Following on from Dior and Chanel, the new Schiaparelli exhibition completes a triptych of fashion exhibitions celebrating the legacy houses of the early twentieth century’s great couturiers at the V&A.
Upon the incendiary arrival of her avant-garde salon to Mayfair in 1932 Elsa Schiaparelli once supposedly quipped “Didn’t the Romans come and conquer Britain?” Almost a century later, the Italian couturière’s conquest is cemented at Britain’s first exhibition celebrating the audacious fashion house, Schiaparelli: Fashion Becomes Art.
Although considerably less well-known than her French peers, this exhibit highlights Schiaparelli as the most imaginative and witty dressmaker of her generation. Bringing together more than 400 objects — dresses, paintings, sculptures, photographs, jewelry and buttons — the majority from the V&A’s collection, the exhibition rehabilitates Schiaparelli as an experimental pioneer and protagonist of Surrealism.
The unfortunate neglect of the designer’s legacy is due largely to the untimely closure of the house in 1954. Having lay dormant for almost six decades, the resurrection of the Maison in 2012 and its appointment of Daniel Roseberry as creative director in 2019 has returned the Schiaparelli name to the centre of the fashion conversation.
“In many ways, the beauty of the house was that it was frozen in time after it closed…It was preserved like a jewel…But the cost of that dormancy is that many people don’t know that she is one of the five great couturiers who truly changed fashion.” says Roseberry.
This unique feature of the house is captured in the exhibition’s clever design connecting Elsa’s creations and those of Roseberry through a tunnel which effortlessly compresses a half century of elapsed time.
Schiaparelli was born into an aristocratic family of the Roman intelligentsia. Her father was a scholar of Arabic and Islamic studies, later becoming the Dean of the University of Rome. Her uncle had become famous for his now disproven discovery of canals and other signs of habitation of mars. The eclectic ideas which circulated Schiaparelli household resurface in this exhibition.
Her relationship with her family was nonetheless fraught. Having been made to feel unacceptably deficient in her appearance as a young girl, Schiaparelli once inserted flower seeds into her facial orifices — ears, mouth and nose — hoping that when they blossomed she would take on their beauty. This story would later inspire a painting by Salvador Dali, a close friend and collaborator of Schiaparelli, featured in this exhibition.
In an act of childhood defiance she once released a box of fleas at a party the grown-ups wouldn’t let her attend. Her Summer 1938 collection ‘Parachute’ was informed by a childhood memory of jumping from a window using an umbrella to slow her descent. Her biography is littered with fantastical stories like this. One cannot help but wonder what is true and what is evidence of Schiaparelli’s aptitude for creating flabbergasting beauty.
Her penchant for challenging (or to use one her favorite words) ‘shocking’ others which commenced in early childhood would persist through her life and design philosophy. Encouraged by Paul Pouriet, Schiaparelli launched her first collection in 1927 with no formal training. The simple but radical designs —white geometric patterns printed on black jumpers which anticipated the graphic t-shirt, became a fad. Within five years the atelier employed 400 staff who created 7,000 couture garments a year.
The Schiaparelli look was resolutely modern, redefining fashionable taste and ideas of beauty inflected by her humor and intellect: Tendrils of embroidered medusa-like hair cascade down a wedding veil. On a jacket, buttons are shaped like carrots and cabbages constituting Schiaparelli’s contribution to the war effort — WASTE NOT–WANT NOT.
Once infamously derided by her rival Chanel as ‘that Italian artist who makes clothes’, the V&A’s exhibition highlights the centrality of the Parisian avant-garde to her atelier and stakes claim to her role not merely as a friend of the surrealists, but a leading figure of the art movement.
Sonnet Stanfill, the V&A’s senior curator points out the surrealist’s preoccupation with fashion: “They saw clothing as a unique arena to appropriate,” says Stanfill. “For the surrealists, clothing was often erotic. For Dalí, the shoe was kind of an erotic appendage of the female leg.” The exhibition presents Schiaparelli’s atelier as a site where artists such as Salvador Dali, Jean Cocteau, Meret Oppenheimer, Eileen Agar and Man Ray collaborated with the Italian designer to manifest these experimentations.
The exhibition corroborates the triumph of Daniel Roseberry’s Schiaparelli. The Texan-born designer became the first American to head a French couture house – mirroring Elsa’s status as an outsider in Paris’ fashion circles a century earlier. In Roseberry’s words, what is essential is creating ‘the pebble in the boot, that thing that’s going to make it memorable…that thing that gets under your skin.’ A white jacket embroidered with golden palm trees on the cuffs and breasts which sprout into three dimensions at the shoulders exemplify this approach.
Daniel has become a master of the red carpet and capturing attention in the social media age. For three years running, the Grammy for best album has been taken home by artists dressed in Schiaparelli – Taylor Swift in 2024, Beyonce in 2025 and Bad Bunny in 2026.
“In difficult times, fashion is outrageous.” wrote Schiaparelli’s in her autobiography. The vibrant rebirth of her Maison under Roseberry offers a compelling validation of her claim. Lady Gaga’s bullet-proof Schiaparelli gown at Biden’s 2020 inauguration signaled the Maison’s enduring understanding of fashion as a form of political resistance. At Schiaparelli, surrealist excess is not merely escapism from political crisis, but an imaginative defiance against conservatism.
Schiaparelli: Fashion Becomes Art has been created in collaboration with Schiaparelli. With further support from Tia Collection, Kathryn Uhde and Revolut. The exhibition is on at V&A South KensingtonCromwell Road London, SW7 2RL, until Sunday, 8 November 2026. All images courtesy of V&A.
