There is something verging towards the disturbing in Les Dîners de Gala, a cookbook conceived and illustrated by Salvador Dalí in 1973. The result of a collaboration between Dalí, his wife Gala, and a secret chef (that is a team of chefs from the top French restaurants of the day...), the volume featured ideas for a magnificent meal accompanied by Surrealist pictures that evoked gastronomic nightmares à la Marco Ferreri's 1973 film La Grande Bouffe.
Many images featured in the volume looked indeed opulently and sumptuously rich, but were suspended between a delight of the senses and a deep sense of repulsion.
The volume included indeed 12 chapters, each one discussing a specific class of foods that went from shellfish to vegetables and aphrodisiacs, accompanied by lithographs in which Dalí experimented with mixed media to create complex and visually striking images.
Les Dîners de Gala was one of the main inspiration behind Bertrand Guyon's second collection for the House of Schiaparelli. You could argue that, in some ways, the metaphor worked pretty well as the book featured ingredients not for the faint-hearted and Haute Couture is not for the masses (even though it inspires trends that are then replicated in a cheaper and affordable key by high street retailers...).
The first design - a long dress with red leather strips forming the grid of a tablecloth laid out for dinner with intricately decorated leather dishes covering it - was an eye-catching number, followed by two white suits reminiscent for their clean lines of Courrèges' Space Age designs, even though Guyon's creations featured in one case a white cape with a crack that revealed luscious egg yolk seeping through it and referencing Schiap's "Phoebus" cape (Guyon seems to have an obsession with it since he also hinted at this design in his previous collection for the fashion house).
Humble (and at times ugly root) vegetables – onions, artichokes, pumpkins, aubergines and tomatoes – then took centre stage and turned into something extraordinary. They indeed appeared as 19th-century style illustrations embroidered or rendered in micro-beads on white tops and skirt suits.
The runway then progressed to tea time with teapots embroidered or appliqued on tweed jackets that called to mind a childish tea party game during which little girls may hone their social skills, while an arty element was introduced via cropped jackets with inserts made from vintage tea towels, napkins or table clothes reworked into geometrically decorative patchworks inspired by the fabric collages (View this photo) of Louise Bourgeois (something that should be definitely tried at home, if you haven't done so already while experimenting with dish towels...).
The food theme then returned in the prints featured in long and fluid gowns that went from vegetables, shrimp and lemon slices, quail eggs, snails on open caviar sandwich and sushi pieces to pasta shapes and cutlery on silk jacquard (a reference to the "Spoon with Crutches" engraving by Dalí in the Gala book?).
Pasta was also evoked by the broken egg decorations hanging from the shoulders of the pasta shapes dress, while bread was referenced through a jacket made from a raw wheat fibre and featuring an elaborate embroidery made with wheat ears, and a cape covered in pastries and croissaints, not to mention the dress with a cropped jacket reproducing a beehive structure and ruffles around the hips with metal bees scattered upon them.
China plates (also used to decorate the runway backdrop) provided Guyon with futher inspiration for long dresses with three-dimensional motifs on white brocade matched with a cropped and fitted beaded jacket and for a lobster embroidered on a dish, part of the bib-like sequinned front panel of a gown painted with seafood motifs (a reference to Dalí and Schiaparelli's 1937 lobster dress for Wallis Simpson).
Dalí was rumored to have bathed in sardine oil and to have taken afternoon naps with live lobsters in his bed, but Schiap was less eccentric in her real life and knew the importance of eating well: she had indeed installed a trattoria in the basement of her Paris house with a kitchen run by an Italian chef.
"Eating is not merely a material pleasure," the designer wrote in her autobiography, Shocking Life, "Eating well gives a spectacular joy to life and contributes immensely to goodwill and happy companionship. It is of great importance to the morale."
Through this collection Guyon's re-emphasised this aspect of Schiaparelli, intrinsic in the gesture of sharing small pleasures in life such as having a meal with friends, especially in our modern and complex world. Fashion-wise, though, not everything worked since as at times the food metaphor was too literal or too surrealist, and the craft was lost in a sea of sequins and embellishments.
A simple dress with twin cherries (the proverbial cherry on the cake...) perilously perched on the nipple of the model wearing it introduced the final section of the collection.
It included draped chiffon gowns in soft porcelain shades, an attempt maybe at cleansing the palate (or at whetting further the appetite?) or a reference to a more liquid and less substantial palette maybe borrowed from Dalí's 1977 volume Les Vins de Gala, a book detailing wines and famous vineyards (even though the black gown with a spider on a web on the back was more "witch" than chef or wine taster, or maybe that's the sort of spider you discover building invisible webs while you harvest grapes...).
Food references were scattered on these gowns through the large decorative brooches representing a shrimp with a lemon slice, a porcelain potato and copper lettuce leaves.
Brooches were actually the only visible accessories on the runway: there were some peas breaking out of a pod, butterfly wings held together with a padlock, and Surrealist brooches like the arrow pierced heart and lips and the Cocteau-evoking eye already seen on the runway during the previous season. Shame there were no clutches or further pieces of jewellery to admire with the dresses, but maybe Guyon didn't have time for accessories.
So far reviving Schiap has proved extremely tricky for all the designers involved: Guyon's new collection was a feast for the eye, a gastronomic Alice (in a way Alice was there in a pale blue gown with sequinned tea cups and teapots...) in Foodland adventure that at times made you think about the bulimic fashion industry keeping on eating and vomiting the same things.
The preface to Les Dîners de Gala warned readers that the book was "uniquely devoted to the pleasures of Taste", highlighting "Don't look for dietetic formulas here. We intend to ignore those charts and tables in which chemistry takes the place of gastronomy. If you are a disciple of one of those calorie-counters who turn the joys of eating into a form of punishment, close this book at once; it is too lively, too aggressive, and far too impertinent for you."
Guyon's second collection for Schiaparelli can be considered as devoted to the pleasure of the eye, and, while it is undoubtedly lively and manages to employ some great artisanal techniques, it risks of ending up like Les Dîners de Gala: just like this volume, these attractive designs can be used as a great dinner (or red carpet...) conversation, but aside from that will we ever manage to see them elsewhere, or will they be enough to relaunch once and for all the House that Schiap built?
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