Shocking Life. New York: E. P. Dutton & Co., 1954.

First edition. Octavo. 255pp. ‘Since most women do not know themselves they should try and do so.’ This is surrealist fashion designer and empire builder Elsa Schiaparelli’s triumphant memoir and celebration of her extraordinary life, told with all the aplomb and feist she is known for. Witty, wild, and energetically dishy, Schiaparelli begins the book with a foreword in which she introduces herself as a ‘complex woman’. "If she is charming she can also be the most hateful person in the world. She is aware of this, but cannot help it."

Schiaparelli makes an unusual choice to begin her life’s narrative from a bird’s eye view, a cinematic entrance, before zooming in in the first pages of her christening and naming in an Italian church, and introduction to her parents. She calls herself “Schiap” in the book, as she did in life, and writes herself in a self-ironical third person, as well as first, switching smoothly between the person and the persona.

Readers are taken through her childhood, her coming of age, her education and choices that led her to near-poverty, when she ended up in New York in 1928 to launch her knitwear line, which she grew into the surrealist and shocking pink phenomenon that was The House of Schiaparelli. Along the way, she shares her encounters with Greta Garbo, Joan Crawford, Picasso, Anita Loos, Katherine Hepburn, and Dali, among others.

A must-have for followers of fashion. Ends with 12 commandments for women!

Illustrated with colour and black & white plates. Spectacular condition, slightest wear, uncommon to find this particular jacket in near fine condition - shocking even!