Elsa Schiaparelli, The New Woman, and Surrealist Politics

Jacques Rancière, in Dissensus: On Politics and Aesthetics, argues that in making the commodity form into artwork, Surrealism, and modernism in general, transformed every object into a potential piece of art. By fusing popular culture to high art, Surrealism destroyed the boundary that held back the aesthetic from the everyday and flooded the artistic with the commercial. However, Rancière’s analysis forgoes the Surrealists’ collaborations with the French couture fashion houses. This paper argues that Elsa Schiaparelli worked together with the Surrealist movement, and Salvador Dali in particular, to formulate a couture style that critiqued traditional modes of femininity while still working within dominant social structures. Their collaborations produced a form of bricolage that, by use of counterpoint, juxtaposed sophisticated couture fashion with images of female sexuality and violence. This relationship assuages Rancière’s criticism of Surrealism. By imprinting Surrealist bricolage onto the female body, Schiaparelli and the Surrealists created an aesthetic model that directly related to the New Woman movement of the 1930s without relegating it to mere commodity.