Schiaparelli Hat Influence

When I woke up one morning this week, I remembered a woman’s voice — kindly, humorous, possibly my Girl Scout Leader —  saying, “Why, bless your pointy little heads!”

Elsa Schiaparelli in one of her hat designs. From the book Shocking, by Dilys Blum.

I must have been dreaming about the hat worn by Carole Lombard at the end of the movie Now and Forever (1934), which I had just watched on Turner Classic Movies. It was one of those cone-shaped felt hats that comes to a point on top, like this one:

Story illustration, Woman’s Home Companion, May 1937.

Pointy hat by Elsa Schiaparelli, 1933-34, photographed by Man Ray. From Shocking, by Dilys Blum.

Elsa Schiaparelli seems to have been the source for many of the silliest hats of the 1930’s and 1940’s; she didn’t necessarily design all of them, but she had a genius for publicity. Dilys Blum’s massive book on Schiaparelli, called Shocking, printed a page of hat sketches from Schiaparelli’s studio notes:

1930’s Schiaparelli Hat sketches pictured in Shocking, by Dilys Blum.

I’m amazed by how often very similar designs appear in Butterick publications, Ladies’ Home Journal, and Woman’s Home Companion — and that’s not counting Vogue and other high fashion magazines.

Schiaparelli was close to the Dadaist and  Surrealist art movements; she had Dali design fabrics for her, and she even made a suit like a dresser, with pockets that were actually drawers. Not to mention her “shoe” hat:

Schiaparelli Shoe hat, winter collection 1937-38. Photo courtesy of Metropolitan Museum.

The notebook sketch for the shoe hat shows it with a bright red sole, anticipating Louboutin by 70 years or so.

There’s a reason her perfume (and her biography) was called “Shocking;” shocking people generated publicity. The magazine Minotaure published a contemporary article written by her friend, Dadaist Tristan Tzara, and illustrated with photos by Man Ray, in which Tzara claimed that Schiaparelli’s 1933-34 hats with holes in the crown, or shaped in a series of oval ridges, represented female genitalia.

Hat from Schiaparelli’s winter 1933-34 collection, photographed by Man Ray. From Shocking, by Dilys Blum.

Hat with a hole in the crown, photographed by Man Ray, modeled by Elsa Schiaparelli. Winter 1933-34 collection. From Shocking, by Dilys Blum.

That’s the kind of article (however firmly the writer had his tongue in his cheek) that gets your hats talked about. If Tzara was right, then the shocking artworks of Judy Chicago (see The Dinner Party, from 1979) were  . . . old hat!

For that matter, in the nineteen thirties and forties (and fifties) the chairs that lined the counter of a diner always had a clip at the back for holding a man’s hat while he ate. Imagine the shocking display of fedoras at lunchtime!

Pointed hats by Schiaparelli. 1930’s. From Shocking, by D. Blum.

The conical, pointed hats had variations in the thirties which allowed them to be folded over at the top, or squared off, or open, or dented in at the top, and there were many versions of the exaggerated — and frequently dented — fedora, like the ones at top in this sketch.

Hats from Schiaparelli sketchbook. From Shocking, by D. Blum.

Pointed hat, magazine pattern illustration. March 1934.

Conical hat with blunt tip, Jan. 1936.

Woman’s Home Companion, coat ad, Nov. 1937. Conical hat, squashed.

Delineator, Feb. 1935. Dented crowns, a la Schiaparelli.

Women in an ad for Ponds cold cream, WHC, Oct. 1937.

Knit hat by Schiaparelli, 1937. Photo courtesy of Metropolitan Museum.

Women in an ad for B.F. Goodrich rainboots, WHC, Nov. 1937.

Hats shown with clothing from Mainbocher, Worth, and Molyneux. Feb. 1936, WHC.

Schiaparelli hat sketchbook 1930s. From Shocking, by Dilys Blum.

Butterick fashion news, May 1938. These hats could be made from a Butterick pattern.

Butterick hat pattern No. 7858. May, 1938.

Butterick Fashion News, March 1938.

I think the one on the left owes a nod to Schiaparelli:

Schiaparelli’s “double slipper” hat, Spring 1938. Photo courtesy of Metropolitan Museum.

Bless her pointy little head.

Elsa Schiaparelli in one of her hat designs. From the book Shocking, by Dilys Blum.

A Schiaparelli-type Suit, Pictured in Butterick Fashion News, April 1938

Schiaparelli-influenced suit jacket, Butterick # 7819

#7819, “The important Schiaparelli-type suit” on the right is decorated with a series of diamond shapes that have a contrast fabric showing through narrow openings. The elongated kite-shaped diamond that bridges the waist may be a practical pocket.

Purple Schiaparelli jacket,  in collection of Museum at the Fashion Institute of Technology, photographed from Shocking, by Dilys Blum.

Schiaparelli used many diamond shaped motifs in her Commedia dell’Arte collection of 1939, but this pattern pre-dates that collection.  A purple wool jacket from her winter 1936-37 collection, pictured in Dilys Blum’s Shocking: The Art and Fashion of Elsa Schiaparelli , p. 97, has oblong areas cut away to reveal a brown velvet underlayer in the pockets. [It really is purple, not blue — a problem with my camera.  I could not find a link to this suit online.] Perhaps the Butterick jacket pattern is a reference to this one, especially if this pattern also has practical pockets. The jacket from # 7819 was featured twice in one issue of Butterick Fashion news; here it is worn open to reveal a Butterick blouse underneath: 

Easier than It Looks

I love the ingenuity of this design.

It appears complex, but if you really look at it, you can figure out how  relatively simple the construction of the diamonds revealing a contrast fabric underlayer actually is. You could apply this idea to almost any jacket pattern.

The jacket front pattern piece has been divided horizontally into four sections. You can see the seam lines where they have been joined together to create a yoke section (A), a yoke-to-bust-point section (B), a bust-point-to-waist section (C), and a waist-to-hip section (D). Section C has a vertical bust dart on each side, which would be stitched before the 4 sections are seamed together. I can’t imagine any reason for dividing the jacket into sections, except to make it easier to reveal the contrast fabric in the diamonds.

A Guess at the Jacket Construction

CAUTION: I have not tried this in fabric – I’m just deducing how it could be done….

After carefully marking the positions of the diamonds on your fabric – probably thread basting, since you would need the markings on both sides of the fabric, you would seam the sections together, A to B, B to C, stopping and backstitching when you reach the horizontal point of the diamond, leaving a gap in the center of the diamond, and resuming the seam at the other point. (The opening would not be a rectangle….) Once you press the seam allowances out of the way, you would baste them into position, put your diamonds of contrast fabric (matching the grain) behind the fashion fabric, baste, check for smoothness, and topstitch along the lines of the diamond. Then you would topstitch along the folded-back seam allowance, about 1/8 inch from the fold, through all layers. You can see these lines of topstitching in the illustration. (In theory, you could stitch the seam allowances out of the way before applying the diamond backing, but I think this might allow the fashion fabric to gape from stress at the bust-point.)

It’s a nice detail that the lapel is topstitched only where it overlaps the top diamond.

If the below-the-waist diamond is a practical pocket, you would stitch a twill stay-tape to the seam allowance on section D, just beside the fold line, to prevent stretching, and add a thin lining. You would have to topstitch the seam allowance inside the diamond below the waist before applying the contrast backing, so that bottom section of the diamond shape remains open.

A friend suggested that the diamonds and collar are prick-stitched by hand with thread to match the contrast layer. That would certainly be a couture touch, but it’s equally possible that the illustrator was just working within the constraints of a pattern catalog printed on newsprint: big white dashes were the only way to indicate stitch lines.

I repeat, I have not tried this with wool and a sewing machine, but I think it’s a reasonable explanation of why this apparently complicated “Schiaparelli-type” jacket is divided into sections on the Butterick pattern. The famous Butterick Deltor [otherwise known as an instruction sheet] would tell you how to construct it, probably much more clearly than I have done…. I rarely sew for myself any more, but I’m really tempted to try that kite-shaped pocket on a casual jacket — a little bigger, with a zingy color underneath. On a dark fabric, I might even try a different jewel color under every pocket!  Comments and suggestions are welcome.