Elsa Schiaparelli and the Epistemology of Glamorous Silence

Ilya Parkins Elsa Schiaparelli and the Epistemology of Glamorous Silence 190 The Paris-based haute couture designer Elsa Schiaparelli who was actively designing between 1927 and 1954 (with the exception of several years during the Second World War) and who was at the apex of the French fashion system in the 1930s remains an enigmatic figure. She left few traces, save for her 1954 memoir, Shocking Life a book that would appeal to readers looking for inside information about the fashion industry, and then likely disappoint them with its relative paucity of direct reflection on that very field; most of the text is taken up by details of Schiaparelli s early childhood and her flight from Europe during the war. Schiaparelli is thus a kind of puzzle for the researcher. This sense of an enigmatic persona is a new iteration of the celebrity as seen by her public in the period of her ascendancy. For the press of her time, Schiaparelli was a glamorous figure; glamour accounted for her mystery. In terms of celebrity, she bears a strong resemblance to the quintessential embodiment of feminine glamour, Greta Garbo, whom Judith Brown describes as all personality and at the same time, none: Garbo, who fascinated millions, remained a resolute mystery to her public. [ ] Her ambition for celebrity was countered always by her resistance to it (Brown 2009: 101). Brown notes Garbo s refusals, including her silence about her personal life; she left few, if any, concrete archival traces. Of course, Schiaparelli published Shocking Life, and she did not refuse publicity. But she, too, was notoriously evasive about her personal life; beyond her carefully managed public persona which was necessary for the health of her business, though it flew in the face of her self-professed shyness she was and remains inscrutable. Schiaparelli represented a paradoxically magnetic inaccessibility, an enigma whose mystery was the foundation of her appeal. It is Schiaparelli s glamorous unknowability as a practitioner in an industry founded on visibility that interests me as a feminist theorist. Representations of women as unknowable in the context of early-20th-century modernity pose a striking contrast to the period s broader Western cultural valuation of clarity, visibility and empirical verifiability. If we understand that a figural femininity in this case, a glamorous femininity was foundational (along with various sorts of avant-garde aesthetic interventions) in challenging an empirical gaze, how might our theories of the modernist cultural imaginary shift? Furthermore, the emphasis on the unknowable issues a strong challenge to feminist theory s valuation of voice, visibility and

revelation as tools for women s empowerment and liberation. The excessive focus on these traits of knowability reinforces problematic dichotomies of agency and victimization: silent or invisible women are victims, whereas visible women are agents. I seek to move beyond this dualistic framework; by tracing the cultural centrality or visibility of women even as they are silent or unknowable, I hope to move toward a more complex understanding of femininity s discursive position in modernity, which will have consequences for concepts of women s agency in feminist theory more generally. 1 The concept of glamour itself, closely tied to the emergent beauty, fashion and entertainment industries of the early 20th century, provides a useful tool for thinking through the epistemology of women s inaccessibility. A review of theoretical discussions of glamour finds a remarkable consonance between this property and the persona of Schiaparelli, as a figure related to or, indeed, unrelated to modern time, especially as this persona is communicated by the designer herself. What we find in attempting to define glamour is its link with a concept of the supernatural; since the early 19th century, glamour has been invoked to denote some mysterious, ineffable quality. It shares an etymological heritage with words that describe arcane knowledge, magic and the occult. As Carol S. Gould notes, glamour belongs to one inclined to bewitch or enchant (Gould 2005: 238). One way in which glamorous individuals bewitch is through their auras of mystery, their enigmatic projections of self: According to Elizabeth Wilson, glamour depends on what is withheld, on secrecy, hints, and the hidden (Wilson 2007: 100). The glamorous individual is thus distant and aloof, possessing a mysterious blend of accessibility and distance neither transparent nor opaque [but] translucent (Postrel qtd. in Wilson 2007: 100). In its connections to the supernatural and the occult, glamour denotes an extra-temporal dimension; after all, the supernatural and the occult open onto worlds ungoverned by the temporal logic of earthly concerns. Part of the glamorous person s distance and inaccessibility, then, is due to the fact that she appears to reside outside of time. Judith Brown theorizes the cigarette as emblematic of glamour, noting that it seems to stop time, and points to this particular glamour as cold, indifferent, and deathly curling away from earthly concerns as if on a whiff of smoke (Brown 2009: 4, 5). The glamorous figure herself curls away from the earthly passage of time arrested, static, distant. 191 The notions of mystery and secrets, of course, suggest depth; a carefully elaborated theory of glamour does not (as might be suspected) naively reduce glamour to a surface effect. Glamour is still tied to a sort of spectacular affect, and its expressions through the visual culture of modernity film stars, fashion show that it is, indeed, a modality of the surface. But the intuited secrets denoted by this surface complicate the relationship between surface and depth. Their relations are not binary, as in ancient and tired distinctions between depth as authenticity and surface as artifice. 2 Neither does glamour as an expression of interiority suggest that there is a mimetic relationship between interior and exterior, wherein the

self-presentation corresponds precisely to the personality; if there were, there could be no mystery, and the surface would lead the observer to the truth of the self. Rather, glamour is a quality that yokes surface and depth, disturbing the naturalization of this foundational dichotomy. The self is there, but remains an enigma, and it is this mystery that is represented through the surface relations of glamour. This is a subtly but importantly different phenomenon from the notion that the surface straightforwardly corresponds to or represents the truth of the interior. Here, the interior remains unknowable, and the question becomes not its ontological status what is the self? but the epistemological consideration of the impossibility of knowing that self. Not only does glamour have a profoundly interior dimension, then, but it is also a social mode that sustains a relationship of active knowledge-making between the glamorous figure and her observers. 192 Glamour therefore establishes connections between selves and the social world through the ongoing act of interpreting the glamorous figure, who is seen to possess a kind of distant interiority. Glamour thus strikes me as a particularly apt concept for thinking about Schiaparelli and for interrogating feminist theoretical dichotomies, because Schiaparelli s representational archive reveals a similar play between surface and depth. There is no question that she was perceived as a glamorous figure, and that this understanding crystallized around her visually accessible surface, which invited the public in and inaugurated a social relationship. Of course, the glamorous figure of the modern cultural imaginary is most often a feminized figure, and so this nexus of questions is another site at which we can unpack the relationship of women to modernity. The production of Schiaparelli as glamorous links the feminine subject to the conditions of modernity in ambivalent ways. One is tempted to suggest that glamour s appeal to timelessness is merely another way of situating the feminine outside of the modern. 3 But as Schiaparelli s embodied glamour reveals through its dismantling of the dichotomies of individual and social, private and public, interiority and surface, as well as the modern and the timeless the glamorous feminine figure might be better understood to complicate the chain of binaries on which modernity rests. The suggestion that glamour holds something in reserve depends on the cultivation of privacy, and the appreciation of and even need for private time and space is emblematic of Schiaparelli, in both the press and her own narrative of her life and career. Notably, Schiaparelli claims in the foreword to Shocking Life that the only escape is in oneself (Schiaparelli 2007: viii). Throughout the book, she portrays herself as shy and in need of private space from a very young age for example, she uses the language of Virginia Woolf s A Room of One s Own to describe the way in which, as an adolescent, she created a private space in her home for writing (12, 18). Near the end of the work, she suggests that this penchant for solitude has been carried over into adulthood: she still prefers to be alone in her house (118). The popular press translated this solitude, tellingly, into an inscrutable quality

that contributed to her glamorous mystique. In a 1932 New Yorker profile, Janet Flanner notes Schiaparelli s fondness for isolation: at the age of thirty-six she still retains the tacit secrecy of a talented child, too gifted and disabused to attempt an explanation to adults (Flanner 1932: 23). A 1934 profile in Time claims, even to her intimate friends, she remains an enigma (Gould 1934: 50). A sensibility emerges in representations of Schiaparelli that nods toward her depth, but fails to penetrate it. What Schiaparelli refuses to proffer is the clearest evidence of her glamour. Schiaparelli often interprets such refusals in gendered terms. Secrecy, she implies, is of particular benefit to women. In Shocking Life, she describes using screens to fashion makeshift dressing rooms in her first location at Rue de la Paix. Upon making the move to Place Vendôme, she brought the screens with her, and they again functioned as dressing rooms but also transcended their mundane usage: As in a confessional, the screens held their secrets. Many unknown things, subterfuges, and deceits were revealed in their sanctuary, but these revelations never went beyond them. They alone heard the stories of wives and mistresses, saw the maimed bodies of women considered plain. And if Schiap looks and listens with sympathy and pity, she forgets everything at six o clock when she leaves the office so all is safe. (Schiaparelli 2007: 63) In this passage, Schiaparelli invokes her relationships with other women clients, this time in more sensitive terms than she does anywhere else in the memoir. She also points toward a particularly feminine domain of secrets: the screens provide sites for the voicing of secrets about issues faced by women, specifically. It is the revelation of secrets about women s intimate lives that compromises women s safety. Of course, women risked and risk much greater damage to their sexual and professional reputations than men do when the spotlight is directed on their intimate lives; surely, this recognition shaped Schiaparelli s decision to reveal very little, even in the apparently revelatory form of the memoir. Protecting her own secrets her sense of an other self was a means of protecting her reputation, especially as a single mother in an era and national context (overwhelmingly pronatalist post-first World War France) where that status would be questionable. The management of her glamorous celebrity, ostensibly all about the spectacular, is revealed to be as much about cultivating the invisible as it is about maintaining visually accessible surfaces. The evidence for such an understanding lies in Schiaparelli s own silences about her life. She left few traces of her intimate life; paradoxically, Shocking Life is built on intimations of a rich inner world. Although Schiaparelli withholds much of herself in self-protective response to the exigencies of celebrity and the limitations of feminine convention, this very withholding is rich with significance. In an industry dependent on the visible, and especially on the visibility of women, Schiaparelli s attempt to remain in the spotlight while also controlling the parts of herself she offers to the gaze gestures 193

at a new understanding of visibility for women in this period. 4 Her strategic deployment of glamour suggests that invisibility can challenge rather than reinforce the gendered binaries that circumscribe understandings of women s lives in the structures of modernity. Making a spectacle of the unfulfilled promise of her deep interiority, she refuses the binary construction of agency and victimhood around which feminists have tended to orient our historical and theoretical reflections on modernity; this dichotomy has tended to stall conversations about the place of women in modernist studies, as evidenced by a recent turn away from the category of gender in the field. Perhaps attention to women s glamorous celebrity, of all the unexpected and disparaged categories, will prove to revitalize this terrain. 194 Notes 1. The interrogation of these dichotomies has intermittently taken place in feminist social-science methodologies. Here I seek to bring these insights to bear on inquiry in the humanities. See, for example, Johnston (2010), Parpart (2010) and Stone (2004). 2. On the history and effects of the binary conceptualization of surface and depth in conceiving of selfhood and style, especially for women, see Tseëlon (2000) and Constable (2001). 3. The tendency to position women outside of modern time is discussed in Felski (1995). See also Witz (2001) and Meeker (2003). 4. Ambivalent or variable visibility among communities of non-heterosexual women in the early 20th century has been very usefully explored by Jasmine Rault in Eileen Gray and the Design of Sapphic Modernity (2011a) and in Fashioning Sapphic Architecture: Eileen Gray and Radclyffe Hall (2011b), Rault draws on Tirza True Latimer s concept of visible invisibility, which is also an apt concept for the glamorous representation I am exploring here. See Latimer (2005). References Brown, Judith. 2009. Glamour in Six Dimensions: Modernism and the Radiance of Form. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Constable, Catherine. 2001. Making Up the Truth: On Lies, Lipstick, and Friedrich Nietzsche. In Fashion Cultures: Theories, Exploration, and Analysis, edited by Stella Bruzzi and Pamela Church Gibson, 191-200. London: Routledge. Felski, Rita. 1995. The Gender of Modernity. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Flanner, Janet. 1932. Profiles: Comet. The New Yorker, 18 June, 21-24. Gould, Carol S. 1934. Haute couture. Time, 13 August.. 2005. Glamour as an Aesthetic Property of Persons. Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 63(3): 237-47. Johnston, Lynda. 2010. The Place of Secrets, Silences, and Sexualities in the Research Process. In Secrecy and Silence in the Research Process: Feminist Reflections, edited by Róisín Ryan-Flood and Rosalind Gill, 291-305. London: Routledge.

Latimer, Tirza True. 2005. Women Together/Women Apart: Portraits of Lesbian Paris. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Meeker, Natania. 2003. All Times Are Present to Her : Femininity, Temporality, and Libertinage in Diderot s Sur les femmes. Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies 3(2): 68-100. Parpart, Jane L. 2010. Choosing Silence: Rethinking Voice, Agency, and Women s Empowerment. In Secrecy and Silence in the Research Process: Feminist Reflections, edited by Róisín Ryan-Flood and Rosalind Gill, 15-29. London: Routledge. Rault, Jasmine. 2011a. Eileen Gray and the Design of Sapphic Modernity: Staying In. Burlington, VT: Ashgate.. 2011b. Fashioning Sapphic Architecture: Eileen Gray and Radclyffe Hall. In Cultures of Femininity in Modern Fashion, edited by Ilya Parkins and Elizabeth M. Sheehan, 19-44. Lebanon, NH: University Press of New England. Schiaparelli, Elsa. 2007. Shocking Life. London: V. and A. Publications. Stone, Elena. 2002. Rising from Deep Places: Women s Lives and the Ecology of Voice and Silence. New York: Peter Lang. Tseëlon, Efrat. 2000. From Fashion to Masquerade: Towards an Ungendered Paradigm. In Body Dressing, edited by Joanne Entwistle and Elizabeth Wilson, 103-15. Oxford: Berg. Wilson, Elizabeth. 2007. A Note on Glamour. Fashion Theory 11(1): 95-108. Witz, Anne. 2001. Georg Simmel and the Masculinity of Modernity. Journal of Classical Sociology 3(1): 353-70. 195 Rachel Alpha Johnston Hurst Happiness and Its Discontents in the Cosmetic Surgery Photograph One of the most common justifications for undergoing cosmetic surgery is that surgery will make the patient happy. The success of a surgery is measured by the patient s apparent post-surgical happiness, which is conceptualized at the level of need. 1 This paper examines the visual economy of happiness in cosmetic surgery, focusing on the photograph as the measurement of a successful surgical outcome. A photograph is a remnant of one s past embodiments, triggering for