Founded by Elsa Schiaparelli in Paris in 1928, the Schiaparelli fashion house became one of the most influential couture brands of the 1930s. During the interwar years, women dressed by the label appeared frequently in magazines, newspapers, films, novels, and theatrical productions. Wearing Schiaparelli examines these appearances to show how couture operated as a meaningful cultural sign within transatlantic modernity.
Drawing on material from France, Great Britain, and the United States, Marylaura Papalas analyzes how references to Schiaparelli circulated across media and helped shape a recognizable female figure. This “Schiaparelli woman” embodied a modern silhouette inflected by Hollywood glamour, modernist aesthetics, and European ideals of taste and distinction. Her presence on the page and screen communicated more than style alone: Wearing Schiaparelli functioned as a performative marker of identity that signaled social position, gendered self-fashioning, and forms of resistance.
Grounded in fashion theory and informed by gender studies, Wearing Schiaparelli reads clothing as a system of meaning through which identity was produced and interpreted. The opening chapter situates Schiaparelli against prevailing female types of the interwar period, while subsequent chapters trace how Schiaparelli-clad women moved across literary, theatrical, cinematic, and print cultures. By placing couture at the center of cultural analysis, this study reframes fashion as a central force in the making of transatlantic femininity in the 1930s.