A Show on Schiaparelli, Supporting Ukraine, Romy Schneider and Chanel
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ART AND FASHION: The eagerly awaited Schiaparelli retrospective at the Musée des Arts Décoratifs this summer will be as much about art as it is about clothes.
“Shocking: The Surreal World of Elsa Schiaparelli” will feature the couturier’s creations alongside works by the likes of Salvador Dalí, Jean-Michel Frank, Meret Oppenheim and Alberto Giacometti, marking a departure from the museum’s previous exhibition dedicated to the Surrealist-inspired designer, held in 2004.
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It will also feature sketches from the vast collection donated by Schiaparelli to the French Union of Costume Arts, now held by the museum.
“In today’s modern world that sees an obvious direct link between fashion and art, Elsa Schiaparelli, a self-described ‘inspired’ couturier, appears now more than ever as a woman of our times,” the Musée des Arts Décoratifs said in a statement.
“For two decades, Elsa Schiaparelli lived and breathed avant-garde fashion, using it as a playing field to reinvent women and femininity, style and spirit, with a lifework that remains strikingly modern. She incarnated the vision of a radiant and vibrant Paris with insatiable curiosity, delighting in all that was new,” it added.
Interest in Schiaparelli is at an all-time high, as its current artistic director Daniel Roseberry dresses everyone from First Lady Jill Biden to Cardi B. The exhibition is set to open on July 6, two days after the house is scheduled to unveil its fall haute couture collection during Paris Couture Week, and is due to run until Jan. 22. — JOELLE DIDERICH
DIGITAL SUPPORT: In light of the ongoing war in Ukraine, the Prospect 100 Global Design Competition is inviting its worldwide pool of under-25 talents to take part in an emergency competition, opening Wednesday and running until March 26.
The brief is to create digital artwork inspired by 25 news sources. Winning entries will be donated to Ukraine’s Ministry of Digital Transformation so they can be sold as NFTs. Proceeds will go toward supporting the Ukrainian armed forces, currently engaged in war against Russia.
“[Our] cofounder Adam Flanagan had noticed a tweet from Vice President [Ivan] Fedorov about Ukraine releasing NFT artwork in order to raise funds for the armed forces,” said Prospect 100 cofounder Alexandre Daillance, who figured that the youth talent showcase’s global network of creatives would be able to come up with high-quality artwork to support Ukraine.
After intense email exchanges with the country’s Ministry of Digital Transformation, the Prospect 100 team was building an initiative that fits the needs and requests of the people they spoke to in Ukraine, from government officials to the “Ukrainian NFT artists’ community,” an organization supporting the ministry in this initiative.
The jury was likewise assembled in the space of 24 hours, with members hailing from the wider creative community, including artists Daniel Arsham, Andre Saraiva, Millinsky and Caitlyn Grabenstein; designer Hiroshi Fujiwara; graphic designers David Carson and Stefan Sagmeister; Galerie Perrotin founder Emmanuel Perrotin; social media stars DudeWithSign and F–kJerry, and Comme des Garçons president and Dover Street Market cofounder Adrian Joffe.
For Saraiva, the Prospect 100 for Ukraine competition and all initiatives in support of Ukrainian people as well as stopping the war are “a duty that we all have as humans.”
Sagmeister added that he “always felt that good design is design that can help someone and design that can delight someone. Right now there is a big need for both, a big need for help and a big need for delight. I would think that even the smallest effort that might contribute to reign this aggression in would be helpful,” he wrote in an email.
Organizers hope for a large number of entries and called for creatives to “take a moment of their time to create something amazing” in support of Ukraine, said Prospect 100’s third cofounder Harry Beard. — LILY TEMPLETON
BECOMING ROMY: As part of its ongoing sponsorship of the Cinémathèque Française, Chanel is supporting an exhibition on actress Romy Schneider, who credited Gabrielle “Coco” Chanel for helping her to shed the starlet image she forged by playing Empress Elisabeth “Sissi” of Austria in a hugely popular trilogy of films in the 1950s.
Chanel met the Austrian-born actress through Italian director Luchino Visconti, who asked the designer to create the wardrobe for his segment of the comedy anthology movie “Boccaccio ’70,” released in 1962.
The exhibition in Paris includes a mottled tweed suit from the fall 1961 haute couture collection, similar to the one worn by Schneider in the film. Audiences were surprised to discover her as the embodiment of womanly mystique, in an apartment that bore similarities to the one that Chanel kept on Rue Cambon.
From then on, the house dressed her on- and off-screen, including in Alain Cavalier’s “Le combat dans l’ile” (“Fire and Ice.”)
“Chanel taught me everything without ever giving me advice. Chanel is not a designer like the others…because it’s a coherent, logical, ‘ordered’ whole: like the Doric order or the Corinthian order, there is a ‘Chanel order,’ with its reasons, its rules, its rigors. It is an elegance that satisfies the mind even more than the eyes,” Schneider once said.
Courtesy of Chanel
The Cinémathèque exhibition, which runs until July 31, also includes five photographic prints taken between 1961 and 1965 by Shahrokh Hatami and George Michalke. It will run alongside screenings of Schneider’s most famous films, including “La piscine,” “Max et les ferrailleurs” and “César et Rosalie.”
Chanel has previously supported the Cinémathèque’s retrospectives on filmmakers such as Jean-Luc Godard and Alain Resnais, and financed the restoration of historic French films such as Jean Renoir’s “The Rules of the Game,” for which Gabrielle Chanel designed the costumes.
Chanel’s links with cinema date back to 1931, when movie mogul Sam Goldwyn invited the house’s founder to Hollywood. Her welcoming party at the Los Angeles train station included Greta Garbo, and Chanel would go on to design costumes for actresses such as Gloria Swanson.
The house has costumed actresses ranging from Jeanne Moreau in “Les Liaisons Dangereuses” to Cate Blanchett in “Blue Jasmine.” It also has longstanding partnerships with film events such as the Deauville American Film Festival in France and the Tribeca Film Festival in New York.
In addition to dressing celebrities such as Kristen Stewart, Keira Knightley, Penélope Cruz and Margot Robbie on the red carpet, the house has financially backed a number of films starring its house ambassadors, most recently Pablo Larraín’s “Spencer,” in which Stewart plays Princess Diana. — J.D.
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