1938
ELSA SCHIAPARELLI

Evening Jacket

Winter 1938–39
Elsa Schiaparelli, Italian, 1890–1973
Black silk velvet embroidered with mirrors, clear plastic beads, gold metal strip, and gold sequins
Gift of Mrs. Pauline Potter, 1950 (C.I.50.34.2)

1978
YVES SAINT LAURENT

“Broken Mirrors” Ensemble

Autumn/winter 1978–79 haute couture
Yves Saint Laurent, French, born Algeria, 1936–2008
Jacket of black silk velvet appliquéd with silver synthetic and embroidered with gold metal strip, silver silk-and-metal thread, and clear crystals; skirt of black silk velvet
Courtesy Musée Yves Saint Laurent Paris @ Yves Saint Laurent

Decorative jackets worn with skirts or dresses heralded the dinner suit, a new form of eveningwear that was popular in the mid- to late 1930s, when social life accelerated following the repeal of Prohibition and the easing of the financial malaise of the Great Depression. This evening jacket by Elsa Schiaparelli features two hand mirrors, formed by rectangles of mirrored glass affixed with star-shaped rosettes, that evoke the mirrored panes of the Salons of War and Peace at either end of Versailles’s Hall of Mirrors. By recalling France’s past glories on the battlefield, the design may reveal a subliminal hope for similar success in the looming struggles.

Yves Saint Laurent reprises the broken-mirror motif in this ensemble, in which the back of the jacket becomes a canvas for an expansive mirror worked in wedges of silver foil fractured by lines of crystals and framed by gleaming gold strip. For Saint Laurent, Schiaparelli’s fashions lent women “originality, insolence and assurance,” and the boldness of this design projects a similar daring and confidence.