The Elsa Schiaparelli Skeleton Dress
A while back I came across this dress:
It’s called the Skeleton dress and was designed in the 1930’s by the Italian fashion designer Elsa Schiaparelli, in collaboration with the surrealist artist Salvador Dali. The dress is padded to resemble the human skeleton and was considered pretty outrageous at the time. It looks like the kind of dress any good goth would die for and it wouldn’t look out of place on the runway of one of John Galliano’s shows.
You can see more of the dress (sorry about the lousy tiny images here) and read more about it at the Victoria & Albert Museum website — I’m not sure if the actual dress is still on display at the museum.
I’d heard of Schiaparelli before and knew she pushed the boundaries of fashion but the more I read about her designs (thanks, Wikipedia) the more I want to know. There’s a book about her that I might try to get my hands on: Shocking! The Art & Fashion of Elsa Schiaparelli (by Dilys E Brown). Costs a small fortune, though, so I might be dropping some hints as it nears Christmas.
Here’s another dress by Schiaparelli (again in collaboration with Dali):
It’s called the Lobster Dress and it has an image of a lobster down the front of it. Not the kind of thing you’d automatically associate with 1930’s fashion but I think there’s sometimes a tendency to assume that fun didn’t come into fashion until the 1960’s. I like unexpected and incongruous touches on fashion items, particularly accessories (my Hell’s Belles bag with the dead cockroach applique is one of my favourite pieces).