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Happiness Quote by Elsa Schiaparelli

"Eating is not merely a material pleasure. Eating well gives a spectacular joy to life and contributes immensely to goodwill and happy companionship. It is of great importance to the morale"

About this Quote

Eating, in Schiaparelli's hands, is a rebuttal to the puritan instinct that shadows both fashion and femininity: the idea that pleasure must be apologized for, minimized, or made "serious" to count. She starts by demoting the merely "material" not because she disdains the body, but because she wants to elevate it. Eating well becomes an aesthetic act, a designed experience, as worthy of attention as a silhouette or a seam. The phrase "spectacular joy" is doing fashion work: it frames pleasure as staged, vivid, intentionally composed. Not indulgence as accident, but as craft.

The subtext is social engineering. "Goodwill and happy companionship" suggests food as a medium of alliance-building - a table as a runway for intimacy, negotiation, and belonging. In interwar and postwar Europe, where Schiaparelli built her career amid scarcity, upheaval, and rigid class codes, insisting on the morale value of eating reads as quietly political. Morale is a word from factories and battlefields; she smuggles it into domestic life to argue that joy is not frivolous, it's infrastructure.

As a designer famous for surreal wit and for collaborating with artists, Schiaparelli also implies a worldview where the everyday can be made strange and radiant. Eating "well" isn't just luxury; it's attention, play, and a refusal to let anxiety dictate taste. The line flatters the senses while making a pragmatic claim: pleasure, properly arranged, lubricates society.

Quote Details

TopicFood
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Citation Formats

APA Style (7th ed.)
Schiaparelli, Elsa. (2026, January 14). Eating is not merely a material pleasure. Eating well gives a spectacular joy to life and contributes immensely to goodwill and happy companionship. It is of great importance to the morale. FixQuotes. https://fixquotes.com/quotes/eating-is-not-merely-a-material-pleasure-eating-144899/

Chicago Style
Schiaparelli, Elsa. "Eating is not merely a material pleasure. Eating well gives a spectacular joy to life and contributes immensely to goodwill and happy companionship. It is of great importance to the morale." FixQuotes. January 14, 2026. https://fixquotes.com/quotes/eating-is-not-merely-a-material-pleasure-eating-144899/.

MLA Style (9th ed.)
"Eating is not merely a material pleasure. Eating well gives a spectacular joy to life and contributes immensely to goodwill and happy companionship. It is of great importance to the morale." FixQuotes, 14 Jan. 2026, https://fixquotes.com/quotes/eating-is-not-merely-a-material-pleasure-eating-144899/. Accessed 11 Feb. 2026.

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Eating Well: Joy, Goodwill, and Companionship
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About the Author

Elsa Schiaparelli

Elsa Schiaparelli (September 10, 1890 - November 13, 1973) was a Designer from Italy.

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