Schiaparelli, Elsa (c. 1890–1973)

Italian couturier and knitwear designer. Her innovative fashion ideas included padded shoulders, sophisticated colours (‘shocking pink’), and the pioneering use of zips and synthetic fabrics.

She was widely influential in the 1930s; her outlook had much in common with the surrealists, some of whom she commissioned to design fabric prints and jewellery. She had a productive partnership with Salvador Dalí, creating lobster-printed skirts, a coat with drawers for pockets, based on Dalí's painting City of Drawers, and a range of hats based on objects such as a shoe, an ice-cream cone, and a lamb chop.

In her 1938 ‘Circus’ collection she introduced buttons in the shape of acrobats. She held her last show 1954.