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Description

Up For Sale Today is

Shocking Life

by

Elsa Schiaparelli

Tailpieces by

Bernard

Hardcover. 8vo. Published by E. P. Dutton & Co., New York. 1954. 254 pgs. Illustrated with Color / Black and White Plates. Signed and inscribed by Elsa Schiaparelli on the half-title page. First Edition/First Printing.

DJ has shelf-wear present to the DJ extremities (DJ chipped at the spine ends). Bound in black cloth boards with pink titles present to the front board and the spine. Boards have light shelf-wear present to the extremities. No ownership marks present. Text is clean and free of marks. Binding tight and solid. 

Her name was Elsa Schiaparelli. She was known as the Queen of Fashion; a headline attraction in the international glitter-glamour show of the late twenties and thirties, feted in Rome (where she was born), Paris, New York, London, Moscow, Hollywood . . .

Her style was a social revolution through clothing—luxurious, eccentric, ironic, sexy. Her fashions, inspired, from the whimsical to the most practical—from a Venetian cape of the commedia dell’arte to the Soviet parachute. She collaborated with some of the greatest artists of the twentieth century: on jewelry designs with Jean Schlumberger; on clothes with Salvador Dalí (his lobster dress for her, a lobster garnished with parsley painted on the skirt of an organdy dress, was instantly bought by Wallis Simpson for her honeymoon with the Duke of Windsor); with Jean Cocteau, Alberto Giacometti, Christian Bérard, photographers Baron Adolph de Meyer, Horst, Cecil Beaton, and the young Richard Avedon. 

She was the first designer to use rayon and latex, thick velvets, transparent and waterproof, and cellophane. Her perfume—Shocking!—was a bottle in the shape of a bust sculpted by Léonor Fini, inspired by the body of Mae West. Her boutique at an eighteenth-century palace at 21 Place Vendôme opened into a cage designed by Jean-Michel Frank. American Vogue, in 1927, presented her entire collection as Works of Art. A decade later, she was the first European to win the Neiman Marcus Fashion Award.
 
“Dare to be different,” Schiaparelli advised women, and she lived it to the height; a rebel against convention—social as well as fashion. She designed an otter-fur bathing suit and a hat inspired by a lamb chop. (“I like to amuse myself,” she said. “If I didn’t, I would die.”) Chanel, her arch rival, called her, “that Italian woman who makes dresses.”

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Book formats and corresponding sizes  
Name Abbreviations Leaves Pages Approximate cover size (width × height)  
inches cm  
folio 2º or fo 2 4 12 × 19 30.5 × 48  
quarto 4º or 4to 4 8 9½ × 12 24 × 30.5  
octavo 8º or 8vo 8 16 6 × 9 15 × 23  
duodecimo or twelvemo 12º or 12mo 12 24 5 × 7⅜ 12.5 × 19  
sextodecimo or sixteenmo 16º or 16mo 16 32 4 × 6¾ 10 × 17  
octodecimo or eighteenmo 18º or 18mo 18 36 4 × 6½ 10 × 16.5  
trigesimo-secundo or thirty-twomo 32º or 32mo 32 64 3½ × 5½ 9 × 14  
quadragesimo-octavo or forty-eightmo 48º or 48mo 48 96 2½ × 4 6.5 × 10  
sexagesimo-quarto or sixty-fourmo 64º or 64mo 64 128 2 × 3 5 × 7.5  
 

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