Sportswear also qualifies as "classic," and its simple utility further identifies it with the International Style. For American women, sportswear took off immediately and became the style of the century. Nothing shows this more clearly than the Tirocchi records. In no record does the word "sport" appear before 1918, and only seven mentions were found in 1918 and 1919. Between 1920 and 1930, more than one hundred and sixty-six entries record sport suits, sport dresses, sport skirts, sport sweaters, sport coats, etc. From 1930 onwards, sports dressing remained popular among clients of all ages; peaking in 1931; remaining steady between 1932 and 1936; then falling off only in proportion to the decline in client numbers in the late 1930s.

In 1927, a new designer of a younger generation took the stage with an intuitive knowledge of the place of fashion late in the decade. Elsa Schiaparelli understood instinctively the relationship between the "classic" and the modern. For her, modernity was rooted in classicism and in respect for the human body. More than any couturier since Paul Poiret, Schiaparelli was involved in and inspired by the world of art. In her 1954 autobiography, written partly in the third person, she credits her appreciation of the "surroundings of beauty" that inspired her clothing designs to her upbringing in a well-to-do and intellectual family in Rome. "She felt that clothes had to be architectural; that the body must never be forgotten and it must be used as a frame is used in a building," Schiaparelli wrote. "The Greeks, more than anybody else except the Chinese, understood this rule, and gave to their goddesses...the serenity of perfection and the fabulous appearance of freedom."(40) Her first evening gown was "a plain black sheath of crepe de Chine down to the ground, with a white crepe de Chine jacket with long sash that crossed in the back but tied in front. Stark simplicity; That was what was needed."(41) She also understood the fact that fashion, as well as art, was moving toward the "classic" and the purist. Even her very first success, a sweater with knitted-in trompe-l'oeil bow at the neckline and a simple black pleated skirt, fit the definition, since it followed the lines of the body, while the knitted-in neckline trimming remained flat. It was the sweater of the future. Schiaparelli made many of them, and they were widely copied, to her great satisfaction [fig. 116].

In the early 1930s, Schiaparelli's bread and butter was these sweaters, for which she used cubist, geometric, and trompe-l'oeil patterning, and her simple, slim-silhouette black dresses, suits, and coats. Because the effects of the Depression were quickly felt in France, Schiaparelli knew that she needed to mobilize the worldwide markets that had opened to French couture in the 1920s. Her cause had already been taken up by Harper's Bazaar and the New York press, and in 1928 she was selling her sweaters and jersey shorts through Saks Fifth Avenue. Although the simple classic blacks and tailored wools seem plain when compared to her later work, Schiaparelli was slowly letting her surrealist wit begin to show. In the early 1930s, she designed long black evening gowns with black cock's feathers protruding at the shoulders and black suits with buttons shaped like cicadas. In the early 1930s, her styles appeared frequently in Harper's Bazaar and Vogue, and by 1934, these designs were being illustrated by Jean Cocteau and Christian Bérard and photographed by Man Ray. Two years later, she was collaborating outright with surrealist artists, designing the "Desk Suit," a fitted, tailored suit of perfectly "classic" outlines, with drawer pulls on its many pockets, from a sketch provided by Salvador Dali. In 1937, a collaboration with Dali resulted in her "Tear Dress," again a perfectly classic shape with unexpected trompe-l'oeil decoration [fig. 118]. A linen jacket of around the same time (now in the Philadelphia Museum of Art) is but one of Schiaparelli's collaborations with Jean Cocteau [fig. 117].

Schiaparelli's surrealist ideas paralleled the increasing popularity of surrealist art and the use of surrealist imagery in the decorative arts, particularly in photography and magazine illustration. Surrealism continued to grow in popularity throughout the 1930s. The Paris Exposition Internationale des Arts et Techniques dans la Vie Moderne of 1937 was a case in point: the couture industry's Pavillon d'Élégance was surrealist in decor. Schiaparelli herself took part in the Exposition with an installation provoked by the ridiculous mannequin she was assigned (or so she claimed in her autobiography). In surrealist fashion she transmogrified the inappropriate mannequin into sculpture by placing it on the ground and hanging the creations it was meant to display on a line nearby, as if on washing day.(42)