Wicked in pink: an exhibition on one of the greatest of all couturiers, Elsa Schiaparelli, helps to answer the old question about fashion-art or craft?

Elsa Schiaparelli is not a name that automatically resonates with the high glamour associated with her arch-rival Gabrielle (Coco) Chanel. Yet it was her creations that almost single-handedly contributed to fashion's shift in stares from craft albeit elevated--to art, as an exhibition which has travelled from Philadelphia to Paris makes clear.

This is the latest example of a fashion exhibition in a museum space, a trend inaugurated in 1983 when the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, gave Yves St Laurent a retrospective, the first for a living fashion designer.

Fashion's status-shift culminated in 1996 at the Florence Biennale, organised by Germano Celant and Artforum's editor Ingrid Sischy, whose aim, to examine the interstices between fashion and art in contemporary society, resulted in a monumental (and very expensive) flop.

The question of whether fashion is a form of art is still hotly debated; arguably, one of the reasons for this is fashion's transitory nature, which aligns it with such time-based arts as photography, dance, scenography and the cinema. An abundant bibliography has since emerged in which both sides of the argument arc vigorously defended through analogous--and by now much documented--procedural analysis regarding the status of those arts.

It has been argued that fashion's transitory nature attracted the scorn of feminists and philosophers: 'clothing is part of our difficult, post Edenic lives; and dress stationed at a boundary between self and other, marking a distinction between private and public, individual and social, is likely to be vexed by the forces of border wars', Karen Hanson has written. Like all time-based arts then, fashion has become another victim of just such a border war by positioning itself at the interstices between binary opposites, of which 'art' and 'craft' are perhaps the most obvious.

The current retrospective at the Musee de la Mode et du Textile in Paris was initiated by the Philadelphia Museum of Art, both beneficiaries of generous donations from Elsa Schiaparelli, in 1969 and 1973 respectively. Consisting of some 250 items from both collections, including clothes, shoes, jewellery, drawings, photographs and wondrous buttons, it is the first retrospective dedicated to the designer. The accompanying catalogue by Dylis E. Blum (of which a French translation is available) has been rather unfortunately but aptly summed up by a reviewer in the London Evening Standard: Blum's "text is clumsy and dull, the narrative so jumbled that a 10 page chronology at the back is needed to sort it out'. The reviewer is equally scathing about the choice of sponsors--'makers of sanitary towels'--which would have shocked Schiaparelli.

A whole chapter is dedicated to the 'marriage of art and fashion' and in it the author argues her case by focusing on the relationship between Schiaparelli and the Surrealists, especially Salvador Dali and Jean Cocteau. These relationships directly resulted in the creation of her seminal 'art objects', including the monkey fur shoes, the 'haunting veil', the black suede gloves with applique red nails of snakeskin, all of which also featured in the exhibition 'Addressing the century (100 years of art and fashion)' organised by the Hayward Gallery, London (1998-99), where the same theme of 'marriage' between art and fashion was debated.

The garments in the current show are displayed thematically on raised platforms encased by glass partitions. Superb use of lighting heightens their visual splendour. Upon entering the exhibition we see the famous geometric black and white sweaters, notably including the trompe l'oeil bow motif--praised by Vogue as a masterpiece--that launched Schiaparelli's career in 1927.

By 1935 she had opened her own salon overlooking Place Vend6me and until the beginning of World War II her most enduring thematic collections--the butterfly, commedia dell'arte, music, cash-and-carry, and the circus--attracted much admiration as well as controversy on the Parisian scene. Her friendships with Dali and Cocteau yielded wonderful results, of which the lobster dress has since acquired iconic status. Inspired by Dali's Telephone lobster, its overt sexual connotations are cheekily replicated by a red lobster motif strategically positioned on the skirt in humorous contrast with the virginal white and gossamer-like texture of the dress. Later Cecil Beaton photographed the future Duchess of Windsor, Wallis Simpson, wearing this erotic outfit with great panache. The nude plaster mannequin made for Schiaparelli by the sculptor Robert Couturier, presented at her stand in the Pavilion de l'elegance at the International Exhibition of 1937, courted notoriety as opposed to fame.

Perhaps Schiaparelli's most famous legacy remains her 'shocking pink', which became her logo and personal signature. Her ability to transform (with a little help from her friend the painter Christian Berard) an innocuous, innocent colour into a personification of sexuality sums up Schiparelli as undoubtedly the first subversive couturier. Her legacy is continued today in the work of Vivienne Westwood, Jean Paul Gaultier and John Galliano.
Sanda Miller is an art historian, critic, and lecturer at the Southampton Institute.