A comet streaked into France in the 1930s, its fallout sending the staid echelons of haute couture into a tailspin. A mere 30 years later a rogue missile blasted into London, blowing dainty English clothes sense to smithereens. Both these thunderbolts shot the stuffing out of cloying conventionality, one with an arrow-narrow silhouette, the other by blitzing the luxe out of luxury, the ex out of exclusivity.
It’s worth studying the photographs of those two alien invaders, the subjects of these lengthy works. The young Elsa Schiaparelli, sleek-headed, confident, wearing strict black: and the young Vivienne Westwood, with tousled hair and a workaday high-street suit: both have intense dark eyes with a far-reaching gaze above their determined mouths — ambitious egos, sisters perhaps, but over, not under, the skin.
‘Comet’ was the word Janet Flanner used in the 1930s to describe the arrival in France of the Italian aristocrat Schiaparelli. Secrest has enlarged on Flanner’s diamond-etched essay, and trawled Elsa’s autobiography Shocking Life, a matter-of-factly written work in which she rather weirdly refers to herself alternately in the first and third person.
Derbyshire-born Vivienne Isabel Swire’s autobiography (her second, by the way, this one assisted by Ian Kelly), chronicles her slow rise from the village of Tintwhistle to punk grande dame, and takes the sledgehammer approach, resolutely in the first person.
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