Schiaparelli was born at the Palazzo Corsini in Rome.[2] Her father was Dean of the University of Rome and an authority on Sanskrit.[3] She was a great-niece of astronomer Giovanni Schiaparelli, who discovered the canali of Mars, and she spent hours with him studying the heavens.[2] She studied philosophy at the University of Rome, during which she published a book of sensual poems that shocked her conservative family.[2] Schiaparelli was sent to a convent until she went on hunger strike and at the age of 22 accepted a job in London as a nanny.[2]
In Paris, Schiaparelli - known as "Schiap" to her friends - began making her own clothes. With some encouragement from Paul Poiret, she started her own business but it closed in 1926 despite favourable reviews.[2] She launched a new collection of knitwear in early 1927 using a special double layered stitch created by Armenian refugees[2] and featuring sweaters with surrealist trompe l'oeil images. Although her first designs appeared in Vogue, the business really took off with a pattern that gave the impression of a scarf wrapped around the wearer's neck.[2] The "pour le Sport" collection expanded the following year to include bathing suits, skiwear and linen dresses. The divided skirt, a forerunner of shorts, shocked the tennis world when worn by Lili de Alvarez at the Wimbledon Championships in 1931.[2] She added evening wear to the collection in 1931, and the business went from strength to strength, culminating in a move from Rue de la Paix to the Schiap Shop in the Place Vendôme.[2]
Schiaparelli's relationship with the Dada and Surrealist movements continued in collaboration with Salvador Dalí, Leonor Fini, Jean Cocteau, and Alberto Giacometti. Chanel referred to her as 'that Italian artist who makes clothes'.[4] Her collaborations with various artists contributed to the vast range and variety of her work.
Perhaps Schiaparelli's most important legacy was in bringing to fashion the playfulness and sense of "anything goes" of the Dada and Surrealist movements. She loved to play with juxtapositions of colours, shapes and textures,[4] and embraced the new technologies and materials of the time. With Charles Colcombet she experimented with acrylic, cellophane, a rayon jersey called "Jersela" and a rayon with metal threads called "Fildifer" - the first time synthetic materials were used in couture.[4] Some of these innovations were not pursued further, like her 1934 "glass" cape made from Rhodophane, a transparent plastic related to cellophane.[12] But there were more lasting innovations; Schiparelli created wraparound dresses decades before Diane von Furstenberg and crumpled up rayon 50 years before Issey Miyake's pleats and crinkles.[4] In 1930 alone she created the first evening-dress with a jacket, and the first clothes with visible zippers.[4] In fact fastenings were something of a speciality, from a jacket buttoned with silver tambourines to one with silk-covered carrots and cauliflowers
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