Culture January 1, 1

Elsa Schiaparelli begins her memoir by comparing Saint Peter’s Basilica and Piazza in Rome to the claws of an enormous crab, thereby revealing the protean, anthropomorphizing imagination for which the designer was revered in 1930s Paris. Like Picasso, this short, magnetic, dark-haired Mediterranean woman captivated prewar society with her creative ferocity. A New Yorker cartoon from 1939 portrays a shopgirl showing a futuristic ball gown to a stodgily dressed older woman: “Why should Madam be afraid? Schiaparelli isn’t.”