Le Roy Soleil

Author: Marijke Peyser

From the end of the 1920s onwards the Franco-Italian fashion designer Elsa Schiaparelli achieved success with a versatile, loose garment that could be worn on the beach but was just as suitable for wearing to lunch in the casino. In both cases the design rendered suspenders and corsets redundant.^[1] Schiaparelli’s exclusive designs and inspiring personality did not escape Dalí. The artist said that Paris in the mid-1930s ‘was not dominated by the differences of opinion among the Surrealists, nor the suicide of my great friend René Crevel, but by the opening of Schiaperelli’s maison de couture, Place Vendôme.’^[2] The collaboration between Dalí and the fashion designer officially began in 1936 with a powder compact (designed in 1935) in the shape of a telephone dial.^[3] Schiaparelli’s winter collection (1936-37) appeared to consist of Surrealist objects rather than clothes: her women’s suits with pockets in the shape of drawers echoed Dalí’s ideas and recent work. Not long before, the artist had pointed out that it was the ‘sectional nature of the female body that made it possible to show each part separately’.^[4] His painting Le cabinet antromorphique and the sculpture Vénus de Milo aux tiroirs, both dating from 1936, show this clearly. Dalí also designed fabrics for the Parisian fashion house. Schiaparelli’s summer collection (1938), which was shown soon after the opening of the Exposition internationale du surréalisme on 17 January, contained her ‘tears dress’ and ‘skeleton dress’, made of fabrics Dalí had designed.^[5]

In 1946 Dalí designed a bottle for Schiaparelli’s perfume Le Roy Soleil, which was made by the firm of Baccarat in a limited edition of two thousand in 1947. The perfume bottle, in the shape of a pyramid-like rock surrounded by waves, has a ‘sun cap’ with lavish rays. It is a beautiful image of the French monarch Louis XIV, the Sun King. As he did in his paintings, Dalí was playing with double images: the Sun King’s face can also be seen as a sky with flying birds. The case, made of gilded metal, was in the shape of a shell, a typical rococo ornament that was often found in the decorations of the Sun King’s palace.