Elsa Triolet’s jewellery art is on display at the Schiaparelli: Fashion Becomes Art exhibition at the V&A – the two women collaborated on buttons and on the 1920s “aspirin necklace” made with beads that look like old aspirin tablets. Apparently, Triolet sold ideas for accessories to Paris fashion houses when she was broke.

Triolet was an impressive woman – she was involved in the Resistance during WWII and was the first woman to win the prestigious Prix Goncourt; Agnès Varda made a short documentary about her. What most people know her for, though, because the world is unfair to female artists who dated male artists, is her eyes, that beloved Surrealist motif.

Paul Eluard, one of the founders of the Surrealist movement, wrote “Les Yeux d’Elsa”, a poem dedicated to Elsa Triolet’s eyes, later sung by Jean Ferrat. The poem inspired an Yves Saint-Laurent jacket, which is itself reminiscent of the Schiaparelli Zodiac jacket on display at the V&A next to an A/W21 jacket by Daniel Roseberry featuring disembodied eyes and other parts of the face – Lady Gaga wore it for a US Vogue editorial by Steven Meisel with a wig that wouldn’t have been out of place at either the V&A exhibition on Marie-Antoinette or the Palais Galliera exhibition about the enduring appeal of 18^th century fashion, but this is a different rabbit hole. Schiaparelli and Salvador Dali often played with the eye motif, for instance, with “Eye of Time” in the 1950s. In 2012, Lanvin released a brooch inspired by Eluard’s poem.

Eyes are obviously a recurring theme in poetry, which Guillaume Apollinaire staged beautifully in his Calligrammes, poems laid out in shapes that complement the effect of the words. In his most famous Calligramme (i.e., the one we study in French school), “The Stabbed Dove and the Fountain,” the fountain looks like upside-down tears springing from an eye-like basin, in a poem that speaks to both the sadness and devastation of war and Apollinaire’s heartbreak.

I was reminded of “Stabbed Dove” this week when I browsed the new Tilda Swinton x HADES collection, which “draws inspiration from Tilda's 2025 Berlinale speech, a direct address to greed-addicted governments, planet-wreckers, and war criminals, and her celebrated poem 'Notes For Radical Living'“. The range includes a black knitted cotton dress and skirt — both featuring poetry laid out in what felt to me like a clear nod to Apollinaire, though he isn’t referenced in the product copy.

So that’s the first Cerulean Spiral completed, a journey from a French fashion house to a Scottish knitwear brand, thanks to the poetry of clothes and how the Surrealists loved eyes.

The spiral was inspired by Sihaam’s Web Weaving Substack. I trust you understand the cerulean reference.