Conclusion

After her house closed, at age 64, Schiaparelli wrote her memoirs titled “Shocking Life” and she also wrote The Twelve Commandments for Women (Vogue). She lived out her retirement between her apartment in Paris and her house in Tunisia. Elsa Schiaparelli died on November 13, 1973. She will be remembered for innovations that weren’t pursued, like her “glass” cape made from Rhodophane in 1934, and for innovations that lasted, like wraparound dresses created decades before Diane von Furstenberg and crumpled up rayon fifty years before Issey Miyake’s pleats and crinkles (Wikipedia). Elsa Schiaparelli’s “most important legacy was in bringing to fashion the playfulness and sense of ‘anything goes’ of Dada and Surrealist movements (Wikipedia).”