Bloom: A Story of Fashion Designer Elsa Schiaparelli

The duo behind Julia, Child offers a bold first-person biography of designer Elsa Schiaparelli, beginning with her dreary childhood in Rome, where the bright colors of market flowers brought her joy in a family that dismissed her as ugly. Schiaparelli’s passion for color and beauty never waned, and Maclear describes how, as a single mother in Paris, Schiaparelli discovered a community of artists—including Meret Oppenheim and Salvador Dalí—who helped foster her artistic identity. Morstad’s vivid mixed-media have an imaginativeness to match Schiaparelli’s surrealistic designs (playing with a beloved uncle as a child, she soars amid the stars and planets of the cosmos) and feature splashes of Schiaparelli’s trademark shade of pink: “Bright, impossible, impudent, becoming, life-giving, like all the light and the birds and the fish in the world put together.” It’s a dramatic tribute worthy of its audacious subject. Ages 4–8. Author’s agent: Jackie Kaiser, Westwood Creative Artists. Illustrator’s agent: Emily van Beek, Folio Literary Management. (Feb.)