Shocking! The Art and Fashion of Elsa Schiaparelli

Dilys E. Blum.

Philadelphia Museum of Art & Yale University Press. Philadelphia. 2003. First edition. Hardback, quarto; pink cloth-bound boards, dust jacket. 320 pages. Lavishly illustrated with over 300 colour images. English. 340 x 280mm. 2.7kg. 9780300100662. Good, in very good dust jacket; light shelf wear to jacket, light ruffling to edges; slight cracking to rear inner hinge.

This comprehensive book accompanies the first major American retrospective of the work of Schiaparelli, held at the Philadelphia Museum of Art in 2003. Shocking! explores the Italian-born couturière's career from its modernist beginnings in the 1920s and its connections with Surrealism to the upheavals caused by war, the business struggles in the years that followed, and the closing of her salon in 1954. The text is lavishly illustrated with more than three hundred reproductions of Schiaparelli clothing and accessories, as well as contemporary photographs, fashion sketches and works by the period's leading fashion photographers, such as Cecil Beaton and Horst.