SALVADOR DALI & ELSA SCHIAPARELLI
Surrealism was pioneered in Paris by André Breton in his Manifesto of Surrealism, as a reaction to what he saw as the destruction wrought by the rationalism that had guided European culture to the atrocities of World War One. Inspired by the psychoanalytical discoveries of Freud and the political ideology of Marxism, the Surrealists desired a revision of values. In visual art, this revision was undertaken through the development of unconventional pure psychic automatism. Thought was expressed in the absence of control by reason, aesthetic judgements or moral preoccupations. Surrealism is based on the idea in the superior reality of certain forms of connotation heretofore ignored, in the omnipotence of the dream, and in the disinterested performance of thought. The artist must catch the unconscious mind’s unawareness and capture the forms of the mind’s potentially limitless capacity to imagine, dream and invent. Surrealism was a means of reuniting conscious and unconscious realms of experience so completely that the world of dream and fantasy would be joined to the everyday world in, according to Dalí, "an absolute reality, a surreality."
Salvador Dalí, The Persistence of Memory, 1931, oil on canvas, 9.5 in × 13 in.
During the 1930s, the Spanish artist, Salvador Dalí forged a visual language that culminated in the Surrealist art movement. Dalí was well acquainted with the French Surrealist movement and Freudian theories about sexual repression taking the form of dreams and delusions. His paintings contained Freudian imagery, such as staircases, keys, and dripping candles. The Persistence of Memory, for example, features melting watches that connote the irrelevance of time in a dream setting, a Surrealist meditation on the collapse of our notions of a fixed cosmic order. One of the watches saddles an abstract biomorphic form that appears to be a kind of mollusk, but is meant to be the deflated head of Dalí. The orange clock at the bottom left of the painting is covered in ants, a symbol used by Dali to represent decay. Dali’s desire for artistic and commercial success led him into the world of fashion.
Fashion designer Elsa Schiaparelli developed a very close relationship with the Parisian Surrealist artistic community. One can see why her competitor, Gabrielle Chanel referred to her as ‘that Italian artist who makes clothes,’ as she incorporated the bizarre juxtapositions of Surrealism into her designs. Distilling their disquieting dream-based imagery and provocative concepts through her own creative process, she incorporated themes inspired by contemporaneous events, erotic fantasy, traditional and avant-garde art, and her own psyche into her designs. A repertoire of inventive devices was her medium of creative expression; such as, experimental fabrics with pronounced textures, bold prints with unorthodox imagery and colours, opulent embroideries, outsized and exposed zippers, and distinctive buttons and ornaments.
In 1927, she launched her knitwear collection that encompassed Surrealist trompe l’oeil prints, compositions that exhibited vivid optical illusions, such as false bow on her Faux Bow sweater.
In 1937, Schiaparelli and Dalí collaborated to create four Surrealist fashion pieces.
First, the Lobster Dress of 1937, a simple white silk evening dress with a crimson waistband that featured a large red lobster painted by Dali onto the skirt. The leading silk designer Sache interpreted his design for Schiaparelli into a fabric print. The lobster is one of Dali’s best known motifs, signaling genitalia, which he began incorporating into works, most notably in New York Dream-Man Finds Lobster in Place of Phone, 1935, and the mixed-media Lobster Telephone, 1936.
The Shoe Hat of 1937, a hat shaped like a woman’s high-heeled shoe, had the heel standing straight up and the toe tilted over the wearer’s forehead. The Surrealist hat offered a perfect example of art displacement because when a shoe is placed on the head, it plays not only with the conventions of fashion but also with the humorous displacing of the entire process of standing.
The Tears Dress of 1938, a slender pale, blue evening gown printed with a Dali design of trompe l’oeil ‘shocking pink’ rips and tears that was worn with a thigh-length veil with real tears carefully cut out and lined in the same colour. The print was intended to give the illusion of torn animal flesh that appeared in many of Dalí’s paintings.
Finally, the Skeleton Dress of 1938, was inspired by the Surrealist fascination with the human body. Although in harmony with the prevailing silhouette of the late 1930s evening wear, the skeleton dress is so constricted that it became a second skin, an imitation of anatomy, produced on the fine, matte black, silk surface. Schiaparelli exaggerated the usually delicate trapunto quilting technique to make enormous bones by stitching together two layers of fabric surrounding cotton wadding to form the relief. The dresses clearly embody the Surrealist art movement directly through the collaboration between Salvador Dalí and Elsa Schiaparelli.
