Lifestyle // Women's
Seeing Things: Prada and Schiaparelli at The Met
"Naif Chic" with Schiaparelli on the left, Prada on the right.
Impassioned conversations about women are inescapable these days—women and childcare, women in the workplace, women in politics, women and their spending power. But perhaps the most creatively compelling conversation on the topic of women is an imaginary tête-à-tête between designers Elsa Schiaparelli and Miuccia Prada at the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Costume Institute. It’s not a real conversation, of course, because Schiaparelli died in 1973. “Schiaparelli and Prada: Impossible Conversations” is a high-concept audio-visual exchange that the museum’s curators, Harold Koda and Andrew Bolton, imagined these two iconoclastic designers of the 20th and 21st centuries might have shared had they known each other.
Elsa Schiaparelli, 1932, by George Hoynignen-Huene
Miuccia Prada, 1999, by Guido Harari
The exhibit opens with a Baz Luhrmann-directed video of Prada in conversation with Schiaparelli as played by actress Judy Davis. Like two old friends sitting down to dinner at a very long table, they introduce the themes of the exhibit, which runs through August 19th. “I can talk about fashion with so few people,” laments Prada, signaling both the inevitability of the conversation and the effortful nature of this exhibit. Unlike last year’s spectacular Alexander McQueen homage, “Impossible Conversations” is based on an intellectually complicated conceit. And yet, for the fashion aficionado, it’s a fascinating look at how history informs and shapes the present, how experience informs our aesthetic.
"Surreal Body" gallery
Schiaparelli’s response to Prada in the opening segment of the digitally enhanced video sets up the show beautifully, allowing the viewer to feel a sense of intimacy with these two eccentric taste makers. While Schiaparelli talks about fashion as her salvation, Prada says, “The most horrible thing I could do to the people I was living with was to be a woman working in fashion.” These glimpses into the real-life intersection of creative strategies and personal lives add a zing of personality to an otherwise stagnant show of frocks and photos. “Life,” exclaims Schiaparelli finally, “That we can talk about, we can talk about life!”
Schiaparelli tops, Prada skirts
In fact, the two women, although they were born six decades apart, do share similar backgrounds. They were both born in Italy, both educated in strict Catholic schools, and both come from upper crust families. Their fathers were both professors. And, perhaps most importantly, both women came of age at socially and politically charged moments in history—Prada in the 1960s, Schiaparelli in the 1930s—a fact that shaped them as fashion rebels and feminists.
"Ugly Chic" with Schiaparelli at left, Prada at right.
Alongside the videos, there’s another conversation going on between the garments and photos on display in the galleries. These juxtapositions illustrate the designers’ aesthetic similarities. Schiaparelli was interested in orientalism and Prada expresses a great curiosity about China and the Chinese woman’s ideas about beauty. They both reference the Greeks’ idea of goddess dressing. They both use color, unusual materials and embroideries and the notion of quirky or ugly chic to define their style. Just as Prada’s lipstick print mimics Schiaparelli’s matchstick print, Prada’s Carmen Miranda collection—complete with banana and monkey motifs—bears some resemblance to Schiaparelli’s Circus collection of 1938. The most interesting gallery in the show focuses on the way both women explored the idea of “hard chic” and “ugly chic” as a way of transforming something ordinary into something luxurious.
Faux fur dress by Prada
But while Prada is a household name, much of Schiaparelli’s oeuvre is forgotten. In her heyday, she was one of fashion’s great innovators—think jumpsuits, wraparound dresses, overalls, and swimsuits with built-in bras. She was also the first designer to stage a real runway show and to open a ready-to-wear boutique. She created the inverted triangle shape of the jacket, which we now refer to as the power suit – a look the Duchess of Windsor, one of Schiaparelli’s clients, made her own. If anything, most people remember Schiap’ for her fantastical collaborations with artists of the 1930s, specifically Salvador Dali, or for her signature color, “shocking” pink. Perhaps these signatures are what Tod’s CEO Diego Della Valle will draw on for the relaunch of the Schiaparelli brand he is planning for February.
Ultimately, “Impossible Conversations” is just that because it delineates the most profound difference between the two designers: Schiaparelli thought designing dresses was an art; Prada does not. Schiaparelli wanted to be a sculptor; Prada says she never wanted to be an artist. “Fashion designers make clothes and they have to sell them,” Prada says in one quote projected on the wall of the surrealist gallery, a long hall filled with Lucite boxes and mirrors. “We have less creative freedom than artists.” At the end of the day, Prada expresses her most passionate sentiment about fashion when she says, “whether fashion is art or whether even art is art doesn’t really interest me. Maybe nothing is art. Who cares!” Indeed, what ultimately makes fashion interesting today is not its relationship to art, but to the real lives of the women who create it and wear it, their choices, their politics, their impossible conversations.
The exhibit will open to the public on May 10 and run through August 19, 2012.
You can always see the latest from Prada at NeimanMarcus.com and Neiman Marcus stores.
