MOTHER OF INVENTION.(fashion designer Elsa Schiaparelli)

Elsa Schiaparelli's signature color was a violent magenta that she admired, she said, because it was "life-giving, like all the light and the birds and the fish in the world put together, a color of China and Peru but not of the West." She called it "Shocking." In French lingerie shops, it is still referred to as le shocking, and Yves Saint Laurent describes it in his foreword to Palmer White's knowledgeable 1986 biography ("Elsa Schiaparelli: Empress of Paris Fashion") as a pink with "the nerve of red . . . an aggressive, brawling, warrior pink." Saint Laurent characterizes the woman herself--whom he dressed, revered, and borrowed from extensively--in even more harrowing terms of endearment. "Her particular charm?" he writes: "Her brutality, her arrogance, her self-possession, disdain, storms of anger, odd whims, her Gorgon's mask." She was a majestic thunderhead whose bolts crackled unpredictably. The electric theme recurs in the title of Schiaparelli's autobiography, "Shocking Life," published in 1954, and in the name of her most famous perfume, also Shocking, first marketed in 1937. But what is most shocking about Schiaparelli in 2003 is her obscurity.

History tends to remember those who have one big idea--monotheism, penicillin, the little black dress--rather than a host of good ones. Coco Chanel and Elsa Schiaparelli launched their fashion houses in the first decades of the last century like two rockets with equal payloads of ambition. Chanel settled into the lower and brighter--more visible--orbit, which the gravity of convention has begun to erode. Schiaparelli exerts her influence like a distant celestial body on women and designers who may see hot pink when they free-associate her name, but who otherwise have no precise image of her work. Beautiful, low-born Chanel, the daughter of a peddler and the mistress of a duke (Schiaparelli, splitting the difference, referred to her as "that dreary little bourgeoise"), was, of necessity, a great student both of class and of men, and she became a master of the irreproachable, distilling a notion of lithe simplicity that was radical for its time into an enduringly desirable modern uniform. Homely, aristocratic Schiaparelli--"that Italian artist who makes clothes," as Chanel called her--was abandoned by her only mate and never cohabited with another. But the possession of an impeccable social pedigree combined with a passionate allegiance to the avant-garde inured her to reproach--or perhaps whetted her appetite for it. She was a poet of couture rather than a prose stylist like Chanel. She designed clothes for an emboldened and unbeholden New Woman. And she probably did more to enrich the language of twentieth-century dress than any of her peers.

A mammoth retrospective of Schiaparelli's couture that runs until early January at the Philadelphia Museum of Art charts the topography of a legendary and protean, though submerged, career: fashion's Atlantis. (The…