In Surrealist Fashion: Schiaparelli and Dalí's Collaborations for the Circus Collection

This study closely examines the Tears Dress and Skeleton Dress, designed in collaboration between Elsa Schiaparelli and Salvador Dalí for the 1938 Circus Collection. While these designs have received critical attention from fashion historians, they have received comparatively less interest in art history owing to a widespread ambivalence towards the artistic value of fashion design. This study considers how Schiaparelli and Dalí employed Surrealist visual strategies to make a subtle critique of the fashion industry, and by extension, contemporary socio-cultural values. Within the context of the Circus Collection, I argue that the trompe l'oeil designs on the Tears Dress and Skeleton Dress would transform the wearer into a disfigured and deformed sideshow act. In effect, Schiaparelli's customers were confronted with the ugly and unattractive, and challenged to refuse prevailing standards of beauty.