dali // playboy // vogue // schiaparelli // dior

 

 

“The meaning of my work is the motivation of the purest-money. What I did for Playboy is very good and your payment is equal to the task.”

This was supposed to be a short post just to share with you these photos that I recently found, that are the result od Dali's collaboration with Playboy magazine. Then, I started digging out through the internet to find out about his collaborations with other magazines and brands and I found..... lots of stuff. I don't know how much you are familiar with Dali's life, and how much you now about him. Ever since I discovered him long time ago, I was very moved and inspired by his work, and I consider him a genius. But there's that one side of his personality that made me ignore his more commercial work. He was obsessed with money and that always bothered me, since I have a different approach to material stuff. Anyway, I'll show you what I found.

To begin with, from the 1930s to the 1970s, Salvador Dali created a series of covers for various editions of Vogue, and lots of illustrations. 

December 1938

April 1944

December 1946

Christmas edition, 1971

Proposition for a cover

 The next name on the list of his collaborations is Italian designer Elsa Schiaparelli. He designed two dresses and a shoe hat for her.

The Tears Dress, a slender pale blue evening gown printed with a Dali design of trompe l'oeil rips and tears, worn with a thigh-length veil with "real" tears carefully cut out and lined in pink and magenta, was part of the February 1938 Circus Collection. The print was intended to give the illusion of torn animal flesh, the tears printed to represent fur on the reverse of the fabric and suggest that the dress was made of animal pelts turned inside out. Figures in ripped, skin-tight clothing suggesting flayed flesh appeared in three of Dali's 1936 paintings, one of which, Necrophiliac Springtime, was owned by Schiaparelli; the other two are The Dream Places A Hand on a Man's Shoulder and Three Young Surrealist Women Holding in Their Arms the Skins of an Orchestra.

 The 1937 Lobster Dress was a simple white silk evening dress with a crimson waistband featuring a large lobster painted (by Dali) onto the skirt. From 1934, Dali had started incorporating lobsters into his work, including New York Dream-Man Finds Lobster in Place of Phone shown in the magazine American Weekly in 1935, and the mixed-media Lobster Telephone (1936). His design for Schiaparelli was interpreted into a fabric print by the leading silk designer Sache. It was famously worn by Wallis Simpson, the Duke of Windsor’s wife, who was the reason he was no longer King of the United Kingdom. She wore it in a series of photographs by Cecil Beaton taken at the Château de Candé shortly before her marriage to Edward VIII.

The placement of the lobster on the ‘virginal’ white dress has always caused a stir for it’s sexual innuendo, and when worn by a woman many blamed for seducing, latching on to, and not letting go of the future King, the dress became symbolic for many and as infamous as she had become.

It is rumored that Dali wanted to apply real mayonnaise to the lobster on the dress but that Schiaparelli objected.

Shoe hat, Elsa and Lobster dress

Salvador Dali worked with Dior to design a dress for Sao Paulo Museum of Art (MASP)

Futuristic “Costume for the year 2045”, a silk jersey aqua dress developed with Christian Dior in 1949-50, accessorised with a velvet crutch, that, rather than being made to sustain a crippled body, looks like a bizarre stick of the sort carried by a Biblical leader. The costume features an amazing amount of fabric draped around the torso and the hips and a pair of prosthetic breasts, surrounded by metallic decorations and three faces, jutting around the pelvic area. 

Dali's Dreams of Venus, for the World's Fair, 1939.

There is much more of his commercial work, and every time I google his name I find some more, but this is what I found especially interesting. Sorry for the super long post, I just had to share this with you. Feel free to tell me what you think about Dali and his work, do you consider him a genius or just a mad men? I'd like to hear your opinion!

Kisses

A.