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There is a story Elsa Schiaparelli tells in her autobiography about the moment she realised what fashion could be. Not the making of clothes to sell, but something closer to the feeling she got working alongside Salvador Dalí, Jean Cocteau, Man Ray and Cecil Beaton. ‘Working with artists gave one a sense of exhilaration,’ she wrote. 'One felt supported and understood beyond the crude and boring reality of merely making a dress to sell.' That word, exhilaration, is the one V&A project curator Lydia Caston keeps coming back to. It is also, quietly, the animating spirit of the V&A's new exhibition. Schiaparelli: Fashion Becomes Art opens on 28 March, and it is the first show ever devoted to the storied fashion house in the UK. It has been a long time coming.
Elsa Schiaparelli was born in 1890 in Rome into a family that traced its ancestry to the Medicis. She was not, by her own account, a woman who took easily to expectation. She left the eternal city in her early twenties, drifted through London and New York, and arrived in Paris in the early 1920s, where a chance encounter with couturier Paul Poiret set her on a different path. By 1927, working from a small atelier, she had produced a hand-knitted trompe-l'oeil sweater that stopped an American buyer cold and launched her career. Within a decade, her salon was the most talked-about in Paris.
What made it so was not merely the clothes, extraordinary as they were. It was the company she kept and the way that company shaped everything she made. Both Dalí and Cocteau were drawn to the idea of metamorphosis and, as Caston puts it, ‘they recognised the transformative power of Schiaparelli's work.’ Dalí saw her Place Vendôme premises as the beating heart of surrealist Paris; Cocteau called it a laboratory for masquerade. The exhibition traces these collaborations through garments, paintings, sculpture and photography, with loans from major international art museums. The V&A’s own collection yields some of the most arresting objects: a ‘Skeleton’ dress, a ‘Tears’ dress, a hat in the form of an upside-down shoe, all made with Dalí. Over 400 objects in total, among them 100 garments and 50 works of art.
But there is another story running through the show, and it is one about interiors. Schiaparelli brought the same exacting eye to her homes as she did to her clothes. From 1928, she worked with French decorator Jean-Michel Frank, first on her boutique at 4 rue de la Paix, then on her apartment on rue Saint-Germain and her home on rue Barbet-de-Jouy. When she moved her couture salon to 21 Place Vendôme in 1935, what she called ‘the world's centre of elegance’, she brought Frank back, this time with Alberto Giacometti. The window displays, conceived by her long-standing collaborator Bettina Bergery, became a draw in their own right, built around two articulated wooden figures called Pascal and Pascaline, who will both feature in the show, alongside a spiral ashtray, a columnar light, a screen illustrated by Marcel Vertès, and a lamp and ashtray by Giacometti and Frank.
Elsa's private life was no different. The hôtel particulier (townhouse) she moved into on rue de Berri in 1937 had paintings on every wall, stone sculptures through the rooms, Dalí among the regular guests. She lived there until her death in 1973.
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The exhibition does not stop at her retirement in 1954. Caston is clear that Schiaparelli's real legacy is something harder to pin down than any single garment: she ‘encouraged her clients to dare to dress differently, to dress in a way that demanded that people look twice.’ That impulse runs directly into the work of the current creative director, Daniel Roseberry, who makes his V&A debut here. His starting points, Caston notes, can be ‘a texture, a button, an accessory, a colour’ or something that takes an original Schiaparelli silhouette and pushes it to ‘extreme exaggeration.’ The line between homage and reinvention is, as it always was with this fashion house, productively blurred.
The exhibition design draws on the spare, charged atmosphere of 1930s fashion photography. It is a considered setting for a story that has never quite been told in full, until now.
Schiaparelli: Fashion Becomes Art, V&A South Kensington, 28 March to 8 November 2026. vam.ac.uk
