Elsa Schiaparelli was not trained as a dressmaker. She was an art-school misfit from a Roman aristocratic family who arrived in Paris in 1922 with a failed marriage, a small daughter, and the conviction that couture was an insufficiently serious art form.

By 1937 she had collaborated with Salvador Dalí on a lobster dress, with Jean Cocteau on a suit embroidered with an illusionary face, and with Meret Oppenheim on fur-lined jewellery. She had also introduced a colour: shocking pink, a magenta so saturated it seemed, to the eye, to hum.

The Bottle

She launched the colour with a perfume. The bottle, released in 1937, was designed by the surrealist artist Leonor Fini and modelled on the bust of Mae West. The fragrance itself was a gardenia-and-honey composition. The bottle sold it.

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A dress cannot just hang like a painting. It must be worn, which is to say, it must survive the tea. — Elsa Schiaparelli

Schiaparelli was the first couturier to understand fragrance as the engine of fashion’s economy. The dress paid for the perfume; the perfume paid for the house. Chanel, her rival, would adopt the model within the decade.

The House, Closed

The House of Schiaparelli closed in 1954. It would be reopened, sixty years later, by Diego Della Valle, under whose ownership designers from Bertrand Guyon to Daniel Roseberry have revived the surrealist archive. The pink — still officially trademarked as Shocking — returns with every collection, as reliably as the returning season itself.