Is fashion art? If your answer is “no,” you likely haven’t seen the work of Elsa Schiaparelli. Cristobal Balenciaga called the Italian surrealist designer the “only real artist in couture.” And soon, her dazzling works will be curated into the first Schiaparelli retrospective in the UK, Schiaparelli: Fashion Becomes Art at the Victoria and Albert Museum.
1940. Photograph by Fredrich Baker/ Condé Nast via Getty Images. All photographs courtesy of the V&A, London.
Inspired by the illimitable creativity and vision of Maison Schiaparelli, curators Sonnet Stanfill, Rosalind McKever, and Lydia Caston will showcase a mix of more than two hundred of the designer’s creations and highlight new research on her collaborations with other visual and performing artists. To the delight of Schiaparelli devotees and newcomers alike, it will include never-before-seen or little-seen garments.
Caston, who is the V&A’s Exhibition Project Curator, joined the museum in 2018 to work on photography projects, often with a fashion focus. Along with other team members at the V&A, Caston worked to tie together research across various departments at the V&A—textiles, fashion, paintings, drawings, photography, and theater.
Fashion Becomes Art serves as the stage on which Schiaparelli’s work is presented in the context of her fashion contemporaries. Yves Saint Laurent, Charles James, Balenciaga, and Hubert de Givenchy, all lauded her designs as creativity beyond couture—true works of art. Schiaparelli also saw herself as more than just a fashion designer. In her 1954 autobiography, Shocking Life, she mentions that she always saw herself pursuing a career as an artist of some kind and that if she were not a designer, she would have perhaps chosen a career as an actor, singer, painter, or sculptor. Her collaborations with Salvador Dalí are renowned in the world of art, with examples such as the Skeleton dress, Tears dress, and a hat shaped to look like an upside-down shoe—all included in the exhibition.
Visitors will be able to follow Schiaparelli’s trajectory, from single motherhood in Italy to design fame in interwar Paris. Her inaugural collection, made with no formal training, was launched in 1927. Her audacious designs were seen as a breath of fresh air at a time when women’s clothing typically followed certain conventions of understated propriety and decorum. The women who wore Schiaparelli boldly defied fashion norms, igniting a change to the existing codes of clothing design with brighter colors, kitschy motifs, exaggerated proportions, and adornments that were meant to attract attention. Women in the surrealist circle such as Eileen Agar and Gala Dalí were fans of Schiaparelli and avid wearers of her clothes. Her creations also caught the attention of the fashionable elite in America, leading to the expansion of the maison overseas into the 1930s.
Photograph © Giovanni Giannoni, courtesy of Patrimoine Schiaparelli, Paris.
Maison Schiaparelli grew quickly within the span of five years, with four hundred employees producing over seventeen thousand couture garments being handmade to perfection in Paris each year.
The exhibition experience, designed by architecture and design studio Nebia Works, takes inspiration from the surrealist photographs of the 1930s by Cecil Beaton and Horst P. Horst. Visitors will have an opportunity to engage with the objects through augmented reality technology. An accompanying catalogue includes chapters featuring original research by V&A curators and leading experts in the fields of fashion and art history. These essays will highlight Elsa Schiaparelli’s designs, collaborations, and foray into America. An expedition into the surreal world of Schiaparelli sounds like a fitting way to welcome spring, along with its fresh beginnings and blooming ideas. –Urvashi Lele
Schiaparelli: Fashion Becomes Art • Victoria and Albert Museum, London • Opens March 28 2026• vam.ac.uk.
