Serge Lepage

Serge Lepage is a French couturier born in 1936 who established Maison Lepage in 1963. In 1977, owner Guido Sassoli de Bianchi appointed him to lead the first sanctioned revival of Schiaparelli after Elsa Schiaparelli’s death. Lepage suspended his own house and attached his active reputation to a name that had been absent from the couture calendar.

From January 1977 to January 1979, the partnership produced five reported haute couture collections and at least two ready-to-wear collections under the Atelier designation. Surviving evidence confirms Schiaparelli-branded garments and a public strategy built around theatrical eveningwear, including a diamond-embroidered dress that required security during presentation. Original show programmes and complete titles remain to be recovered.

The revival ended after the January 1979 presentations, and Lepage later returned to work under his own name. Although brief, the appointment is structurally important: it demonstrates that Schiaparelli’s post-1954 history included an active designer-led couture programme decades before the Della Valle relaunch.

Lepage approached revival through couture spectacle and visible luxury. Draped evening shapes, Grecian references and emphatic embellishment sought to recover the public audacity associated with Schiaparelli without reproducing the founder’s original network of Surrealist commissions.

The most widely reported gesture—the dress embroidered with 512 diamonds—used material value and presentation risk as instruments of publicity. The approach was less an archaeological reconstruction than an attempt to make an inherited name socially immediate in the late 1970s.