Fashion and surrealism. If, as André Breton invited us to do, we let ourselves go to automatic writing, allowing our hand to move on its own, photographing the thoughts that go through our heads, here they are, right in front of us: fashion and surrealism, in fact. The two magic words, the two alchemical keys, from which to access the secrets of the famous shoe-shaped hat created in 1937 by Madame Elsa Schiaparelli. A vision of fashion, hers, which becomes dreamlike, provocative, audacious, at times even absurd. Like the day when Salvador Dalì inspired in her a reversal of the canons and an unexpected upside down vision: a shoe that becomes a hat, like when a few years earlier his wife Gala portrayed him with a shoe on his head and one on his shoulder, charming, seductive, gallant, unpredictable matador. So: why not? Why not create a shoe that is a hat or, better yet, a "shoe hat"? In the hands of Gala's daughter with Paul Eluard, Cécile, that slightly magical object is reinterpreted in two versions: one with a colored heel, the other with a black heel. Eighty years later Gallia e Peter were invited to create a faithful copy of the former for the collection of the new House of European History, recently inaugurated in Brussels. A work created by carefully studying the hat kept at the Victoria & Albert Museum in London, including drawings, studies, measurements, reconstructions of memory. To provoke again, to make people dream again, in the name of Elsa, in the name of Dalì, in the name of surrealism, craftsmanship and art.
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