Surrealism and the Fashion Magazine

Introduction

Salvador Dalí's flamboyant appearance is familiar to many. Less familiar is his foray into fashion design as the creator of neckties, a deviation so apparently unexpected for the leader of a major artistic movement as to seem a gesture itself imbued with Surrealist intent.¹ Yet what should we expect from Dalí but the unexpected? Sidney Shallett, a journalist for the Saturday Evening Post puts this seeming contradiction to the artist in an interview in 1952:

I was sufficiently curious about Dalí's role as a tie designer to look up the painter at his New York hotel and ask him how he felt about it. Dalí, who was wearing a conservative gray-and-black necktie, said he thought it was perfectly all right for a great artist to design ties. "The modern artist," he said in his heavily accented Catalonian tones, "should participate in every kind of extracurricular activity. Michelangelo designed the dress for the Pope's Swiss Guards. It is all part of the propaganda of your imagination, no?"²

Dalí considers it essential to the modern artist's endeavour that he "should participate in every kind of extracurricular activity." Not merely that he "could" or "would wish" to do so, but that it is incumbent upon him so to do. And not simply "some" kind of extracurricular activity, but "every kind." It is essential to the modern artist's public image, for one can only assume this is what is implicated in Dalí's "propaganda of the imagination," that he be seen to operate outside of what one might expect to be his more usual context. Dalí's actions here support his words: he refuses to dress to the expected model of a surrealist artist, appearing in "conservative" attire to Shallett's surprise. That he should do so for a press interview is doubly significant; he is not merely dressing for Shallett's eyes but for the thousands of pairs of eyes that will skim the pages of the Saturday Evening Post. The fact that the encounter takes place in Dalí's second language adds an extra layer of de-contextualization to the whole episode. That Shallett helpfully, if subconsciously, contributes to the effect by emphasizing that Dalí has been translated out of his native tongue, serves as an ironic reminder of the difficulty of ever fully wresting control of one's public image, which is subject to endless possible interventions. Dalí's forays into the sphere of image-making thus take place on two levels simultaneously. In his fashion design and his personal dress he speaks to those who immediately set eyes upon his creations or his self-image; while in his interaction with the mass media, he concerns himself with the projection of the image of himself and his art across a much wider sphere.

The intersection of these two kinds of image-making can be found in the work Dalí executed for fashion magazines in the late 1930s and early 1940s, during which time he published a surprising number of articles, illustrations, and cover designs in Vogue magazine. During the very same period, one can observe the preoccupations of fashion infiltrating the arena of high surrealism, as its journals, particularly here Minotaure, parade their own fascination with the fashionable world. This paper performs an analysis of two sample issues of these titles, locating the precise surrealistic effect of the June 1, 1939 edition of Vogue, to which Dalí contributes both a cover artwork and several other pieces, while simultaneously examining the interest in fashion exhibited in Minotaure's third and fourth double number of October-December 1933. In so doing I will argue for both a deeper acknowledgment of the very distinct use of metaphor as employed by the surrealists, and posit some of the ways by which the encounter between surrealism and the fashion magazine most perfectly encapsulates, and indeed could be said to emblematize...