Elsa Schiaparelli

Air takes five of her ten planets, with two apiece in fire and earth and a single one in water, and five of the ten are mutable. Air arranges everything; the element that would register what a thing cost is down to one planet. The record says Schiaparelli worked with Dali on a lobster dress and a shoe hat, invented shocking pink, and was Chanel's chief rival until the war closed her house.

The Sun sits at eighteen degrees of Virgo with Saturn at nine, both in the sign built on doing something properly, and Mercury sits at thirteen degrees of Libra. Her Moon sits on the sixth degree of Leo at noon and may have been in Cancer. Venus sits on the fourth degree of Scorpio. For a designer whose record is a lobster on a dress and a colour she had to invent a name for, a Virgo Sun doing the technical work is the half of it nobody looks at.

Venus sits square Jupiter at just under three quarters of a degree, which reads as pleasure without a brake: extravagance, and valuing more when the problem was never quantity. In the record of those particular objects, that contact is the one to keep. The Sun sits in hard contact with that same Jupiter at under a fifth of a degree, belief in its own scale meeting a limit. Saturn sits square Pluto at three quarters, pressure against pressure, which reads as the enforced ending of something that had lasted, and the record supplies exactly that ending.

She died in Paris on 13 November 1973, at eighty three, on the day of her own Uranus return: the transiting Uranus stood conjunct its natal place at under half a degree. That return comes once in a life or not at all, so for the two to fall on the same day is as rare as this project gets. Neptune stood directly opposite its own natal degree at a quarter of a degree the same day. The Moon was full and eighty nine per cent lit, which is the phase that sees a thing clearly and usually through other people.