Fashion inspiration: The surreal life

Handbag hats. Dollar-bill dresses. Evening-glove scarves. This season, ready-to-wear designers like Isaac Mizrahi, Jean-Charles de Castelbajac and Dolce & Gabbana have taken a page out of Alice in Wonderland and fallen down a rabbit hole into a fantasy world where art meets fashion. It’s here, in this dream-like place, that cracked-egg couture (à la Agatha Ruiz de la Prada), optical-illusion accessories (Moschino Cheap & Chic) and colourful harlequin looks (Alexander McQueen) reign on the runways. These modern-day odes to surrealism—the 20th-century art movement that shifted perceptions of reality—pay homage to fashion’s first lady of tongue-in-chic, designer Elsa Schiaparelli.

Throughout the 1930s, Schiaparelli popularized this radical new fashion fusion with her madcap motifs, like insects and lips, and her use of trompe l’oeil; an art technique that creates optical illusions. She wove whimsy, visual puns and everyday objects into her designs. Lamb chops became hats. Aspirin posed as jewellery. Lobsters adorned dresses. To Schiaparelli, designing was not a job but an art. During her career, she forged creative relationships with artists like Man Ray, Alberto Giacometti and Jean Cocteau, but it was the iconic designs that she produced in collaboration with Salvador Dalí from 1936 to ’38 (notably, the shoe hat and the lobster, tears and skeleton dresses) that garnered the most attention. Post–World War II, Schiaparelli found that her witty designs were out of step with the austerity of the period, and no longer appealed to war-weary women. The house closed in 1954.

Fashion didn’t play tricks on the eyes again until the 1980s, when the likes of Yves Saint Laurent, Christian Lacroix and Karl Lagerfeld blended the avant-garde with the amusing. Saint Laurent designed a jacket embroidered with a pair of eyes for his Fall 1980 ready-to-wear collection, which winked at surrealist Louis Aragon’s poem Les Yeux d’Elsa. Lagerfeld playfully nodded to the concept of the misplaced object with his decadent corset hats in Fall 1985. More recently, plenty of designers have been churning out double-take-worthy accessories—witness Marc Jacobs’ inverted-heel shoes for Spring 2008, Antonio Berardi’s heel-less platform shoes of the same season, and Jeremy Scott’s Fall 2009 Mickey Mouse–inspired button-covered berets. What began as a fashion experiment with a contemporary-art movement has become a source of inspiration for ready-to-wear and fast-fashion labels worldwide. Looks like Schiaparelli got the last laugh, after all.

Check out our favourite surreal looks from the runway.

ALEXANDER MCQUEEN Spring 2008