design and the object to the sur-
face of the garment as if to determine what is internal and what
external. As Schiaparelli was the doyenne of Surrealist fashion
designers, Dali was her male counterpart. He collaborated with
Schiaparelli in a succession of efforts in which it is difficult to
determine the exact origin of the idea. In general, though, the
inventions seem to be Dali’s, as they come so resonantly from
his body of work and from related avenues in Surrealism. The
connections were manifold, and the artist’s wife Gala was
customarily dressed gratis by Schiaparelli, as she provided a
perfect absurdist and plausible model for the designer’s
clothing.
Aside from Dali’s specific creations of clothing, however,
his idiosyncratic version of Surrealism was critical to the
transmission of Surrealist concepts and themes into fashion.
He was a dandy. Associating himself with the history of
dandies, he fashioned his own appearance and assumed
privilege, taking pleasure in inventing style for himself and for
others. Dali’s role in fashion was not only sanctioned by the
Surrealist obsession with everyday life, but also with his
responsibility to lead in style as the dandy-artist. Gala’s role in
fashion was largely derived from this same image—of the artist
as arbiter of style in all matters.
The official Surrealists disavowed Dali, but their reasons for
doing so did not touch upon his role in fashion. Nevertheless
that role was intimately tied to his projection of an artistic
temperament and to the part he played as an arbiter of style. It
was, after all, Dali more than any official leader of Surrealism
who opened up avenues to the fashion publications—requisite
thoroughfares for Dali as a boulevardier. Breton, avatar of
Surrealist intellect, had scant interest in Dali, avatar of
Surrealist style. In fact, Breton repeatedly sought to disavow
Dali’s self-proclamation as a Surrealist. Dali’s excesses (chiefly
in the postwar period) in extravagance and commercialism do
not vitiate the reasonableness of his fashion enterprises, both
in conjunction with Schiaparelli and independently, for they
were the natural expression of a Surrealist dandy.

207
 LEFT
MARCEL VERTES
Rendering of Backward Suit, by Elsa
Schiaparelli, 1937-38
Published Harper’s Bazaar, New York,
March 15, 1938
When Harper’s Bazaar published this drawing
of Schiaparelli’s innovative suit, it commented:
“A charming little street number, remarkable
only because it is worn front to back.’ However,
Schiaparelli’s suit, with its paradox of
entrances and exits, is certainly more than
slightly remarkable.

ABOVE
JEAN-CHARLES DE CASTELBAJAC
(French, born Morocco 1950)
Backward Suit, 1980
Taking Schiaparelli as his point of departure (or
arrival), Castlebajac created a new suit of
reverse illusionism.

OPPOSITE
KARL LAGERFELD
Backward Suit, 1986
Photograph Albert Watson

208
LEFT
HORST P. HORST
Fashion Photograph, 1947
The artistic vocabulary of revised classical
forms, deep landscape, and figures both
suspended and propped up in Dali’s painting
Dematerialization of the Nose of Nero (1947)
were addressed by Horst in his fashion
photograph.
BELOW LEFT
HORST P. HORST
Dresses by Adele Simpson, 1943
Published Vogue, New York, March 1, 1943
Fashion models pose before the Dali mural in
the New York apartment of Helena Rubinstein.
Although the transport of figures to the vast
world of Dali landscape is only an illusion, the
clothing gains clarity and importance from its
relation to the world of painting.

OPPOSITE
HORST P. HORST
Costumes by Dali for Bacchanale, Ballets
Russes de Monte Carlo, 1939
Photograph
In costumes designed by Dali and executed
in the studios of Chanel, real figures are
incarnated as the limp forms of Dali’s
imagination.
PAUL DYSON (British, born 195r)
Window Display, Harvey Nichols, London,
1985
Photograph Anthony Lawrence
With a limp, crutch-supported head, a
disintegrated figure, and a mannequin
transformed into a flower, the London display
window uses Dali as the source of inspiration.
RIGHT
SALVADOR DALI
The Painter’s Eye, 19 41
Watercolor and ink on paper
Collection Joseph and Jory Shapiro, Chicago
In a summary of favorite themes, from bobby
pins to drawers and cabinets, Dali presented
himself as the all-seeing, all-visual artist.

ABOVE
TOM LEE (American, 1909-1971)
Window Display, Bonwit Teller, New York,
1938
Inspired by the Trompe I’Oeil exhibition at the
Julien Levy Gallery, New York, Lee’s window is
one of many inflected by Surrealism in America
in the 1930s and 1940s.
 LEFT
DAVID BAILEY (British, born 1938)
Fashion Photograph, 1980 ;
Published Vogue Italia, Milan, September 1,
1980
After some four decades, Dali’s magical .
landscapes still provide a place to present high
fashion

BELOW AND OPPOSITE

SALVADOR DALI
“Dream vs. Reality,’ 1944
Published Vogue, New York, February 15, 1944
Both Dali’s imaginary dress and the real one are
transformed by the Surrealist sensibility and
ambience. Although Vogue titles the article
“Dream vs. Reality;’ the two seem more
amicable than adversarial, reality being like a |
dream and the dream being akin to the real.

4
:
‘

4
-
=I
Sau ADOR DALL draws a dream, above.

A dress sketched in over a page torn from a mediwval - :

tome on birds and bats and curious beasts.

Ai the right, Dali draws an existing, *'|

flesh-and-blood, size 10to 18 fashion.

Rose Burrack’s navy rayon crepe |

4 ‘RR
| » ‘
dress; $50, Pink satin shawl; $23. | yf r
|
: ; }
Henri Bendel: Garfinekel’s;L.S, Ayres |

214
Heats LEFT
‘SHERRY VIGDOR (American, born
Germany 1961)
Clock hat, 1985
Photograph Roxanne Lowit
Firm, but otherwise firmly in the tradition of
Dali, the clock has a timeless durability as a
fashion theme.

RIGHT
‘SALVADOR DALI
Limp-Watch Pin, 1949
Minami Art Museum, Tokyo
Initiated as motif in painting, but arising from
an accessory of dress, the limp watch is
| returned, by a perverse twist, to the realm of
_jewelry.

Only in the brain of Salvador Dali

exists the dress above with its curvaceous bosom

Sf __coat
hip-bones.
han andentomoloical
ger accessories,
¥ Buvthe dres:thathe hasketc theheroic seale
onhed
at the left is an original from Henri Bendel.
It is a white silk erépe dinner and dance dress.
witha hand-embroidered belt of sequins and amber beads
which puts forth a transparent peplum of loops.

215
216
 SURREALISM AND
THE WORLD OF
FASHION
Surrealism moved decisively into the world of fashion. Appro-
‘priating the imagery of fashion and offering it as metaphor,
Surrealism also shared an interest in the nature of clothing and
in the specific characteristics of fashion. Feeling the disap-
proval of the first-generation Surrealists, yet emboldened by
their adventure in reconciling everyday realities with the large
issues of a revolutionary art, major Surrealist figures entered
the realms of fashion, fashion advertising, and window display
in the 1930s and 1940s. The fashion magazine, both in its de-
sign and in its advertising, became the chief point of dissemi-
nation for Surrealist style. French, English, and American
fashion periodicals reflected the art movement through the spe-
cific invocation of Surrealism or by the adoption of a Surrealist
style in photography, graphics, and design.
To be sure, some Surrealists disavowed the worldliness of a
Surrealism dressed in the mode of fashion, but many partici-
pated in its adventures. Others sought to separate their ““com-
mercial” work from untainted efforts, but even these
distinctions could only be vaguely sustained by the late 1930s,
when the popularity of Surrealist expression in the fashion
journals reached its peak. No single editor or art director can
be considered responsible for the attraction of the journals to
Surrealism, so pervasive was its style among the major fashion
publications, most especially Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar.
Jean-Michel Frank, Jean Cocteau, Leonor Fini, Cecil Beaton,
George Hoyningen-Huene, A. M. Cassandre, and Man Ray
were recruited as unlikely missionaries for the stylistic revolu-
tion in the unlikeliest of places. That their cause prevailed and
has continued to sustain itself so completely requires a careful
OPPOSITE
OSCAR DOMINGUEZ (French, born consideration of the nature of Surrealist style as applied to the
Spain, 1906-1957) : fashion arts.
Armchair, 1937
Wheelbarrow upholstered with red satin The first austere, programmatic, and exclusionary expressions
Photograph Man Ray, courtesy Man Ray
of Surrealist art were, like those of the first Futurists and other
Archives, Paris
Published Minotaure Paris, vol. 3, no. 10,
artistic reformers, destined to be of short life. What followed
Winter 1937 was a style that was more florid and flexible than that of the
founders, but not in the manner of a second generation.
Surrealist artist Dominguez paradoxically
created a'wheelbarrow with the attributes of a Rather, it was one of accommodation and transformation, al-
sedan chair, in which Man Ray photographed a lowing for the expression of such real-world values as the pri-
model wearing a Madeleine Vionnet evening mary form rejected. In its rigor, first-generation Surrealist
gown, further exaggerating the contrast of thinking all but foreclosed the possibility of strict Surrealism
elegance and utility. The upholstered comfort of passing to subsequent generations. Nevertheless, the immedi-
the wheelbarrow and the charm of the well-
appointed model establish an uneasy and
ate détente of the followers allowed Surrealism to flaunt its sty-
awkward disjuncture between this presentation listic virtuosity in film, fashion, and the commercial media with
and the customary purposes of the a bravado akin to the self-confidence of the first-generation,
wheelbarrow. manifesto-making Surrealists. Thus, despite its theoretical 217
 premise and severe first definition, Surrealism assured its era’s eye. Just as photography was a late, but essential, form of
succession into new forms and new ideas. Surrealism, so fashion photography found an ideal style in Sur-
But the fundamental ideas of the first generation could be realism. Not only did Surrealist dress provide a perfect play of
respected, as, for example, in Surrealist film and photography, illusions, but even the most ordinary garment could be ren-
forms little analyzed or envisioned in their initial phase but cru- dered magical in the transformations of a Surrealist photo-
cial to the development of the Surrealist mythos. One such idea graph. In some measure, the same possibilities obtain for
was the interpretation of the body. Denied its integrity by Surrealist illustration.
dream interpretation and other psychological insights cogni- Surrealism’s unattainable dreams, the aestheticization of the
tively known to the early Surrealists and frequently present in product, and the transmogrification of the object were evident
their work, the interpretation of the body became an abiding in fashion editorial and advertising imagery of the 1930s and
Surrealist premise, even beyond its first associations with the 1940s. Its commercial matrix lay in the product and advertis-
literature of psychology. The partial figure, the dislocation of ing, but it also had an influence in all editorial areas including
body parts, and the placement of the figure and/or its parts in the covers of such fashion periodicals as Harper’s Bazaar
unanticipated settings were adopted for promotional imagery (United States and England), Vogue, and Flair, the last of these
and for the new imagery of fashion in the 1930s. The conven- being Surrealism’s great continuing stronghold among fashion
tional wisdom that fashion and its products depend upon nov- publications into the 1950s. Flair’s die-cut covers, allowing a
elty for their promotion is insufficient to explain the role reading from exterior into interior, begged for Surrealist inven-
assigned to Surrealism, for other art movements of the period tion, and the magazine’s close association with Dali fostered
might have been selected for the expression of advertising and dreams of sublime Surrealist women, flower transformation,
fashion. The concept of the partial figure could even be attrib- and splendid plumage.
uted to Cubism or Futurism if such were the isolated and single But Surrealist invention had a more fundamental effect than
motive of the new advertising of the 1930s. the simple adornment of pages with butterflies, fluid figures,
Rather, it was precisely Surrealism’s ability to juxtapose the and the phantasms that could be made to surround apparel.
real and the unreal that made it a primary form for advertising The Surrealist designer would create an entire environment of
and media expression. Merchandise, in its crassest form, could the magazine page, often with a motif unifying text and image.
be seen; the dream of the consumer product, whether fashion Surrealism was unafraid of the word and accustomed, even in
or otherwise, could also be envisioned. The simultaneity of an its earliest forms, to integrating it with the image; the magazine
optical truth and its dreamed doppelganger could render the page posed no threat but rather provided an opportunity, es-
product enticing. Photography had long sought to portray the pecially as the programmatic nature of early Surrealism could
218 fashion object as desirable within the constraints of the cam- be made to serve the adornments of another generation. Fur-
OPPOSITE FAR LEFT
GEORGE HOYNINGEN-HUENE
(American, born Russia, 1900-1968)
Gown by Elsa Schiaparelli, 1939
Photograph
Published Harper’s Bazaar, New York,
September 1, 1939
Converging here are three artists, the
photographer Hoyningen-Huene, the painter
Leonor Fini (who designed the armoire in the
background), and the clothing designer
Schiaparelli, in a twentieth-century
Gesamtkunstwerk involving a cross section of
the arts. In the 1930s, fashion magazines
particularly encouraged such collaborations
around themes of Surrealist dress and style. The
unaccustomed silhouette of the Schiaparelli
gown, offering a bustle in the front, seems
appropriate in a setting filled with artistic
presences.
OPPOSITE LEFT
GEORGE HOYNINGEN-HUENE
Gown by Alix, 1939
Photograph
Published Harper’s Bazaar, New York,
September 4, 1939
In the same campaign of photographs, Eugene
Berman provides the set for the gown by Alix
Grés (born 1899).

ABOVE RIGHT
EDOUARD BENITO (French, born Spain,
1892—?)
Sketch for Gowns by Coco Chanel and Elsa
Schiaparelli, 1938
Published Vogue, New York, July 15, 1938
Arcane but elegant, Benito’s setting for dresses
by Chanel and Schiaparelli is a translation of
Surrealist landscapes by Dali.
BELOW RIGHT
CECIL BEATON (British, 1904-1980)
Lady in Hat Box, 1932
Courtesy Sotheby’s, London

thermore, the artistic license of Surrealism sanctioned the free-

dom that has come to be a characteristic of fashion
publications but had not prevailed before. To see the entire
page as an aesthetic field, disregarding borders associated with
type, was not only to create a fantasy, but also to permit the
synthesis of illustration, photography, and type within the aes-
thetic assembly of the page. Not only were the Surrealists em-
ployed by the fashion magazines, but advertising and editorial
materials employed the devices of Surrealism with a startling
ardor. Simulations of Surrealist space, motifs, and even paint-
ings became—and still are today—frequent devices of fashion
presentation. The Surrealist graphic moved adroitly from man-
ifesto to merchandise.

What was realized in magazines regarding both merchandise

and art was recognized in window display as well. The Surre-
alist metaphor of the window as eye would seem to be vitiated
when it becomes the place of merchandise instead, but its in-
ventive possibilities were explored by numerous artists and de-
signers. Although Dali’s notorious exploits at New York’s
Bonwit Teller in 1939—when his Night and Day tableaux 219
 ABOVE AND OPPOSITE
Published Harper’s Bazaar, New York, two of the designer’s evening gowns for an
LEONOR FINI (Italian, born Argentina,
March 15, 1940 article in Harper’s Bazaar. Fini was one of the
1908)
Sketches for Evening Gowns by Elsa Surrealist painter Fini, who had earlier designed artists most closely associated with
220 Schiaparelli, 1940 the Shocking flacon for Schiaparelli, illustrates Schiaparelli.
 ABOVE LEFT
SALVADOR DALI (Spanish, born 1904)
A Dream about an Evening Dress
BELOW LEFT
GIORGIO DE CHIRICO (lItalian, born
Greece, 1888—1978)
La Femme Antique
ABOVE RIGHT
PAVEL TCHELITCHEW (American, born
Russia, 1898—19 57)
A Room ina Seashell

Published Vogue, New York, March 15, 1937

Three “‘photo-paintings” commissioned by

Vogue to involve artists in the presentation of
fashion.

222
COUNTERCLOCKWISE FROM TOP

LEONOR FINI (Italian, born Argentina,

1908)
ALEXEI BRODOVITCH (American, born
Russia, 1898—1971)
MIGUEL COVARRUBIAS (Mexican, born
1904)
A. M. CASSANDRE (French, born the
Ukraine, 1901-1968)
GIORGIO DE CHIRICO
Hat Boxes
Published Harper’s Bazaar, New York,
March 1937

In 1937, Harper’s Bazaar, where Brodovitch

was then art director, invited artists and
designers to create hat boxes for a spring issue.
Artists as various as de Chirico, Yasuo
Kuntyoshi, and Alexander Calder were invited
to take part. Their willingness to be involved
suggests a particular indulgence of the
commercial aspect of design seldom found
earlier in the century—or later. The five artists
here all had Surrealist connections, de Chirico
as precursor, Cassandre and Covarrubias as
illustrators, Fini as illustrator and designer, and
Brodovitch as art director.

NO Nv
¥
OPPOSITE ABOVE
ANTONIO (American, born Puerto Rico,
1943-1987)
Shoe Metamorphosis, 1978
In a succession of transformations, the woman
becomes the shoe in Antonio’s rendering.
OPPOSITE BELOW
ROMAN CIESLEWITZ (French, born
Poland, 1942)
Michael Ange, Shoe Advertisement for Charles
Jourdan, 1982
In appropriation and fantasy, Cieslewitz attains
the magic of art’s transformation and clothing’s
charm.

RIGHT
HOWARD NEVELOW (American)
Window Display, Delman Shoe Salon,
New York, 1968
The Castle in the Pyrenees (page following), by
René Magritte, was a fertile source of
inspiration for designers.

were expurgated by the powers-that-be of the store—tested the been drawn to Surrealist motifs in 1937 and 1938, coinciding
idealism of the display notion, they also exerted a lasting influ- with those years when Europe became aware of the inevitabil-
ence on the great display artists Tom Lee, Candy Pratts Price, ity of war, so too the rapid popularization of Surrealism as a
and Gene Moore, revealing the importance of Surrealism for graphic style may have been prompted by the need to provide
display design. To realize a world within the window, to peer some fantasied alternative to the bleak prospect of war. As Eu-
in and through reflectively and reflexively, makes of the win- rope fell, Schiaparelli went to the circus; as Fascism flourished,
dow display a magical mirror of Surrealist intent. Like the Surrealism flowered.
magazine page, its promotion of a product or an idea external
to the art does not exclude Surrealism or make it implausible; Amid such grim realities, one of the options Surealism offered
rather Surrealism offers the special magic by which the jejune in the fashion magazines was color. The Surrealist palette was
is transformed into the extraordinary. Moreover, window dis- Dali’s gaiest legacy, along with a strong sense of line. Pastel
play specifically needed the Surrealist option of transforming washes of color were used in Surrealist illustrations to give a
scale. The Surrealist symbol existed without reference to scale; shimmer of translucent color; the thin paint of Dali’s canvases
thus it enabled the great designers to render the large small and and of much Surrealist facture translated easily to the maga-
the small large without interrupting the credibility of the scene, zine page. Of course, such color was neither a universal nor an
whether artificial or real. As the window had served as a visible early trait of the Surrealists but characterized the work of only
passage from real to imaginary, so the display window pro- a few of the more decorative painters in the period. To some
vided a like aperture and like option. To break the window it- degree, Surrealism was an evasion for the fashion magazines of
self, as in a state of pique Dali broke the Bonwit Teller the 1930s and 1940s, allowing them to provide pretty images
windows in 1939, is merely to make manifest Surrealism at its in the guise and mufti of art. In a brief Hollywood fling at
most transparent. about the same time, Surrealism was likewise a flamboyant
That Surrealism attained currency in the graphic design of and colorful art superimposed on the realities of cinema.
fashion magazines in the late 1930s must also be viewed in the But in all its forms, even with its worldly evasion, Surrealism
context of cultural history. Impending war and then its pres- afforded the same friction between a sinister and a benign vi-
ence promoted specific fantasies about fashion. At the time sion as it had at its first conception. When Fascism and the
Surrealism offered a mask that was a kind of protective helmet Third Reich supplanted the Surrealist dreams with even more
against turbulence. Other styles might offer surcease from war, potent and powerful horrors, Surrealism did not describe the
but no other art could provide the imaginative world of fantasy nightmare directly but kept faith with its instinct to fibrillate
that the late 1930s and 1940s required. As Schiaparelli had the tissues of illusion and reality. 225
ABOVE ABOVE CENTER
RENE MAGRITTE (Belgian, 1898-1967) EDWARD MARTINEZ (American, born
The Castle in the Pyrenees, 1959 1954)
Oil on canvas, 78 7/, X 55 in. Window Display, Jessica McClintock, San
Collection Harry Torczyner, New York Francisco, 1985
Magritte’s vision of a castle in the Pyrenees The adaptability of the Magritte image is
plays on the expressions “castles in the air” and demonstrated in another window display that
“castles in Spain,’ merging the two in one achieves the same astonishing feats of levitation
visionary, antigravitational experience of a as the original.
giant stone with castle floating above the sea, a
seemingly celestial elevation.

22.6
ABOVE
ISSEY MIYAKE (Japanese, born 1938)
Dress with Fictive Granite Accessories,
1986-87
Photograph Tahara Keiichi
The stone bag held by the model creates the
physical illusion of weight and gravity, as does
the apparently heavy stone bracelet she wears.
Miyake’s knowing wit may well allude to the
weight of garments as well as to Magritte’s art
of the heavy stone.

227
 ro
igi Wt pepe tpt ape /
( t tt ob Sie aes
haa it; tad:

RENE MAGRITTE
Golconda, 1953
Oil on canvas, 317/s X 397s in.
Private collection
Magritte’s rain of figures has a familiar air yet
creates a feeling of acute discomfort. His images
have been successfully appropriated by many
artists in the fashion arts, most especially Guy
Bourdin, whose mysterious images of shoes are
often set in a Surrealist perspective.

228
 MARCH 1937

N PARIS - 50 CENTS - %IN LONDON

ABOVE
A. M. CASSANDRE
Cover for Harper’s Bazaar, New York,
March 1937
Posing as the “‘key to the Paris openings,’ this
issue of Harper’s Bazaar purports to be a
special guide for the cognoscenti. It is true that
a magazine can claim to provide special insights
and access to a different world for which the key
is an apt symbol; but Cassandre also opens up
the dreaming world of the Surrealists, suggested
here in the spatial aperture to the blue skies
beyond.

ABOVE RIGHT
GENE MOORE (American, born 1910)
Window Display, Tiffany & Co., New York,
1962

Moore reveals a special affinity for the devices

and models of Surrealism in using keys to create
a Magrittean harmony.

229
OPPOSITE
SAUL LEITER (American)
Dress by James Galanos, 1960
Photograph
Published Harper’s Bazaar, New York,
November 1960
All seeing but always more passive than overtly
sentient, the Magrittean male spectator
becomes the lambent witness to new fashion,
the observer who is there whether he is
acknowledged or not.

TOP RIGHT
BARRY LATEGAN (American, born South
Africa, 1935)
Fashion Editorial for Cafra Men’s Clothing,
1980
Published Uomo Harper’s Bazaar, Milan,
December 1980
In this instance the male spectator—with vision
obscured by nature—becomes the wearer.

CENTER RIGHT
SHOJI UEDA (Japanese, born 1913)
Formal Wear by Takeo Kikuchi for Men’s Bigi,
1983-84
Photograph
Rake, clown, and witness, the singular man in a
bowler hat and a Surrealist landscape is a study
in contrasts between his formality and his
gravity-defying hat trick.

BOTTOM RIGHT
RENE MAGRITTE
Pandora’s Box, 26 X 30 in.
Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven,
Connecticut. Gift of Dr. and Mrs. John A. Cook
Magritte’s stranger-spectator passes cryptically
through the world of appearances. Fashion
enters his purview, perhaps, through the
flower, which is the transmogrification of
woman and symbol of beauty. His own laconic
presence becomes a type for the male spectator
in contemporary fashion.

231
pans Oe
RIGHT
JEAN-FRANCOIS LEPAGE (French, born
1960)
Fashion Editorial, 1985
Published Per Lui, Milan, December 1985
Overtly and cannily Surrealist, a menswear
photograph seeks differentiation for men’s
formal wear through a masquerade both
sinister and silly.
BELOW
LOUISE DAHL-WOLFE (American, born
1895)
Fashion Photograph of Claire McCardell
Bathing Suit
Published Harper’s Bazaar, New York, May
1948

253
LEFT
GEORGE HOYNINGEN-HUENE
Gown by Elsa Schiaparelli, 1935
Photograph
Published Harper’s Bazaar, New York,
October 1935
Looking away, as if in longing for some ineffable
beauty, the elegantly gowned model stands in a
Surrealist landscape, the legacy of an artistic
vision to which the world of fashion would
cling in the 1930s.
ACKNOWLEDG
MENTS

It is a paradox that Surrealism, now in its sev- Moore; Davide Mosconi; Claus Ohm; Cindy
enth decade, should have so many adherents. Palmano; Herb Ritts; Michael Roberts; Sheila
Listed below are the designers, photographers, Rock; Paolo Roversi; David Seymour—Mag-
illustrators, publishers, museum curators, <eal- num, Elizabeth Gallen; Melvin Sokolsky, Jor-
ers, and collectors who have contributed so dan Calfus; Irving Solero; Lance Steadler,
generously to this book: Michele Filomino; Bert Stern, Pamela Reed;
Keiichi Tahara; Alastair Thain; Christophe-
Eric Beamon; Anne-Marie Beretta, Anne Ver- Tony Thorimbert; Oliviero Toscani, Jackie
nin; Tom Binns; Manolo Blahnik, Jamie Preito; Fixot; Michael Tropea; Shoji Ueda; Tony Vir-
Judy Blame; Mary Bright; Roberto Capucci; amontes; Paul Warchol; Albert Watson, Peter
Pierre Cardin; Jean-Charles de Castelbajac, Schub; Bruce Weber, Nan Bush.
Marc Boisseuil; Bill Cunningham; Eduardo Gabriella Giandelli, Lorenzo Matotti; An-
Costa; Jean-Rémy Daumas, Sasha Walckhoff, tonio Lopez, Juan Ramos, Matthew Olzak;
Laurent Fuchel; Doline Dritsas; Emmé, Claire Mel Odom; George Stavrinos.
Krischok; English Eccentrics, Helen Littman, Mrs. E. A. Bergman, Robert Bergman; Gal-
Sandra Kay; John Galliano, Amanda Grieve; erie Beyeler; Birch and Conran Fine Art, James
Jean-Paul Gaultier, Frédérique Lorca; Tan Giu- Birch; Edwynn Houk Gallery, Edwynn Houk,
dicelli, Frank Weill, Beatrice Keller; Hubert de Sandra Newton; Mrs. Robert B. Mayer, Laurie
Givenchy, Dominique Sirop; Georgina Godley, A. Stein; Robert Miller Gallery, Howard Read;
Sandra Stagg; Olivier Guillemin; Pam Hogg; Herbert and Dolores Neumann; Mr. and Mrs.
Marc Jacobs, Robert Duffy; Stephen Jones; Marshall Padorr; Antony Penrose; Drs. Wil-
Charles Jourdan, Jean-Marie Imoucha, Rose- liam and Martha Heineman Pieper, Alan
mary Heon; Takeo Kikuchi; Marina Killery; Cohen; Kathleen Lamb for the Mr. and Mrs.
Adam Kurtzman, James Bacchi; Christian La- David C. Ruttenberg Collection and the Rich-
croix, Jean-Jacques Picart; Dominique Lacou- ard L. Sandor Collection; Katherine $. Sham-
stille; Karl Lagerfeld, Ralph Toledano, Sarah berg; Joseph and Jory Shapiro; Sotheby’s,
Matthew, Caroline Cebal; Lederer, Philippe A. London, Lydia Cullen; Staley-Wise Gallery,
Bigar; Francois Lesage; Adelle Lutz, Andrea Ethelene Staley, Taki Wise; Harry Torczyner;
Starr; Maidenform, Marcia Cacaci; Pink Soda, Zabriskie Gallery, Virginia Zabriskie, Pamela
Mandy Martin; Issey Miyake, Jun Kanai; Salisbury, Ann Lapides; Richard S. Zeisler.
Claude Montana, Beatrice Paul; Robert Lee Barney’s, Simon Doonan; Henri Bendel,
Morris, Sybil Nakamura; Thierry Mugler, Danuta Ryder; Bonwit Teller; Bloomingdale’s,
Jean-Luc Suchet, Alix Malka; Jean Patou, Jean Candy Pratts Price, Jackie Dunham; Calish As-
de Mouy, Patrick Pradelie; Eric Rhein; Marcel sociates, Patricia Jefferies; Delman, Howard
Rochas, Héléne Rochas, Monique Berger; Cin- Nevelow; Sara Tomerlin Lee; Jessica Mc-
zia Ruggieri, Anne Vickerson; Yves Saint Lau- Clintock, Edward Martinez; R. H. Macy,
rent, Pierre Bergé, Stephen de Pietri; David Linda Fargo; Harvey Nichols, Paul Dyson;
Shilling; Shiseido, Mari Chihaya; Larry Shox; Portantina Boutique, Barbara Bergreen, Ma-
Vivienne Westwood; Kirsten Woodward; chado and Silvetti; Saks Fifth Avenue, Michael
Sherry Vigdor; Kansai Yamamoto. Passantino, Bill Lorenzen; Tiffany & Co., Gene
Josef Astor; David Bailey, Sarah Lane; Mar- Moore.
tin Brading; Alfa Castaldi; Roman Cieslewitz; The Art Institute of Chicago, T. Faulkner-
Jean-Yves Cornec; Maria Vittoria Corradi; Lavelle, Kristy Stewart, Julia Bernard; The
Louise Dahl-Wolfe; Willo Font; Scott Heiser; Brooklyn Museum, Elizabeth Ann Coleman,
Hideoki; Taishi Hirokawa; Noelle Hoeppe; Polly Willman, Marguerite Lavin; The Met-
Horst P. Horst, Rick Tardiff; Daniel Jouan- ropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Jean
neau; Art Kane, Lisa Garcia; William Klein; Druesedow, Beth Alberty, Kim Fink, Katell le
Kim Knot, Julian Saddon; Tom Kublin; Barry Bourhis; Minami Art Museum, Tokyo, Masao
Lategan; Anthony Lawrence; Saul Leiter; Jean- Nangaku, Mr. Ohtake; Musée de la Mode et
Francois Lepage, Susan Dalton; Annie Leibo- du Costume de la Ville de Paris, Guillaume
vitz, Rossett Herbert; Roxanne Lowit, Orlando Garnier; Musée des Arts Décoratifs, Paris,
King; Serge Lutens, Patrice Lerat; Niall Daniel Marchesseau; Musée des Arts de la
MclInerny; Iain McKell, Sue Odell; Robert Mode, Paris, Pierre Provoyeur, Florence
Mapplethorpe; Harry Meerson; Christopher Miiller, Nicole Monsajon; Museum of Con- 235
temporary Art, Chicago, I. Michael Danoff,
Terry Neff, Alice Piron; The Museum of Mod-
ern Art, New York, Mary Corliss, Thomas
Grischkowsky; Philadelphia Museum of Art,
Dilys E. Blum, Monica Brown; The Tate Gal-
lery, London; Graham Lington; Salvador Dali
Museum,: Saint Petersburg, Florida, Joan
Kropf; Victoria and Albert Museum, Lon-
don, Sir- Roy Strong, Garth Hall, Valerie
Mendes, Mark Haworth-Booth; Wadsworth
Atheneum, Hartford, Connecticut, Marianne
Carlano, Gregory Hedberg, David Parrish;
Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven,
Connecticut.
Condé Nast, Diana Edkins, Cindy Cathcart,
Elaine M. Shaw; Edizioni Conde-Nast Italia,
Alda Premoli, Luca Stoppini, Mariuccia Ca-
sadio, Micheline Roth; The Face, Robin Der-
rick, James Truman; Harper’s Bazaar, Martin
Schrader, Anthony Mazzola, Susan P. Goodall;
Harper’s-Queen, Hamish Bowles; i-D, Steph-
anie Crean, Peter Brown; Life, Deborah
Cohen; Mondadori Press, Sandy Auriti; Paper,
Kim Hastreiter; Playboy, Tom Stabler, Holly
Binderup, Mary Fennel, Barbara Hoffman;
Uomo Harper’s Bazaar, Mary Cavaglia; Van-
ity Fair, Valerie Sonnenthal, Heather Crocker;
Visual Merchandising, Laurel Harper; The
World of Interiors, Nicolette le Pelley.
Suzanne Bartsch; Tina Chow; Charles
Cowles; Nancy Hall-Duncan; Janus Films,
Karen Rosen; Marie-Andrée Jouve; Kitchen,
Kazuko Koike, Setsuko Takeuchi; Judith Mal-
lin; Anne de Margerie; Caroline Reynolds Mil-
bank, Mark Walsh; Studio Bergot, Marie
Rucki, Francois Charles-Domine, Juan Stot-
tani, George Rucki; Juliet Man Ray, Jerome
Gold; Lucien Treillard; Pierre Gassman;
Dianne Benson.

At the Fashion Institute of Technology, Rich-

ard McComb, Dorothy Rudzki, and Tomoko
Wheaton made extraordinary contributions to
the book through their steadfast and fast
research. Barbara Castle and Stacy Broser
maintained manuscripts, emendations, and
composure with unfailing equanimity. The
staff of the Shirley Goodman Resource Center
at the Fashion Institute of Technology assisted
in countless ways.
At Rizzoli International Publications, Lau-
ren Shakely and William Dworkin were une-
quivocal in showing faith and giving aid; Sarah
Burns contributed patient and painstaking re-
search; Charles Davey saved the design day
with acute sensibility for Surrealism and his
sure and beautiful ideas for the book; and Jane
Fluegel was the omniscient Surrealist eye pro-
viding editorial scrutiny and vision in complete
professionalism and happy friendship.
Harold Koda and Laura Sinderbrand are my
colleagues, co-curators, and true co-authors.
They are my best friends. They have my ap-
preciation, admiration, and affection.

R. M.
 INDEX

Page numbers in italics indicate illustrations. E

Cafra Men’s Clothing, 231
Cahun, Claude, 70
A Calugi e Giannelli, 178, 179
Agar, Eileen, 155 Calder, Alexander, 223
Antonio, 23, 34, 35, 67, 131, 188, 224, 225 Capucci, Roberto, 188
Apollinaire, Guillaume, 140 Cardin, Pierre, 53, 97
Aragon, Louis, 9, 12, 70, 200 Carnegie, Hattie, 46
Arnaud, Michel, 103 Cartier, 86, 87
Arp, Jean, 17, 26, 28, 30 Cassandre, A. M., 49, 64, 65, 154, 217, 223,
Art of This Century, New York, 182 229
Astor, Josef, 91 Castaldi, Alfa, 62, 63
Castelbajac, Jean-Charles de, 77, 102, 103,
B 108, 184, 194, 208
Bacchanale (ballet), 210, 211 Chanel, Gabrielle (Coco), 139, 157, 210,
Bailey, David, 214 211,219
Balanchine, George, 130, 198 Chien Andalou, Un (Dali and Bunuel), 51,
Balenciaga, Cristobal, 141, 179 79
Ballets Russes de Monte Carlo, 109, 130, Chloe, 16, 23, 34
ZNO 2a 1 Cieslewitz, Roman, 224, 225
Barney’s, 148 Circus Polka (Balanchine), 198
Barthes, Roland, 128 Cocteau, Jean, 38, 49, 50, 52, 53, 100, 128,
Basile, 94, 95 198, 202, 203, 204, 205, 217
Baudelaire, Charles, 150 Colcombet, House of, 200
Bayer, Herbert, 50, 66, 67 Colin, Paul, 20
Beaton, Cecil, 18, 38, 42, 52, 53, 109, 118, Connery, Jason, 163
119, 205, 206—07, 217, 219 Corneille, 200
Bellmer, Hans, 76, 109, 114, 132 Cornell, Joseph, 12, 15
Ben (Vautier), 77 Corradi, Maria Vittoria, 36
Bendel, Henri, 169 Couture (Milbank), 205
Benito, Edouard, 219 Covarrubias, Miguel, 154, 223
Bérard, Christian, 198 Crane, Walter, 170
Beretta, Anne-Marie, 53, 104 Cravan, Arthur, 117
Bergdorf Goodman, 186 Crosby, Caresse, 141, 161
Berman, Eugene, 218, 219 Crosby, Harry, 161
Binns, Tom, 98, 122 Cunningham, Bill, 108, 125
Black Sun Press, 161
Blahnik, Manolo, 53, 104, 141, 163 D
The Blind Man, 117 Dahl-Wolfe, Louise, 233
The Blood of a Poet (Cocteau), 49, 50 Dali, Gala, 110, 206—07
Bloomingdale’s, 34 Dali, Salvador, 12, 14, 15, 16, 17, 22, 23,
Blumenfeld, Erwin, 40 SOS ous 3) Si, SR ED, AU, TE 35 ED
Bonwit Teller, 82, 83, 213, 214, 215, 225 84, 86, 90, 105, 107-08, 109, 110, 112,
Bourbon, Louise, 125 114, 117, 198. 120. 1220924, 130. 131,
Bourdin, Guy, 228 135, 136, 139-40, 144, 145, 146, 147,
Braagaard, Eric, 124 148, 150, 166, 182, 183, 198, 203, 204,
Brading, Martin, 169 205, 206-07, 210,211,212,213, 214-15,
Brazil, 112 218, 219, 222, 225
Brentano’s, 96, 97 de Chirico, Giorgio, 12, 14, 16, 49, 60, 102,
Breton, André, 9, 12, 50, 73, 84, 96, 97, 11035, 109), 1145 130522257223
108, 114, 140, 207 Delman Shoe Salon, 225 )
Brodovitch, Alexei, 223 Delvaux, Paul, 60, 141, 161, 162, 163, 166
Bunuel, Luis, 51, 79 Diaghilev, Serge, 130
Byrne, David, 109, 129, 152, 153 Dianne B., 194
 Dior, Christian, 32, 33, 34 Heiser, Scott, 4-5, 54, 55, 188, 189 Lifar, Serge, 20
Disney, Walt, 161 Hideoki, 171 Lindbergh, Peter, 136
Dominguez, Oscar, 12, 14, 216, 217 Hirokawa, Taishi, 68, 98, 100, 102, 103, Linea Italiana, 32, 36
Donati, Enrico, 76, 77, 82, 96, 97 122, 124, 125, 133, 136-37, 146, 148, Loos, Anita, 200
Donatella, 142 150, 171, 198, 203, 204 Lopez, Antonio, see Antonio
The Dream of Venus (Dali), 140 Hoeppe, Noelle, 148 L’Orchestre en Liberté (ballet), 20
Dritsas, Doline, 120, 121 Horst, Horst P., 18, 24, 40, 41, 42, 43, 49, Lowit, Roxanne, 22—23, 26, 27, 34, 35, 54,
Ducasse, Isidore, 11, 12, 15 50, 52, 86, 87, 95, 196. 197, 200! 217 55, 68, 102, 103, 104, 114, 115, 116,
Duchamp, Marcel, 25, 50, 56, 76, 77, 96, Hoyningen-Huene, George, 93, 217, 218, 117s 12059279122. 123, 1425 15 0,note
97, 107, 108, 200 219, 234 170—71, 215
Dyson, Paul, 166, 167, 212 Hugo, Valentine, 16, 22, 23, 84, 112 Loy, Mina, 117 7
Lutens, Serge, 16, 20, 21, 32, 33, 34, 36, 37
E I Lutz, Adelle, 109, 114, 128, 129, 152, 153
Eluard, Paul, 9, 12, 50, 51 Ingres, Jean-Dominique, 18 Lynes, George Platt, 74, 75, 80, 81, 140,
Emmé (Ethel Price), 124 International Surrealist Bulletin, 166 144, 145
English Eccentrics, 192, 193
Eric, 112, 113 J M
Ernst, Max, 14, 16, 18, 138, 139, 141, 158, Jacobs, Marc, 53, 91 McCardell, Claire, 233
161, 180, 183, 190, 191 James, Charles, 53, 140, 147 McClintock, Jessica, 226-27
Exposition Internationale, Paris, 1937, 50, James, Edward, 44 McInerney, Niall, 191
S15 56 Jean, Marcel, 50, 72, 99 McKell, Iain, 48, 49
Exposition Internationale du Surréalisme, Johns, Jasper, 117 McLean, Bruce, 112
Paris Jones, Stephen, 108, 117, 125 Macy, R. H., 34
1938, 50, 58—59, 192, 193 Jouanneau, Daniel, 122, 123 Magritte,René, 14, 17, 44, 46, 51, 53, 73,
1947, 82 Jourdan, Charles, 224, 225 75, 78, 92, 96, 97, 104, 106, 107, 122,
Exposition Surréaliste d’Objets, Paris, 1936, 133, 140, 141, 143, 160, 161, 192, 199,
70 K 200), 225, 226,227. 228.229) 230.0252
Kane, Art, 88, 89, 94, 95 Maison Samuel, Brussels, 14, 17
Fe Kaplan, Jacques, 68 Malan Studio, Inc., 164
The Face, 48, 49, 80 Kawakubo, Rei, 136, 206 Malet, Leo, 58
Fantastic Art, Dada, Surrealism, New York, Keiichi, Tahara, 227 Malta, Silvano, 62, 63
1936, 78 Kenneth Beauty Salon, 164 Man Ray, 2-3, 10, 11, 12-13, 15, 16, 18,
Fargo, Linda, 34 Kerlor, William de Wendt de, 197 19,25;,50) 51, 53,065 07, SS meoumes
Fath, Jacques, 85 Kertész, André, 47 78, 85, 99, 109, 114, 117, 132, 142;
Fellowes, Daisy, 205 Kikuchi, Takeo, 231 155, 162, 163, 184, 185, 216, 217, 232
Fini, Leonor, 205, 217, 219, 220, 221, Killery, Marina, 126 Mapplethorpe, Robert, 194
223 Kosak, 36 Marisol, 68
First Surrealist Manifesto, 1924, 140 Krauss, Rosalind, 15 Martinez, Edward, 226-27
Flair, 225231 fant S Osos 28 Krizia, 131, 148 Masson, André, 192, 193
Flato, Paul, 108, 114 Kublin, 179 Matotti, Lorenzo, 60, 61
Foucault, Michel, 53 Kuniyoshi, Yasuo, 223 Meerson, Harry, 134, 195
Frank, Jean-Michel, 198, 217 Kurtzman, Adam, 140, 148 Mendl, Lady Elsie, 205
Frederics, John, 40 Men’s Bigi, 231
Freud, Sigmund, 11, 14 iL Michael Ange, 224, 225
La Femme 100 Tétes (Max Ernst), 180 Michelangelo, 89
G La Révolution Surréaliste, 84, 139, 140 Milbank, Caroline, 205
Galanos, James, 230, 231 Lacoustille, Dominique, 16, 22, 23, 45, 114, Miller, Lee, 50, 53, 89
Galerie Beaux-Arts, Paris, 50 126,127; Minotaure, 18, 217
Galerie Charles Ratton, Paris, 70 Lacroix, Christian, 16, 24, 140, 141, 150, Miro, Joan, 105
Galeries Lafayette, 200 151, 156, 172, 198 Miyake, Issey, 54, 55, 172, 173, 227
Gallé, Emile, 126, 127 Lagerfeld, Karl, 16, 22, 23, 34, 35, 107, 108, Moments de Mode, Paris, 1986, 198
Galliano, John, 108, 168, 169 145715, 1225 123, 150 SSa 6465s Montana, Claude, 17, 30
Gaultier, Jean-Paul, 66, 68, 69, 108, 116, 198, 200, 201, 208, 209 Montparnasse, Kiki de, 18, 19, 53
117, 150 Lalanne, Claude, 77 Moore, Gene, 82, 83, 164, 180, 181, 225,229
Giandelli, Gabriella, 60, 61 Lamb, Charles, 195 Morris, Robert Lee, 103
Gibbons, Elizabeth, 74, 75 Langston, Mark, 166 Mosconi, Davide, 32
Givenchy, Hubert de, 53, 99 Lategan, Barry, 231 Mugler, Thierry, 4-5, 54, 55, 103, 141,
Godley, Georgina, 17, 28, 29, 30, 31 Lautréamont, Comte de, 11, 12, 15 170-71, 188, 189, 191
Grés, Alix, 49, 50, 51, 218, 219 Lawrence, Anthony, 167, 212 Musée des Arts de la Mode, Paris, 198
Grieve, Amanda, 168, 169 Le Bal (ballet), 109, 130
Griffe, Jacques, 133 Le Surréalisme en 1947, 77 N
Guadagno, Carmalo, 190, 191 Le Surréalisme’ et la Peinture, 96, 97 Nevelow, Howard, 225
Guggenheim, Peggy, 182 Lederer, 122 New Burlington Galleries, London, 166
Guillemin, Olivier, 17, 26, 27 Lee, Tom, 213, 225 New York Dada, 56, 57
Leibovitz, Annie, 128, 129, 152, 153 New York World’s Fair, 140
H Leiter, Saul, 230, 231 Noailles, Vicomtesse de, 139, 155
Halard, Francois, 66 Lepage, Jean-Francois, 233 Noyce, Janet, 48, 49
Harper’s Bazaar, 12, 46, 50, 51, 56, 62, 64, Les Mystéres du Chateau du Dé (Man Ray),
85, 86, 93, 108, 109, 111, 114, 125, 142 O
139, 154, 157, 183; 195, 200,, 202, 203; Lesage, Frangois, $3, 101, 109, 133, 149 Odom, Mel, 66
208, 217, 218, 219): 2205-221.223,.229) Lesage, House of, 38, 39, 198, 204 Ohm, Claus, 38, 39, 86
231, 233, 234 Lesur, 64, 65 Oppenheim, Meret, 117
238 Harvey Nichols, London, 166, 212 Levy, Julien, Gallery, New York, 12, 73, 213 Ozbek, Rifat, 80
P U
Palmano, Cindy, 28, 29, 30, 31 Ueda, Shoji, 231
Patou, Jean, 16, 24, 150, 156, 172 Uomo Harper’s Bazaar, 94, 95, 174, 231
Per Lui, 233
Picabia, Francis, 25 Vv
Picasso, Pablo, 198 Vanity, 60, 61, 62, 63, 104, 147, 178, 179,
Playboy Fashion Guides, 66 188
Portantina, 60 Vanity Fair, 122, 123, 128, 129, 152, 153,
Price, Candy Pratts, 34, 225 182
Versace, Gianni, 67
Q Vertés, Marcel, 46, 108, 109, 111, 157, 200,
Ow’est-ce que le Surréalisme?, 73 208
Vigdor, Sherry, 215
R Vionnet, Madeleine, 50, 51, 86, 217
Ringling Brothers Circus, 198 Viramontes, Tony, 80
Roberts, Michael, 112, 141, 163, 200, 201 Vittu, Germaine, 124
Rochas, Marcel, 134, 195 Vogue
Rock, Sheila, 32 London, 103, 126
Rogers, Millicent, 205 Milan, 67
Roversi, Paolo, 126 New York, 42, 50, 51, 112, 113, 131,
Rubinstein, Helena, 210 154, 166, 172, 174, 175, 182, 203, 205,
Ruggieri, Cinzia, 140, 141, 148, 150 206, 2072 MOS 2U4S 217, 21852195 222
Ryder, Danuta, 169 Paris, 49
Vogue Italia, 214
Vogue Italia Pelle, 112
S
Vreeland, Diana, 86
Saad, Georges, 125
Sade, D. A. F., Marquis de, II, 114, 132
W
Saint Laurent, Yves, 17, 38, 39, 40, 51, 53,
Warchol, Paul, 60
70, 71, 77, 86, 92, 99, 140, 149, 176,
Weber, Bruce, 153, 164, 165
177, 198
West, Mae, 49-50, 60, 62, 205
Sauveplane, Henri, 20
Westwood, Vivienne, 141, 150
Schiaparelli, Elsa, 16, 17, 25, 38, 40, 46,
Wols, 50, 51, 56
49-50, 51, 53, 56, 60, 62, 70, 86, 91,
Woodward, Kirsten, 32, 108, 117, 157
93, 99, 100, 101, 102, 103, 107-08,
The World of Interiors, 66
109, 110, 111, 112, 113, 114, 118, 119,
120, 122, 135, 136-37, 139, 140, 141,
Ni
146, 147, 170-71, 184, 185, 196, 197,
Yamamoto, Kansai, 49
198, 199, 200, 202, 203, 204, 205,
206-07, 208, 219, 220, 221, 225
Second Surrealist Manifesto, 1929, 53, 84
Seligmann, Kurt, 232
Seymour, David, 182
Shiseido, 20, 21, 36, 37
Shox, Larry, 51, 70
Silvetti, Jorge, 60
Simpson, Adele, 210
Society of Wind Instruments, 22, 23
Solero, Irving, 170—71
Stavrinos, George, 186
Steadler, Lance, 112
Stern, Bert, 172, 174, 175
Studio Bergot, 26, 27, 109
Surrealist Exhibition, Brussels, 141
Surrealist Manifestoes
1924, 140
1929, 53, 84

"7p :
Tabard, Maurice, 53, 89, 141, 158, 159
Tanguy, Yves, 17, 26-27
Tanning, Dorothea, 158
Tatler, 112, 163, 200, 201
Tchelitchew, Pavel, 222
Thain, Alastair, 117
Thorimbert, Christophe Tony, 174
Tiffany & Co., 180, 181, 229
Toscani, Oliviero, 172
Traphagen Commercial Textile Studio,
12
Trompe | ’Oeil, New York, 1938, 213
True Stories (Byrne), 109, 129
Tzara, Tristan, 15, 18, 25
 Richard Martin is Director of the Costume
Institute of the Metropolitan Museum of Art,
New York, and one of the authors of Tango,
also published by Thames and Hudson.

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