Schiaparelli: Fashion Becomes Art at the V&A

At the V&A South Kensington, Schiaparelli: Fashion Becomes Art is a reminder that Elsa Schiaparelli treated fashion as provocation, performance, wit and visual shock long before such words became part of the industry’s default vocabulary.

Born in Rome in 1890, Schiaparelli arrived in Paris with none of the obedient instincts expected of a couturier. Where Chanel streamlined the modern woman, Schiaparelli disturbed her, amused her and armed her with imagination. Hollywood stars, wealthy socialites and the era’s most independently minded women wore Schiaparelli.

Left: Elsa Schiaparelli and Salvador Dalí, Skeleton Dress (1938). V&A © 2025 Salvador Dalí, Fundació Gala-Salvador Dalí, DACS. Photo © Emil Larsson.
Middle: Salvador Dalí, Telephone (1938). © Salvador Dalí, Gala-Salvador Dalí FoundationDACS, London 2026.
Right: Schiaparelli: Fashion Becomes Art at V&A South Kensington. Photo: David Parry / PA Media Assignments.

She famously said, “For me, dress designing is not a profession but an art.” Her trompe l’oeil bow sweater of 1927 announced the method: a garment could be practical and still play tricks on the eye. From there came sportswear, city suits, eveningwear and accessories that refused to behave: shoe hats, fantastical buttons, embroidered faces, skeleton ribs and lobsters placed where lobsters had no business being.

The V&A understands that Schiaparelli’s genius was not simply eccentricity, but how smart she was about the alliances she established. Across more than 400 objects, the exhibition places her clothes in conversation with the artists who helped shape her world: Salvador Dalí, Jean Cocteau, Man Ray, Pablo Picasso, Eileen Agar and others. Rather than fashion T “inspired by” art, her work represented fashion operating as art’s most intimate, unruly cousin. The Skeleton dress and Tears dress still unsettle because they turn the body into a site of illusion, injury and desire.

Left: Schiaparelli Haute Couture Fall Winter 2024. Photo © Giovanni Giannoni.
Middle: Kuba Dabrowski Awar Odhiang, Paris, 2025. Schiaparelli by Daniel Roseberry. Haute couture AW 2024 © Kuba Dabrowski.
Right: Schiaparelli Haute Couture Fall Winter 2024 Look 30. Photo © Giovanni Giannoni.
All three images courtesy of Patrimonie Schiaparelli, Paris.

What gives the show extra weight is its London thread. Schiaparelli opened a Mayfair salon in 1933, and the exhibition restores that chapter with rare garments bearing the London label, including pieces connected to coronation dressing, British clients and the city’s own surrealist circles. It makes the V&A setting feel a lot like a homecoming.

The final section brings the story to Daniel Roseberry, Schiaparelli’s American creative director since 2019. Roseberry has made the house culturally visible again, by absorbing the DNA of the maison and enlarging it for the red carpet age. His gilded anatomy, exaggerated silhouettes and celebrity moments can be spectacular to the point of theatre, but here they make sense. It pays tribute to the spirit of Schiaparelli: to make the impossible walk into the room.

Schiaparelli: Fashion Becomes Art
V&A South Kensington
The Sainsbury Gallery
28 March – 8 November 2026
More information and tickets, HERE.

Author: Lina Ress

Lead image: Mae West wearing Elsa Schiaparelli in Every Day’s A Holiday (1937). Moviestore Collection Ltd – Alamy.