Lobster dress
Designer | Elsa Schiaparelli |
---|---|
Year | 1937 |
Type | Evening gown or Dinner dress |
Material | Silk |
The lobster dress is a 1937 dress designed by Elsa Schiaparelli. It features a large lobster painted by Salvador Dalí.
Design
The dress is an A-line off-white silk evening or dinner dress with a crimson waistband featuring a large lobster painted by Salvador Dalí onto the skirt. The initial lobster motif was drawn by Dali and printed onto the dress by the silk designer Sache.[1] The dress is also illustrated with sprigs of parsley.[2] The dress is made from printed silk organza and synthetic horsehair.[3]
The front of the dress is 52 inches (132 cm) in length, with a waist measurement of 22 inches (56 cm).[3] Schiaparelli prevented Dali from adding mayonnaise to the completed dress.[1][4][5]
History
From 1934, Dalí had started incorporating lobsters into his work, including New York Dream-Man Finds Lobster in Place of Phone shown in the magazine American Weekly in 1935, and the mixed-media Lobster Telephone (1936). Dali saw lobsters as symbolic of sexuality.[2] The lobster is placed low on the dress, between the legs of the wearer, with the tail of the lobster fanning upward toward the wearer's Mons Veneris, and its claws towards her calves.[6] The lobster dress made its debut as part of Schiaparelli's Summer/Fall 1937 collection.[2]
The dress was worn by Wallis Simpson in photographs taken by Cecil Beaton at the Château de Candé, shortly before Simpson's marriage to Edward VIII. Beaton's photographs of Simpson would be featured in Vogue magazine in an eight-page spread in June 1937.[7] The dress was included as part of Simpson's wedding trousseau.[8][9] It was illustrated in Women's Wear Daily in May 1937 as a feature on Simpson's spring wardrobe.[1] In her book, Nevertheless, She Wore It: 50 Iconic Fashion Moments, Ann Shen wrote that in Simpson's wearing of the dress "was charged with erotic flippancy" and gave the British public "even more reason to hate Wallis" in the aftermath of her husband's abdication as British monarch. Shen felt that the dress shows "the power of innovation and sexual empowerment in a woman – and the impact art and fashion can have".[2] Schiaparelli and Dali would subsequently create a 'Shoe Hat' (1937–38) and the 'Skeleton Dress' (1938) together.[1]
The dress was reimagined by Miuccia Prada in 2012 to mark the opening of the retrospective Schiaparelli and Prada: Impossible Conversations at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City and worn by Anna Wintour at the 2012 Met Gala.[9] The dress was reimagined by Schiaparelli's Creative Director Bertrand Guyon for their Spring 2017 collection of haute couture. Guyon's dress took 6 people some 250 hours to make, with the lobster appliqué sewn by hand onto the skirt.[10]
Schiaparelli donated her own copy of the dress to the Philadelphia Museum of Art in 1969.[3] The dress was extensively analysed by Claire Eldred in her essay "Encounters and Exchanges with Elsa Schiaparelli's Lobster Dress: an Object Biography" in the 2019 book Fashion and Contemporaneity: Realms of the Visible.[9]
See also
References
- ^ a b c d "1937 - Elsa Schiaparelli, Lobster dinner dress". Fashion Institute of Technology – Fashion history timeline. Fashion Institute of Technology. Archived from the original on 2020-12-06. Retrieved 26 January 2021.
- ^ a b c d Ann Shen (1 September 2020). Nevertheless, She Wore It: 50 Iconic Fashion Moments. Chronicle Books LLC. p. 161. ISBN 978-1-4521-8401-2.
- ^ a b c "The Lobster Dress". Collections database. Philadelphia Museum of Art. Archived from the original on 2012-02-22.
- ^ Meryle Secrest (6 November 2014). Elsa Schiaparelli: A Biography. Penguin Books Limited. ISBN 978-0-241-96685-3.
- ^ Jess Cartner-Morley (29 September 2018). "Fantastical frocks rule in off-the-peg Schiaparelli range". The Guardian. Retrieved 27 January 2021.
- ^ Nancy Frazier (2012). I, Lobster: A Crustacean Odyssey. University of New Hampshire Press. p. 105. ISBN 978-1-61168-323-3.
- ^ "The Future Duchess of Windsor: New photographs taken at the beautiful Château de Candé exclusively for Vogue by Cecil Beaton". Vogue. June 1, 1937. pp. 52–57.
- ^ Stephen Birmingham (1981). Duchess: The Story of Wallis Warfield Windsor. Book Club Associates. p. 192. ISBN 978-0-346-90643-3.
- ^ a b c Laura Petican (4 January 2019). Fashion and Contemporaneity: Realms of the Visible. BRILL. pp. 69–86. ISBN 978-90-04-39225-0.
- ^ Emily Farra (24 January 2017). "80 Years Later, Schiaparelli Brings Back Elsa's Famous Lobster Dress". Vogue. Archived from the original on 2020-09-18. Retrieved 26 January 2021.
- Bibliography
- Elsa Schiaparelli: A Biography. Penguin Books Limited. ISBN 978-0-241-96685-3.
External links
- Photographs of the dress
- v
- t
- e
- List of works
- Landscape Near Figueras (1910)
- Vilabertran (1913)
- Cabaret Scene (1922)
- Portrait of My Father (1925)
- Young Woman at a Window (1925)
- The Basket of Bread (1926)
- Apparatus and Hand (1927)
- The Lugubrious Game (1929)
- The First Days of Spring (1929)
- The Accommodations of Desire (1929)
- The Great Masturbator (1929)
- The Invisible Man (1929–1932)
- The Persistence of Memory (1931)
- The Ghost of Vermeer of Delft Which Can Be Used as a Table (1934)
- Morphological Echo (1934–1936)
- A Chemist Lifting with Extreme Precaution the Cuticle of a Grand Piano (1936)
- Couple with Their Heads Full of Clouds (1936, 1937)
- Soft Construction with Boiled Beans (Premonition of Civil War) (1936)
- The Burning Giraffe (1937)
- Metamorphosis of Narcissus (1937)
- Swans Reflecting Elephants (1937)
- Apparition of Face and Fruit Dish on a Beach (1938)
- The Enigma of Hitler (1939)
- Shirley Temple, The Youngest, Most Sacred Monster of the Cinema in Her Time (1939)
- The Face of War (1940)
- Slave Market with the Disappearing Bust of Voltaire (1940)
- Geopoliticus Child Watching the Birth of the New Man (1943)
- The Seven Lively Arts (1944)
- Dream Caused by the Flight of a Bee Around a Pomegranate a Second Before Awakening (1944)
- Basket of Bread (1945)
- The Apotheosis of Homer (1945)
- The Temptation of St. Anthony (1946)
- The Elephants (1948)
- Cartel de Don Juan Tenorio (1949)
- Leda Atomica (1949)
- The Madonna of Port Lligat (1949)
- Christ of Saint John of the Cross (1951)
- Galatea of the Spheres (1952)
- The Disintegration of the Persistence of Memory (1952–1954)
- The Colossus of Rhodes (1954)
- Crucifixion (Corpus Hypercubus) (1954)
- Young Virgin Auto-Sodomized by the Horns of Her Own Chastity (1954)
- The Sacrament of the Last Supper (1955)
- Living Still Life (1956)
- The Seven Lively Arts (1957)
- The Discovery of America by Christopher Columbus (1958–59)
- The Ecumenical Council (1959–60)
- Galacidalacidesoxyribonucleicacid (1963)
- La Gare de Perpignan (1965)
- Tuna Fishing (1966–67)
- The Hallucinogenic Toreador (1968–1970)
- La Toile Daligram (1972)
- Dalí Seen from the Back Painting Gala from the Back Eternalised by Six Virtual Corneas Provisionally Reflected by Six Real Mirrors (1972–1973)
- Lincoln in Dalivision (1977)
- The Swallow's Tail (1983)
- Lobster Telephone (1936)
- Lobster dress (1937)
- Mae West Lips Sofa (1937)
- Champagne Standard Lamps (1938)
- Rainy Taxi (1938)
- A Logician Devil (1951)
- Giraffes on Horseback Salad (1937)
- The Secret Life of Salvador Dalí (1942)
- Dali's Mustache (1954) (with Philippe Halsman)
- Être Dieu (1985)
- Un Chien Andalou (1929)
- L'Age d'Or (1930)
- Spellbound (1945, dream sequence)
- Destino (1946, completed 2003)
and costumes
- Mariana Pineda (1927 production)
- Gala Dalí (wife)
- Gala-Salvador Dalí Foundation
- Paranoiac-critical method
- Salvador Dalí and dance
- Chupa Chups
- Dalí Atomicus (1948 photograph)
- Salvador Dalí (1966 film)
- The Death of Salvador Dali (2005 film)
- Little Ashes (2008 film)
- Midnight in Paris (2011 film)
- Dalíland (2022 film)
- "Salvador Dalí" (song)
- 2919 Dali (asteroid)
- Dali crater
- Salvador Dalí Desert
- Dalí cross