Schiaparelli joined forces to create the "Mad Cap." Paraphrasing Richard Martin, we can

say that fashion and Surrealism were meeting in a dramatic, often comic (might we say

madcap?), encounter.

 In 1937, that dramatic encounter included one other member: Classic Hollywood.

Although Hollywood stars like Norma Shearer and Joan Crawford had been interested in

Parisian haute couture since the early 1930s, in 1937, Schiaparelli invited Mae West to

adapt her bosomy curves for a perfume bottle. When West arrived in Paris, Schiaparelli

recalls, "she was stretched out on the operating table of [her] workroom, and measured

and probed with curiosity" (qtd. in Martin 205). Based on West's silhouette, the

Surrealist artist Leonor Fini created an hourglass-shaped flacon. In that moment, with

Mae West as a kind of moving mannequin, Schiaparelli's "operating table" became the

charmed dissecting table where Surrealism met Hollywood through fashion, as if by

chance. The name of the perfume was Shocking.

 The encounter made quite an impression on Hollywood too; and long before

Hitchcock worked with Dali on Spellbound, Surrealism was briefly invited to the studio

system. Both Chanel and Schiaparelli were asked to design costumes for MGM and

Paramount respectively. Schiaparelli did Mae West's costumes for Every Day 's a

Holiday (1937), and Chanel even went to Hollywood to collaborate with Leisen and

Adrian. But that association did not last too long, because these designers seemed too

eccentric for the fast-paced studio system. Chanel actually faired much better with Jean

Renoir, designing costumes for bourgeois life in France in La Regle du Jeu (1939). What

Hollywood filmmakers wanted was to incorporate these Surrealist-inspired designs

symbolically into their scripts, mostly for laughs. In 1939, for instance, Leisen directed