In 1936, the year that Salvador Dali created the Lobster or Aphrodisiac Telephone, Vogue’s then art director, Dr. Mehemed Fehmy Agha, wrote an explainer essay for the magazine titled, “Surrealism or the Purple Cow.” In it, he said that Dali, who had dressed in a diving suit to give a lecture in London, had “nearly smothered to death because someone forgot to open the air-valve.” Agha went on to explain that the artist’s get-up “was supposed to symbolize the vertical descent to the lower depths of the Subconscious.” Maybe that’s where Dali first came across the bottom-feeding lobster that made its way into art and then into fashion via Elsa Schiaparelli. (As did his artwork, The City of the Drawers).
Whatever the symbolism these co-conspirators had in mind, their famous lobster dress was part of a summer collection, and perhaps it was simply a witty harbinger of the season. Since then the lobster has become shorthand for Surrealism in fashion, and alluded to by other designers. One of them is milliner Philip Treacy who created the clawed toppers worn by fearless fashionistas Isabella Blow and Lady Gaga. Thom Browne, however, might be the most lobster-obsessed designer since Schiap; it fits in well with his subversive take on prep and carries with it images of shingled houses and sandy beaches.
In adopting a lobster, Emma Corrin, Vogue’s August cover star, follows in the probably apocryphal footsteps of the French poet Gérard de Nerval, who is supposed to have walked a pet lobster on a leash in Paris. But Corrin takes it farther, not only do they tenderly care for their sea creature, they dress like it too, inspiring this celebration of crustaceans in fashion.
