Women of style, Elsa Schiaparelli and Marie-Laure de Noailles, with two determined personalities, both allowed the worlds of fashion, cinema, and fine arts to flourish with an unprecedented freedom. Both created their own persona, Schiaparelli through her fashion house and de Noailles through the numerous artistic projects she instigated. Their passion and audacity for a resolutely innovative creativity, made the expression of their extra-ordinary visions possible. Both collaborated with the same artists, such as, Dalí, Cocteau, and Man Ray.

Elsa Schiaparelli started in Haute Couture that year with black and white sweaters bearing a trompe-l’oeil bow tie. Marie-Laure de Noailles added to her Robert Mallet-Stevens villa in Hyères a swimming pool once again designed by the architect. Both elements gave rise to artistic experimentations, whether surrealist or avant-garde, as magnificent as they are unsettling, in Haute Couture as in art-house cinema.

A Schiaparelli exhibition is introduced in the swimming pool of the villa Noaille. The starting point was a portrait of Marie-Laure wearing a jacket, one of Schiaparelli’s iconic creations, and photographed by Man Ray. Schiaparelli’s tailoring was a genuine canvas for stories, because of the shoulders, incandescent or ultra-matte Lesage embroideries, innovative materials, fabrics custom made for the house, abstract patterns and unexpected materials. 

In this exhibitions you can find creations from Bertrand Guyon, style director of Maison Schiaparelli, who plays with the feminine and the masculine, rigour and dream-like fantasy, elegance and allure. . The Schiaparelli jacket fully merges the narrative and the savoir-faire in an absolute symbiosis. Schiaparelli jackets become like contemporary characters whose roles create a parallel to the films shot by Man Ray or Dalí in black and white in the swimming pool almost ninety years ago.

“Dress designing, incidentally, is to me not a profession but an art.
I found that it was a most difficult and unsatisfying art,
because as soon as a dress is born
it has already become a thing of the past. “  – Elsa Schiaparelli