How Elsa Schiaparelli Became One of Fashion’s Most Delightfully Bizarre Designers
A new exhibition at the V&A explores the house founder’s history and legacy, especially when it came to her artistic leanings.
Step into London’s V&A museum this weekend, and you’ll be greeted with a surrealist wonderland. Elsa Schiaparelli’s fantastical gowns; woven jackets with embroidered circus horses and mirrored paillettes; carrot-shape silk buttons; and works by everyone from Man Ray to Salvador Dalí, Jean Cocteau, and Pablo Picasso come together in a show dedicated to the Italian couture house’s impact and legacy. Enter: Schiaparelli: Fashion Becomes Art, the U.K.’s first exhibition devoted entirely to the avant-garde designer and the house she birthed.
The show explores one of fashion’s most adventurous and delightfully bizarre couturiers. “She was the first punk,” says Lydia Caston, the V&A’s project curator, who worked on the Fashion Becomes Art alongside senior fashion curator Sonnet Stanfill and paintings curator Rosalind McKever. “She’s very daring. She did costumes for stage and screen. She worked with innovative materials, made dresses out of glass and cellophane, and dressed some really important and interesting women. We’re thinking of her as the fashion designer’s favorite fashion designer.”
The exhibition traces Schiaparelli’s creations from her earliest days in Paris in the 1920s, when she collaborated with surrealist writers, painters, and sculptors. At that time, she introduced The Skeleton Dress, a black silk piece made with Dalí that featured padded ridges as bones on the bodice. While a number of women have owned the iconic design over the years, this is the only known surviving garment today. It’s so fragile that the conservation team at the V&A estimates the show’s run will be the last opportunity for the public to view it.
“We could see Vivienne Westwood or McQueen being really inspired by that,” Caston says of the provocative garment. “Galliano was inspired by her newsprint textile, which she created with promotional stories about herself, to create his dress. There’s a perfume bottle, which Jean-Paul Gautier has obviously been inspired by—it’s based on her body.”
Like Daniel Roseberry, the current designer at the house of Schiaparelli, Elsa’s work was not for the timid, and the exhibition proves this fact. Fashion Becomes Art features over 400 objects—many selected by Roseberry and his team from the house’s archives—with 100 looks, 50 artworks, and a range of perfumes, jewelry, and accessories. That includes the intricate red gown Ariana Grande wore to the 2025 Academy Awards designed by Roseberry, outfitted with 50,000 hand-embroidered sequins and crystals, and a playful red pump (a nod to Elsa Schiaparelli’s Shoe Hat meets The Wizard of Oz).
Ariana Grande’s Oscars dress.
Stanfill, Caston, and McKever conducted the first research into Schiaparelli’s London years, the results of which are on view for the first time. “We thought it might have been a watered-down version of what she was offering in Paris, but they were really striking garments,” says Caston, referencing tweed and tartan creations.
The show places Schiaparelli as a bold experimenter across art and fashion. “Lots of research has focused on her as a collaborator with the surrealist artists, but here, she’s an active protagonist, someone who was a big inspiration in that field,” says Caston. “Dalí described her premises of Place Vendôme, where the house is today, as the beating heart of surrealist Paris.”
Schiaparelli: Fashion Becomes Art is on view March 28-November 8, 2026 at the V&A museum.
