In 1935, Salvador Dalí designed a powder compact in the shape of a telephone dial for Elsa Schiaparelli. This was their first collaboration, which would be followed by many others. Clients could personalize the compact by having their name or any other cherished inscription engraved on it. Several versions exist: black lacquer or tortoiseshell, among others.

Originally a technical object, the telephone dial transforms into a cosmetic case and finally achieves the status of a work of art.

That same year, Schiaparelli moved to 21, Place Vendôme. In this regard, Dali notes in his memoirs that the Paris of the 1930s was marked "not by the polemics of the surrealists of the café on Place Blanche, or by the suicide of my great friend René Crevel, but by the fashion house that Elsa Schiaparelli was going to open on Place Vendôme. It was there that morphological phenomena took place; it was there that the fiery tongue of Dali's Holy Spirit was going to descend" (The Secret Life of Salvador Dali, 1942).