Dali, Schiaparelli and the Shoe Hat

Elsa Schiaparelli in 1937.

The Dali shoe hat is one of the most intriguing bits of art history and fashion history that I have yet to come across while reading Sofka Zinovieff’s memoir The Mad Boy, Lord Berners, My Grandmother & Me. Having never heard of fashion designer Elsa Schiaparelli prior to this morning when I read about her in Zinoviesff’s novel, I decided to do a little bit of digging and learn more about her, Dali and their shoe hat.

Born in 1890, Schiaparelli was an Italian fashion designer whose influence was on par with Coco Chanel, who referred to her as “that Italian artist who makes clothes.” Meant as a dig one could argue that is rather a compliment! Her designs were bold and strongly influenced by the Surrealist Movement. Schiaparelli is notable today for her collaborations  with Jean Cocteau and Salvador Dali.

Salvador Dali photographed by Gala Dali in 1932.

Salvador Dali was a Spanish Surrealist artist born in Catalonia in 1904. In 1929, he met his future wife, a Russian divorcé born in 1894. Per Dilys Blum, a Dali biographer, the inspiration for the shoe hat is purportedly the picture of Dali with a slipper on his head and a slipper on his shoulder (above), taken by Gala in 1933.

Perhaps this account is true but Dali writes in The Secret Life of Salvador Dali (1942):

“As a little boy at school, I stole an old slipper belonging to the teacher, and used it as a hat in the games I played in solitude. In 1936, I constructed a Surrealist object with an old slipper of Gala’s and a glass of warm milk. Years after my school-boy prank, a photo of Gala crowned by the cupolas of Saint Basil revived my early fantasy of the “slipper-hat.”

Gala Dalí wearing the Schiaparelli outfit and Dali Shoe hat in 1938 by Andrew Maillet.

In 1937 Dali sent sketches of the shoe hat to Schiaparelli, which she dutifully manufactured and featured in her Fall-Winter 1937-38 collection. The hat was made to wear with a black dress and jacket embroidered with red lips which were suggestive of those belonging to of the voluptuous actress Mae West for whom Schiaparelli was designing movie costumes at the time. It was first worn by Gala, Schiaparelli and then the avant-garde socialite and heiress Daisy Fellowes in Venice.

L’Officiel De La Mode, October 1937. Caption reads: the very original hat represents a black felt shoe with red heel. Photograph by George Saad.

Since 2013, the original Dali shoe hat, which belonged to Gala, resided in the collection of the Palais Galliera. There are two further Schiaparelli shoe hats known to exist, one with a red heel in the Andrea Pfizer Collection and the other with a black heel in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.