Evening jacket

Schiaparelli's interest in neoclassicism and the eighteenth century is evident in her jacket with embroidered hand mirrors bracketing buttons cast as Hellenic deities. But even in this elegant consideration of rococo style, a surrealist provocation intrudes in the fractured surface of the "shattered" mirrors. Schiaparelli's mirrors are both of art-historical heritage and of a contemporary sensibility responding to a a world on the verge of war.