Sciaparelli and Spark: On the Fashion of The Girls of Slender Means

There is a dress in Muriel Spark’s novel The Girls of Slender Means (1963) that my memory has never quite shrugged off. It’s a dress by the Paris-based designer, Elsa Schiaparelli—renowned in the 1930s and 40s for her surrealist designs. Spark’s novel is set in the austerity of postwar London. Yet she gives us a Schiaparelli dress that is almost fantastical, passing from girl to girl in a boarding house in Kensington as they borrow it for nights out. Only the slender girls, mind. The “slender means” of the title evoke the poverty of wartime rations; the wearing of the dress requires a slender form.

In the same punning spirit, my memories of this dress were sparked by the spring Schiaparelli exhibition at the Victoria and Albert Museum, also in Kensington. It is the first major exhibition of her work in London, subtitled “Fashion becomes Art,” and spans her output from the 1920s to her retirement in 1954.

I was interested to see if I could find the amazing dress from Spark’s novel. I forgot to take into account that the dresses I saw in the V&A were just under a century old. Faded and delicate, the mannequins were holding them up as much as wearing them. Here and there, I saw hints of a dress that conjured exotic birds in a dying forest. As for the dress in Spark’s novel:

It was made of taffeta, with small side panniers stuck out with cleverly curved pads over the hips. It was coloured dark blue, green, orange and white in a floral pattern as from the Pacific Islands.

The owner, Anne, got it from her “fabulously wealthy” aunt who wore it only once. Anne loans it to the other (slender) girls in exchange for bars of soap or clothes coupons. In 1941, British Vogue had told women, “Now if ever, beauty is your duty” to encourage the troops and maintain morale. Like a show of resistance, there was a renaissance in full-length skirts, despite shortages in materials.

The avant-garde exoticism of Spark’s dress was typical of Schiaparelli’s work. She collaborated with many of the leading artists of her time, including Dalí, Man Ray, Cocteau and Picasso. The most arresting sight at the V&A was the Hair-Tentacle Veil (c. 1935). This delicate piece features embroidery that recreates hair tentacles, like a macabre bride marrying the natural world to Surrealism. Schiaparelli had an edge to her. The uncanny is pushed to the surface. There were hints of absurdity in everything she did, as though nothing could be taken seriously.

The “cleverly curved pads over the hips” of Anne’s dress recall Schiaparelli’s skeleton dress. When in it, a woman wore her bones patched onto the fabric of her sinuous black form.

But the skeleton dress has no color, so Spark’s dress was a vision of Schiaparelli’s series of “garden” dresses. These are not pretty, chintzy designs referencing a pastoral idyll.  On Schiaparelli’s garden dress the flowers are too large, specimens are pinned, insects crawl.

In the V&A, the dresses stand in a row likes a series of Daliesque landscapes. The flesh of each silhouette is a sheer, pale silk organza or tulle, subtly tinted—shell pink, dusty ivory, or a washed green, like light passing through leaves. The ballooning flowers sit in irregular clusters, as if they have settled by chance, without a care for design.

If one of these was the dress that animated Spark’s girls of slender means, I could decode it as the social comedy and subversion that inform both her work and Schiaparelli’s. The similarities between Spark and Schiaparelli are striking: both were witty, satirical. Both were artists depicting female desire and aspiration with a critical eye.

In personal terms, they embodied the figure of the stylish, intellectually self-possessed, unmarried woman. From this vantage point, the dress becomes something larger: a woman whose style exists for its own sake rather than for marriage or social advancement; a woman who chooses wit, form and style as serious pursuits.

The dress—a projection of collective hallucination—escapes, whereas a girl is left to die; the one girl who preferred poetry to dresses. Poetry, which meets the cruelty that dresses cover.

Instead of focusing on Schiaparelli’s artistic ethos, the V&A exhibition foregrounds Daniel Roseberry, the current face of the Schiaparelli brand, whose language—”to talk about the body from the inside to the outside”—frames the work in terms of structure and impact. His designs are bold and dynamic and enjoy current cachet with red-carpet celebrities. The immediate impact is one of glitz and daring. Roseberry’s work privileges spectacle—volume, gold, anatomical exaggeration—where Schiaparelli’s shock lay in wit and displacement.

Roseberry’s presence points to a difficulty. It is hard to deliver the shock of the new when the materials are faded, and the effects are more poignant than outré. A black and white picture of the late Duchess of Windsor, Wallis Simpson, shows here wearing Schiaparelli’s infamous lobster dress. It doesn’t convey the scandal of sexual innuendo that Simpson was willing to lean into. Nor the shock.

Perhaps the V&A could have looked to Spark’s novel. Her staging of Schiaparelli’s work exposes illusion, cost, and cruelty. But she also poses the antithesis to the dream of design. In Schiaparelli, the dress is authored, singular, unrepeatable. In Spark, the dress is circulated, traded, consumed.

*

In her autobiography, Shocking Life (1954), Schiaparelli details her first piece of performance art. It was staged in 1898, when she was eight years old. Born to a family of Italian intellectuals, she was taking her first communion in a Roman convent, against a background of nuns funnelled into blue and white robes. The future Surrealist told the priest, “Father, I have fornicated,” and duly fainted.

Spark’s Schiaparelli dress also “caused a stir wherever it went.” Because of this, the girls had to be careful where it went:

You can’t wear it to the Milroy. It’s been twice to the Milroy… it’s been to Quaglino’s, Selina wore it to Quags, it’s getting known all over London.

A gentleman visitor to the girl’s boarding-house falls in love with these girls appearing and disappearing in veils of innocence, artifice and self-invention. He watches the “mad girl” of the novel, who goes on make-believe dates with a phantom film star, float up the stairs of the lobby to the dormitories above. She is beautiful. She is wearing the dress.

But Spark’s fabrication has a fatal edge. In the garden of the Kensington boarding house, just half a mile from the V&A, there is an unexploded bomb dropped by the Luftwaffe in 1941.  At the end of the novel, it detonates, and in the subsequent fire, the single possession saved from the inferno is the Elsa Schiaparelli dress. Selina, the slenderest of all the girls, risks her life to salvage it. Thus the dress—a projection of collective hallucination—escapes, whereas a girl (with large bones) is left to die; the one girl who preferred poetry to dresses. Poetry, which meets the cruelty that dresses cover.

In later life, there is an anecdote from Spark’s life in Italy. Just like Schiaparelli’s story, this story involves nuns. Spark was said to have given away her designer dresses to the local nuns, who wore them beneath their habits. The image is both comic and oddly fitting, encapsulating the strange coexistence of weight and surface that runs through both Spark’s fiction and Schiaparelli’s design.

In terms of her legacy, Schiaparelli’s admirers see her work as cultivated wit, theatricality and a kind of intellectual glamour that treats fashion not merely as adornment but as a form of imaginative expression. For Spark’s readers, Schiaparelli’s dress represents the hollowness of desire. It is worn by each girl in turn in order to stage herself as stylish and desirable. The cold-bloodedness with which Selina rescues (or steals) it destroys the young man’s vision of the Eden he thinks he sees in the Kensington boarding-house.

He watches Selina emerge from a smoky passage. She is pushing “her way through the girls” who are not slender enough to escape through a casement window in the washroom. But Selina is, and “carrying something fairly long and limp and evidently light in weight,” she enfolds it “carefully in her arms.” For the young man watching her, the dress becomes the shroud of his dream of infinite pleasure.

Still, I cannot help but be enchanted by Schiaparelli; by the happy vision she gives me of another life, of being the woman who arrests attention, who offers a promise of hyper-reality, who flirts with the tension between provocation and artifice. Schiap (as her friends called her) played with promises of style and disappearance. Spark was more concerned with the cost.

As for the dress, it is still there, in the memory of a book I once read, waiting to be worn, while its authors are long gone.