From Chanel's Archrival to France's Haute Couture Club: What Has This Brand Been Through?

A textbook case of a brand forgotten because it fell out of step with what its time wanted.

In January, haute couture gained two new members. One of them is Schiaparelli, the house founded by Elsa Schiaparelli — Coco Chanel's old archrival.

The news was announced last week by the Fédération de la Haute Couture, which answers to France's Ministry of Industry. Schiaparelli has shown at Paris Haute Couture Week as a guest member since 2014.

As we have explained before, "haute couture" is a term with a precise legal meaning. In France the name is protected by law: only houses recognized by the Fédération de la Haute Couture may call themselves "haute couture." The conditions are demanding — a workshop in Paris; participation in the womenswear presentations the couture federation holds each January and July; at least 50 looks per presentation; and very few copies of each design, most of them made by hand.

This year, counting the newly admitted Schiaparelli and Julien Fournié, there are only 13 registered French haute couture houses — Chanel, Christian Dior, Givenchy, Jean Paul Gaultier and the rest — plus 6 overseas corresponding members such as Giorgio Armani, Elie Saab and Valentino, and 15 guest members, among them the Chinese designer Guo Pei, known for the "big skirts" she makes for CCTV's Spring Festival Gala, and the white-hot Vetements.

Schiaparelli, founded in 1927, was in fact once an officially recognized French haute couture house, and it served that world's traditional customers: the aristocrats and celebrities who stand for Old Money. But after the brand declared bankruptcy it simply walked off the stage, never having to wrestle with the changes to come in the class and the number of haute couture's customers.

Schiaparelli's return to haute couture is part of a plan to revive the brand. Diego Della Valle, the chief executive of Tod's, bought Schiaparelli in 2007 and has been working at this ever since. "To celebrate its 90th anniversary, Schiaparelli, founded in 1927, has decided to reclaim its 'haute couture' designation," the brand's official statement said. It is probably not an ending Elsa Schiaparelli foresaw in 1954, when at 60 she closed the house and went off to write her autobiography, Shocking Life.

Elsa Schiaparelli was born in Rome. Her father was a distinguished scholar of Oriental languages, her uncle a famous astronomer, and the family had produced an archaeologist as well. In short, she came from a prominent family, was well educated, and grew up surrounded by beautiful things. One more thing matters: she was not especially good-looking, but she had a certain remote, self-possessed air — and that would become a guiding spirit in the clothes she later cut.

By rights, on that kind of distinctive femininity Coco Chanel would lose to no one, least of all to Elsa Schiaparelli. But the two women worked in completely different ways.

If Coco Chanel lit up Paris fashion in the 1920s, Elsa Schiaparelli's golden age came a little later: her most glorious years were the 1930s. If Coco Chanel remade women's wardrobes with trousers, the striped sailor shirt, the little black dress and costume jewelry, what Elsa Schiaparelli did was inject a few strands of humor into fashion with her odd ideas. She was playful, and she was bold.

In the 1930s, after a whirlwind marriage to a Polish count fell apart, a penniless Elsa Schiaparelli made her way back to Paris to earn a living. At first, besides selling fashion drawings to the couture houses, she made clothes for people with influence: the interior designer Elsie de Wolfe, the fashion editor and socialite Daisy Fellowes, the Duchess of Windsor. To please her customers she often made exaggerated designs, a habit later described, kindly, as "putting the beauty of imperfection into clothes."

Schiaparelli began with sportswear and only later added eveningwear and tailoring. The piece that made her name was a black-and-white knit sweater with a butterfly across the chest drawn like a child's scribble. Vogue picked it as the "sweater of the year," and that was what brought her to the notice of Paris fashion.

In her day the "explosive" designs she gave fashion were too many to count: she put the big patch pockets of Balkan folk dress on jackets; she brought the rough, exotic printed cloth of the East into fashion; she invented her signature color, "shocking pink"; then came dresses printed with giant lobsters, dresses with a tear print, gowns with a trompe-l'œil skeleton; she launched dragonfly-shaped scarves and gloves with red fingernails; she cut up the press clippings written about her, made a collage pattern out of them, and printed it on the scarves, shirts and beach clothes she designed; and with the Spanish painter Salvador Dalí she made the shoe hat, which looks exactly like a shoe clapped on your head. She also brought the zipper, standard on army uniforms, into fashion.

Elsa Schiaparelli's restlessness in fashion also earned her a good name. She ran with Picasso, Cocteau, Picabia and the other masters leading Surrealism, and she was on good terms with the aristocrats of France's high art world.

She struck while the iron was hot and caught Hollywood's eye. She designed heavily padded shoulders for Marlene Dietrich, then dressed Mae West for the film Every Day's a Holiday. The Hollywood trip also gave her the idea for her first perfume, Shocking, and from the perfume she designed the Shocking dress, whose fitted bodice held air pockets that could "manufacture" a full, sexy figure like Mae West's.

By the early 1930s Schiaparelli was making 120 million francs a year, with 26 factories and 2,000 employees. She opened a couture house at Place Vendôme aimed at a small, privileged clientele, and a luxury shop at 36 Grosvenor Street in London. On the eve of the Second World War, Elsa Schiaparelli was one of the most sought-after designers in Paris.

Set against the period: Western society after the First World War was still in economic depression, and another world war was about to break out. Since the collapse of the Victorian order, the world of ideas had been restless. Freud's psychoanalysis, which took its first shape in 1914, was by now common knowledge, and Freud himself added to the pessimism of the age; Jung was talking about the "collective unconscious"; in literature, the postwar English-speaking world saw the Modernist movement — Joyce, Eliot, Lawrence, Virginia Woolf — come to maturity; in art, Clive Bell's formalism, Cubism, and the Dadaism that followed Fauvism chimed with Surrealism from a distance.

Elsa Schiaparelli was more or less fashion's Duchamp, and the Surrealist designs she made in fashion were like Duchamp's Fountain, made from a urinal: whether they were beautiful is one question, but they were unquestionably avant-garde.

Coco Chanel did not much like Elsa Schiaparelli. One account says Schiaparelli's business was doing so well that it blocked some of Chanel's light. Judging by the fashion columns of the time, Schiaparelli's name did appear far more often than her rivals'.

Chanel had little respect for her all the same, always calling her "that Italian woman," or teasing that she was only "a painter who makes dresses." One good story: both of these avant-garde women often went to a bar called Retz, which sat between their two salons. But Coco Chanel usually went in by the back door, and Elsa Schiaparelli used the other one.

Still, though the two took different routes through fashion, the trouble they ran into was much the same.

After the Second World War began, both the Chanel and the Schiaparelli houses closed when France fell. In September 1939 Coco Chanel shut her shop and withdrew to her apartment. When the war ended she left Paris quietly and spent eight years in Switzerland.

Elsa Schiaparelli did the same. She left Paris for New York during the war, and in 1945, as soon as it ended, she went straight back to Paris with her old style — a black gown with a naturally rounded shape and a wavy hem — hoping to revive Schiaparelli.

But postwar Paris fashion had a new favorite: Dior and its New Look. Elsa Schiaparelli never brought her house back to the top again. She was a shrewd enough businesswoman, though; after that she went on making money for a while by licensing the name to lingerie, nail polish and neckties. In 1954, Schiaparelli declared bankruptcy.

Coco Chanel was a good deal more careful. In the same year Schiaparelli went bankrupt, the 70-year-old Chanel showed her first postwar collection and began the second period of her design career. Unlike Elsa Schiaparelli, she did not keep spending her old inspiration. She caught the postwar wish of women to stand level with men and to live more freely and actively, and she launched what is still a Chanel bestseller: the tweed suit.

The tweed suit won no praise in Paris at first, but it was soon accepted in the American market. Chanel became an object of worship in Paris fashion again, and the Chanel suit was mass-produced and widely copied.

That, roughly, is the story of the two women designers who once made waves in Paris fashion. It is probably because they both had their day in the same era and the same circle that people keep putting them side by side.

But Coco Chanel and Elsa Schiaparelli took different roads to different places.

Coco Chanel's parents were both peddlers. She grew up in an orphanage and built her business from nothing, starting with a hat shop and moving on to clothes. She too carries the label of "reformer" in fashion history — she argued that women should wear trousers, for one — but on the whole the image she created kept a friendly distance from mainstream society: an elegance and propriety that showed through even when the skirt lost its train. Put plainly, what Coco Chanel was building through fashion was a social order she wanted for herself.

Elsa Schiaparelli came from the upper middle class, and the fashion of that world was probably something she had already grown tired of as a child. So when she got the chance to make dresses and clothes, what she had in mind was not how to satisfy society's stiff-backed standards of elegance but how to break the rules and make interesting things that were not like everything else.

Both kinds of "innovation" worked well at first. But here is the crux: social conventions change with time, especially after the Second World War.

The way Coco Chanel brought her brand back into public view a second time was to use clothes to wake women's needs. Elsa Schiaparelli, by contrast, was still steeped in her own tastes — the pampered style of an exuberant Italian expressing herself. That is probably why, of two archrivals with such different design instincts, one could return to the center of Paris fashion after the war while the other reached a dead end.

After Diego Della Valle bought the brand, though, Schiaparelli's revival began. In 2013 the house poached Marco Zanini from the French house Rochas as creative director, and it soon had a voice on the runway at Paris Haute Couture Week the following year. That creative director did not stay long: in 2015 Bertrand Guyon, from Valentino, took the seat.

In the gap before the second creative director arrived, Paris Haute Couture Week in July 2015 came round, and Schiaparelli had to put on the show with its in-house design team. One verdict on the result: it was "clearly short of the modernity and appeal Marco Zanini expressed while he held the post, and it failed to convey Schiaparelli's real spirit."

It looks as though Schiaparelli is now fully modern. The founder's classic "tear print" and "trompe-l'œil skeleton" still poke through at couture week now and then, but the house is plainly being run the way modern luxury houses are run: hire young ready-to-wear designers who are willing to break the mold and can create new trends, and win the attention of the market and of consumers.

It has clearly managed that.

Cover and in-text images from: s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com, overdressedforlife.files.wordpress.com, 41.media.tumblr.com, media.vam.ac.uk, s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com, fashionreverie.com, fashionista.com, chaos-mag.com, thefashpack.net.