Introduction
Aroosiag Mikaëlian, known in the Schiaparelli circle as Mike, was an Armenian refugee knitter working in Paris who supplied the technical solution behind Elsa Schiaparelli’s breakthrough trompe-l’œil knitwear of 1927. Schiaparelli drew the white bow and its drop shadow; Mikaëlian translated the image into a stable black-and-white jumper using an Armenian two-tone knitting method.
When a large American order followed, Mikaëlian helped expand production through a network of Armenian women in Paris who knew the technique. Her contribution was therefore both material and organisational: she engineered the fabric and helped turn an apartment-scale experiment into repeatable production. The surviving bow-knot sweater makes her work central to the foundation of the Schiaparelli house rather than incidental studio labour.
Design ethos
Mikaëlian’s work depended on control of yarn tension, colour and structure. The contrasting yarn was trapped across the reverse of the stockinette ground, avoiding the loose floats and distortion produced by more familiar European techniques. The result was a dense, tweed-like textile that held a large graphic image when stretched over the body.
That engineering allowed a drawing to operate as clothing. The bow did not sit on the sweater as an appliqué or print; it belonged to the knitted structure itself. Mikaëlian’s role demonstrates how technical knowledge can determine the visual authorship of a garment, especially when an apparently simple illusion depends on a specialist method.
Disclaimer
Career history
1927
Aroosiag Mikaëlian translated Schiaparelli’s trompe-l’œil bow drawing into a stable black-and-white jumper using an Armenian two-tone knitting technique. She then helped organise a network of Armenian women in Paris to fulfil the large American orders that followed. The collaboration made the house’s foundational visual idea technically repeatable and commercially scalable.
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