Fashion and Modernity in the Interwar Period: Elsa Schiaparelli in Literature and Popular Culture

Elsa Schiaparelli, an Italian-born designer who made her career in Paris in the 1920s and 1930s, embodied a bold and experimental female modernity. Her designs were the preferred costume of unusual trendsetters like Wallace Simpson and Daisy Fellowes, whose marriages, divorces, public scandals and social successes underscored an independent, contemporary and audacious femininity. Both women appear wearing Schiaparelli designs in fashion magazines of the period. But the innovative reputation of the brand extended beyond the European popular press and continued to permeate the collective conscience well after the second World War. Fictional interwar characters in novels like Mary McCarthy’s The Group (1954) and Muriel Spark’s Girls of Slender Means (1963) wear Schiaparelli as a way of distinguishing themselves from their more traditional and less accomplished peers. The brand epitomized a modern woman who was stylish, smart and most importantly, successful. This paper examines the representation of Schiaparelli designs in literature and popular culture, assessing how her work symbolized a distinct interwar modernity that emphasized unconventionality, questioned gender norms, and promoted female independence.