Fashion exhibitions are ambivalent devices: they put in the case what was born to live on moving bodies, but at the same time give life again, through simple exposure, to long forgotten creations, often more disruptive modern than the present, indeed dark and dark. obscurantist, certainly mercantile and culturally poor, that we are experiencing.
It is the case of Shocking! The surreal world of Elsa Schiaparellithe beautiful exhibition that the Musée des Arts Décoratifs in Paris dedicates until January 22, 2023 to the work of Elsa Schiaparelli and the maison she founded, brought back to life by Diego Della Valle who, in an admirable operation of historical continuity, reopened the historic salons of Place Vendome, most recently entrusting the creative direction to Daniel Roseberry.
The exhibition was inaugurated during the days of haute couture, at the beginning of July, in which the maison took part, and is a project that has had a long gestation, the acquisition of Schiaparelli by Della Valle has just begun in 2006, but whose real start came with the appointment of Roseberry. An entire room is dedicated to the designer at the end of the exhibition, with the clear intention of creating a dialogue with the founder, also underlining: we are here now.
The continuous swaying between past and present, between fashion and art, between creation and influence, between atelier and cultural milieu of a historical moment of unrepeatable liveliness, is the key to the project, curated with great care and attention by Marie-Sophie Carron de la Carrière.
The exhibition presents the golden years of a visionary and authentic pioneer creator through the dense network of her relationships with the leading artists of the time. Not only surrealists, because Elsa’s world was much more than exclusively surreal – in this sense the title is perhaps limiting, but it is also a successful slogan – and the link with the very elegant, rarefied Jean Michel Frank, who conceived the cage in the Place Vendome boutique, it was no less defining. Sure, the hat-shoe and lobster dress of the professional liaison with Salvador Dalì are on display and rightly steal the show, but in reality the layers are multiple and Shocking it is an invitation to discover them all, slowly, one by one.