Tribute to Elsa

Amidst the models, lighting and runways during the reign of the Couture Fashion Week in Paris was the amazing Tribute to Elsa exhibit; a series of 18 outfits designed by the renowned Christian Lacroix.

If you're like me and see the clothing on the runways as more then a quirky red-carpet outfit but as a wearable work of art, then you too must be in love with the legend that is Elsa Schiaparelli.

To condense the legend; she was an Italian born designer who entered the fashion world with the start of her business in Paris 1927 to closing her design house in 1954.

During this time she stamped the world with her outrageous and audacious nature introducing looks such as "Shocking Pink" (a name so deliciously explanatory of her surreal styling), her 1938 Circus collection, the shoe hat, lobster print and not to mention use of insects. With friends and callaborators such as Salvador Dalí, Jean Cocteau and Alberto Giacometti it would be inevitable that her designs would reach the artistic heights they did in a mid 20th Century fashion world.

The collection that featured offered all that embodied the late Elsa Schiaparelli to the extravegant, outrages garments splashed with Shocking Pink, Acid Greens dawned with feather, fur and enlarged pockets.

The whole exhibit really is a thing of visual euphoria celebrating the once ingenious designer with the outcome in my personal opinion, a perfectly expressed tribute to it's Queen with endearment.

Of course you wouldn't see me strutting down 5th Avenue in the changing blue taffeta blouse, but that's not really the point sometimes in fashion and in Elsa Schiaparelli's case, sometimes it's just plain art.

If you haven't already done so, then see the exhibit and designs as well as a behind the scenes video at:

http://www.schiaparelli.com/en/tribute.html


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