Over the last several weeks, I’ve come across many articles in fashion magazines and style sections of newspapers congratulating Diane von Furstenberg on the 40th anniversary of her “creation” of the wrap dress. Diane von Furstenberg certainly made the wrap dress popular, and that dress propelled her to designer superstardom, but another woman beat her to the wrap dress…by decades.

I had seen Elsa Schiaparelli’s work in museums, knew her face from perusing old photographs of the Paris art scene pre-World War II, and had sniffed some of her perfumes, including the most famous, Shocking, before reading Judith Thurman’s great 2003 New Yorker article, “Mother of Invention,”¹ but that article sent me on a more in-depth trip of discovery into the world of Schiaparelli…

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