Elsa Schiaparelli

If Vionnet is the 1930s' great technician, Elsa Schiaparelli is its great wit. She started out in the late 1920s with hand-knitted sweaters featuring trompe l'oeil bows, and within a few years was running one of the most talked-about couture houses in Paris, moving to grand premises on the Place Vendôme in 1935. Her clothes were beautifully made, but what made her famous was her imagination - she treated fashion as a place for jokes, provocation, and art.

Her most famous work came from collaborating with artists, especially Salvador Dalí - covered in the surrealism and fashion entry. The lobster dress of 1937, a white silk organza gown printed with a huge lobster, was worn by Wallis Simpson in a Vogue shoot shortly before her wedding. The shoe hat, an upside-down high-heeled shoe worn on the head, and the "Tears" dress, printed with trompe l'oeil rips, are among the strangest and most memorable clothes of the century. In 1937 she launched the vivid magenta she called "shocking pink," with a perfume to match. She also used buttons shaped like insects, acrobats, and vegetables, and was one of the first couturiers to use zips as a visible, decorative feature rather than hiding them.

What I think gets forgotten behind all the surrealist fun is how influential her tailoring was. Her suits and jackets, with their padded, squared shoulders and neat, narrow waists, are a big part of why the broad-shouldered line took over the second half of the decade and then carried into the 1940s. Her rivalry with Coco Chanel - who reportedly dismissed her as "that Italian artist who makes clothes" - is one of fashion's great feuds, and I think the decade is richer for having both of them.