In her column for Elephant, Kitty Lees delves into the archives, spotlighting one jewellery-themed work every month.
Elsa Schiaparelli delighted in chaos. She put things where they were not meant to be: aspirin tablets strung into necklaces, sharp claws tipped onto fur gloves, a shoe balanced on the head, its heel upholstered in shocking pink velvet. An illustrious bright orange lobster, stretched provocatively across the front of an elegant white organdy evening gown. The story goes that Salvador Dali wanted to add real mayonnaise to the dress, which Schiaparelli refused.
Schiaparelli approached jewellery with the same slightly strange Surrealist instinct that defined her clothes. Often making pieces in collaboration with artists such as Dalí, Jean Cocteau and Alberto Giacometti, she embraced trompe l’œil and turned everyday things into strange, weirdly wonderful objects of desire: insects crawling across collars, cracked lips stuffed with pearls, eyelids and lashes coated thickly in gilt. They are objects that demand to be looked at twice, with a kind of enchantment through discomfort.
One such piece: the insect necklace. It belongs to Schiaparelli’s Pagan Collection of 1938, which was inspired by Botticelli’s Primavera, a lush painting, heavily decorated with fruits and flowers. Schiaparelli translated this abundance of nature into dress: a pink coat fastened with caterpillar-shaped plastic buttons, blazers holding the delicate structures of butterflies, an evening gown blooming with white apple blossoms and wild strawberries.
The necklace itself is made from clear Rhodoïd and pressed metal insects, painted in a colourful cluster of metallic green, red, pink, blue, and yellow. It has this strange but familiar feeling of bugs crawling across your skin. Perhaps because the insects appear suspended rather than set; their shadows falling directly onto the body. Heavy, bottle-green beetles anchor the top while smaller creatures – luminous yellow dragonflies, pink winged bees, and things with long antennae trembling outward – scatter unevenly around the curve. The composition feels deliberately unsettled, as though the insects have gathered instinctively or are still moving.
In Schiaparelli’s Insect Necklace, those small creatures one would usually swat or flick from clothing become a thing to keep close.
