Elsa Schiaparelli’s baroque fantasy

The clothes designed by legendary Parisian couturière Elsa Schiaparelli (1890-1973) possess a literary pedigree. In Muriel Spark’s novel The Girls of Slender Means, set in 1945 London, young women sharing the top floor of a Kensington boarding house take turns wearing the same Schiaparelli evening dress, ‘a rustle of silk’ and French elegance precious in hard times, a luxurious cast-off given to one of the smarter girls by ‘a fabulously rich aunt, after one wearing’. So distinctive is the dress, ‘with small side panniers stuck out with cleverly curved pads over the hips… coloured dark blue, green, orange and white in a floral pattern as from the Pacific Islands’, that it almost seems to have a life of its own: ‘You can’t wear it to the Milroy. It’s been twice to the Milroy… it’s been to Quaglino’s, Selina wore it to Quags, it’s getting known all over London.’ Later, when the boarding house is on fire, the couture dress becomes the embodiment of heartless evil when one of the girls decides to salvage it rather than help others to get out alive.

Did Elsa Schiaparelli create something more than, simply, clothes for socialites and film stars? The exhibition ‘Schiaparelli: Fashion Becomes Art’, which runs at the Victoria & Albert Museum, London until 8 November 2026, demonstrates that she did. The exhibition brings together 110 outfits and 50 artworks as well as accessories, jewellery, paintings, photographs, furniture, perfumes and archive material, illustrating how closely Schiaparelli’s fashion career was, and remains, woven into the artistic avant-garde of her time. Through her friend Gabrielle Buffet-Picabia, wife of Francis, the artist, Schiaparelli got to know Man Ray and Marcel Duchamp; she collaborated on several of her creations with Salvador Dalí, Alberto Giacometti and Jean Cocteau. Coco Chanel, who loathed her as a direct competitor, gave her the backhanded compliment of referring to her as ‘the Italian artist who makes clothes’. In 1934 Schiaparelli made the cover of Time magazine.

Born in Italy into a Roman family of aristocrats and scholars, Schiaparelli rebelled in every way against the conventional expectations of her family. In London in 1914 she met the theosophist Wilhelm Wendt de Kerlor, was engaged the next day, and in 1916 sailed with him to New York. By 1924 her marriage had ended and she had moved to Paris. It was in the City of Light that Schiaparelli met and befriended the couturier Paul Poiret, who encouraged her creativity. She began to design her own Modernist sportswear and trompe-l’oeil knitwear. But, as the couturière became immersed in the artistic atmosphere that permeated Paris in the 1920s and 1930s, the clothes she ‘invented’ (the word she used to describe her activity, as she did not sew) became infused with Surrealism and a fascination for the wondrous and otherworldly.

By then, Paris had become a Surrealist vortex, attracting into itself a cosmopolitan crowd of experimentalists – Salvador Dalí from Spain, René Magritte from Belgium, Max Ernst and Meret Oppenheim from Germany and Switzerland, Man Ray and Dorothea Tanning from America – who clustered around the French exponents of the movement and their imperious leader André Breton. While in New York, Schiaparelli had developed an interest in the iconoclasm and rebelliousness of the Dadaists. Parisian Surrealism adopted a similar anti-bourgeois stance, seeking immediate and unconstrained artistic expression where the subconscious mind was the primary creative force. The Surrealists explored ‘automatic’ (produced while in a dream-like state) writing and drawing, collages, and deliberately provocative cinema. In 1930 Luis Buñuel’s film L’Âge d’or (made with some input from Dalí), which attacked all aspects of bourgeois morality, caused an enormous scandal. It would remain banned in France until 1981.

Such was the context of Schiaparelli’s blossoming as a fashion designer and, along with her Surrealist friends, she embraced the absurd, the erotic and the subversive. The exhibition features some of her most daring designs, such as a ‘Skeleton’ evening dress in black crepe, adorned with a raised spine and ribs made of quilted wadding, the ‘Lobster’ gown painted by Dalí (for whom lobsters were sexually charged images), which was worn by Wallis Simpson, and a ‘Medusa’ wedding-veil embroidered with sinuous dark lines, slyly undermining the conventions of a bride’s wedding day. Accessories also reveal Surrealist preoccupations: gloves painted with a fingernail effect appear as uncanny doubles of the hands that wear them, while hats are loaded with hidden meaning as metaphors of female genitalia.

As befits Parisian haute couture there is much on show that is sumptuous. A 1936 black wool jacket, richly embroidered with palm trees in gold thread, was inspired by Napoleon Bonaparte’s white satin coronation outfit, which was similarly adorned as a tribute to Corsica, the Emperor’s birthplace. Schiaparelli often visited the Palace of Versailles and its Hall of Mirrors, and her ornamentation reveals a preoccupation with mirrors as portals. This also informed the visual universe of her friend Jean Cocteau, who wrote mischievously: ‘Her establishment in the Place Vendôme is a devil’s laboratory. Women who go there fall into a trap, and come out masked, disguised, deformed or reformed, according to Schiaparelli’s whim.’ Meanwhile Dalí suggested that rather than the café in Place Blanche where the Surrealists gathered and quarrelled, the crucible of avant-garde Parisian creativity was Schiaparelli’s couture house: ‘Here new morphological phenomena occurred; here the essence of things was to become transubstantiated; here the tongues of fire of the Holy Ghost of Dalí would descend.’

The exhibition brings into focus Schiaparelli’s two-fold appeal, which sounds contradictory but is beautifully captured in the arresting photography of Cecil Beaton, Horst P. Horst and Man Ray. She was on the one hand a creator of phantasmagoria who spoke the visual language of the wondrous; and, on the other, a translator of the ultra-modernity of her times – a machine age of aeroplanes and skyscrapers. ‘Being thoroughly modern’, Harper’s Bazaar wrote about her in April 1932, ‘she gives her clothes the essence of modern architecture, modern thought and modern movement.’ Schiaparelli experimented with fabric made of glass; on a work trip to London in 1931 she donned a pair of wide-legged culottes, a ground-breaking garment which was widely criticised as unfeminine. She embodied the 1930s as the decade that invented the jolie laide (‘pretty ugly’) and replaced good taste and natural beauty with chic and dash.

Where this rich and absorbing exhibition falters is in the framing. Almost entirely and strikingly absent is Schiaparelli’s trademark and favourite colour, shocking pink, which she described in her 1954 memoir Shocking Life: ‘Bright, impossible, impudent, becoming, life-giving, like all the lights and the birds and the fish in the world put together, a colour of China and Peru but not of the West – a shocking colour, pure and undiluted.’ It is a strange omission. Absent, too, with a few exceptions, are the sort of suggestive, cross-discipline displays that the V&A usually excels at. One showcase combines some opulent gowns with a 1939 light fitting by Jean-Michel Frank and Alberto Giacometti and a commedia dell’arte painted screen by Marcel Vertès. But why not also mock up, for example, the transporting experience of visiting Schiaparelli’s Parisian boutique in Place Vendôme? Though the lighting and soundscape are atmospheric, the show’s scenography is muted, in cool shades of grey, and leans towards a contemporary minimalism which entirely misses Schiaparelli’s enchanting oddness, her surreal idea of beauty.

There is another problem. Schiaparelli closed her house in 1954, and after a long hiatus the brand was revived in 2012 as Maison Schiaparelli, whose current creative director is American designer Daniel Roseberry. Rather than trace the historical arc of Elsa Schiaparelli’s career and – as was done very successfully in a recent Dior exhibition – end the show by highlighting a selection of contemporary designs, the exhibition scatters Roseberry’s bigger and bolder creations throughout alongside Schiaparelli’s own, and they are something of a distraction. It is understandably difficult to follow in the footsteps of such an inventor as Schiaparelli without lapsing – at least some of the time – into pastiche or caricature. And so, ultimately, it is the original work of Schiaparelli, that 1930s efflorescence of baroque fantasy in which women were conceived as apparitions, that feels timelessly modern.

Schiaparelli: Fashion Becomes Art is at the Victoria & Albert Museum, London until 8 November 2026.