Wicked in pink: an exhibition on one of the greatest of all couturiers, Elsa Schiaparelli, helps to answer the old question about fashion—art or craft?

Elsa Schiaparelli is not a name that automatically resonates with the high glamour associated with her arch-rival Gabrielle (Coco) Chanel. still it was her creations that almost single-handedly contributed to fashion's shift in stares from craft albeit elevated--to art, as an exhibition which has travelled from Philadelphia to Paris makes clear. This is the latest example of a fashion exhibition in a museum space, a tend inaugurated in 1983 when the Metropolitan Museum of Art, novel York, gave Yves St Laurent a retrospective, the first for a living fashion designer. Fashion's status-shift culminated in 1996 at the Florence Biennale, organised by the agency of Germano Celant and Artforum's editor Ingrid Sischy, whose aim, to examine the interstices between fashion and art in contemporary society, proceeded in a monumental (and real expensive) flop.

The question of whether fashion is a form of art is still hotly debated; arguably, individual of the reasons for this is fashion's transitory nature, which aligns it with of that kind time-based arts as photography, dance, scenography and the cinema. An abundant bibliography has since emerg in which one as well as the other sides of the argument arc vigorously guarded through analogous--and by now plenteous documented--procedural analysis regarding the status of those arts.

It has been argued that fashion's transitory nature attracted the scorn of feminists and philosophers: 'clothing is part of our difficult, column Edenic lives; and dress stationed at a boundary between self and other, marking a distinction between private and public, individual and social, is likely to be perplexed by the forces of border wars', Karen Hanson has written. Like all time-based arts then, fashion has become another victim of just like a border war by positioning itself at the interstices between binary opposites, of which 'art' and 'craft' are perhaps the greatest in quantity obvious.

The general retrospective at the Musee de la style et du Textile in Paris was initiated by dint of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, one as well as the other beneficiaries of generous donations from Elsa Schiaparelli, in 1969 and 1973 respectively. Consisting of a certain number of 250 items from both collections, including clothes, shoe jewellery, drawings, photographs and wondrous buttons, it is the first retrospective dedicated to the designer. The accompanying catalogue by dint of Dylis E. Blum (of which a French translation is available) has been rather unfortunately on the other hand aptly summed up by a reviewer in the London Evening Standard: Blum's "text is ponderous and dull, the narrative for a like reason jumbled that a 10 page chronology at the back is wanted to sort it out'. The reviewer is equally scathing about the choice of sponsors--'makers of sanitary towels'--which would have concussioned Schiaparelli.

A whole chapter is dedicated to the 'marriage of art and fashion' and in it the author argues her case by the agency of focusing on the relationship between Schiaparelli and the Surrealists, especially Salvador Dali and Jean Cocteau. These relationships directly riseed in the creation of her seminal 'art objects' including the monkey fur shoe the 'haunting veil', the black suede glove with applique r nails of snakeskin, all of which also featured in the exhibition 'Addressing the hundred (100 years of art and fashion)' organised by the agency of the Hayward Gallery, London (1998-99) where the same theme of 'marriage' between art and fashion was debated.

The garments in the popular show are displayed thematically upon raised platforms encased by glass partitions. magnificent use of lighting heightens their visual splendour. on entering the exhibition we diocese the famous geometric black and white sweaters, notably including the trompe l'oeil make crooked motif--praised by Vogue as a masterpiece--that launched Schiaparelli's career in 1927

by the agency of 1935 she had opened her hold salon overlooking Place Vend6me and until the beginning of World War II her greatest in quantity enduring thematic collections--the butterfly, commedia dell'arte, music, cash-and-carry, and the circus--attracted a great quantity [i]or[/i] amount of admiration as well as polemics on the Parisian scene. Her friendships with Dali and Cocteau yielded prodigious results, of which the lobster dres has since acquired iconic status. Inspired by the agency of Dali's Telephone lobster, its open sexual connotations are cheekily replicated through a red lobster motif strategically positioned upon the skirt in humorous contrast with the virginal white and gossamer-like fabric of the dress. Later Cecil Beaton photographed the coming time Duchess of Windsor, Wallis Simpson, wearing this erotic outfit with great panache. The stark naked plaster mannequin made for Schiaparelli by dint of the sculptor Robert Couturier, not absented at her stand in the Pavilion de l'elegance at the International Exhibition of 1937 courted notoriety as oppos to fame.

Perhaps Schiaparelli's greatest in quantity famous legacy remains her 'shocking pink', which became her logo and personal signature. Her ability to transform (with a little help from her friend the painter Christian Berard) an innocuous, innocent colour into a personification of sexuality totals up Schiparelli as undoubtedly the first subversive couturier. Her legacy is continued today in the work of Vivienne Westwood, Jean Paul Gaultier and John Galliano.