Exhibition Review - Schiaparelli: Fashion Becomes Art
- Maria Cohen
- Aug 17
- 4 min read
This week we finally made it to the V&A to see the Schiaparelli: Fashion Becomes Art exhibition. It’s a fascinating celebration of fashion at its most imaginative and theatrical. Rather than presenting clothing simply as something to be worn, the exhibition reveals how Elsa Schiaparelli transformed fashion into an art form: witty, provocative, experimental and often wonderfully unexpected.
Elsa Schiaparelli (1890-1973) was one of the revolutionary figures of twentieth-century fashion. Her couture house became one of the most talked-about in interwar Paris, challenging accepted standards of style and conventional definitions of beauty. Her vision was resolutely modern, but her influence extended far beyond clothes. Working at the centre of Europe’s creative avant-garde, Schiaparelli placed fashion in direct conversation with painting, photography, graphic design, theatre and film.
It is precisely this multidisciplinary spirit that makes her work so naturally suited to the Victoria and Albert Museum. The V&A is home to one of the world’s most significant collections of dress and textiles and holds an important collection of Schiaparelli garments in Britain. Among the most extraordinary are the Skeleton Dress and the Tears Dress, created through Schiaparelli’s celebrated collaboration with Salvador Dalí. In this exhibition, fashion sits alongside paintings, photographs, sculpture, furniture, jewellery, perfume and archival material, creating a much broader portrait of Schiaparelli’s world. What emerges is not simply the story of a couturier, but one of creative ambition, collaboration and fearless innovation.
There is also a particularly satisfying London connection. Schiaparelli ran a London salon at 6 Upper Grosvenor Street between 1933 and 1939, making the exhibition feel, in some sense, like a return to a city that played an important part in her life and career.
Her granddaughter, the actress and model Marisa Berenson, offers a more intimate way of understanding the woman behind the mythology, describing Schiaparelli’s life as a continual “quest” for meaning, beauty, innovation and self. That idea of searching and transformation seems to run through the exhibition. Berenson remembers her grandmother as courageous, fiercely original and deeply enigmatic: a woman whose private world revealed itself most clearly through her imagination, humour and art.
That independence appears to have been present from the beginning. Born in Rome at the Palazzo Corsini into a family of aristocrats, intellectuals and explorers, Schiaparelli grew up surrounded by tradition and expectation, yet refused to be confined by either.
That tension between convention and rebellion would become one of the defining forces of her work. She did not simply want to make beautiful clothes, she wanted to challenge the assumptions surrounding beauty itself.
One of the most striking aspects of the exhibition is Schiaparelli’s relationship with Surrealism. Her collaborations with artists such as Dalí and Cocteau, demonstrate how freely she crossed the boundaries between fashion and fine art.
Familiar objects and parts of the human body appear in unexpected places: lobsters, eyes, lips and anatomical forms become motifs and ornaments. The results are humorous, unsettling and elegant all at once. Decades later, many of these ideas still feel surprisingly contemporary.
With an artist’s approach to dressing the body, Schiaparelli created striking spectacle from little more than fabric. She became known for stylish sportswear, sharply tailored day suits and dramatic evening gowns. Unusual textiles and unexpected silhouettes gave the women who wore her clothes an unmistakable aura of modernity.
Innovation was another constant throughout Schiaparelli’s career. One early example was her embrace of the zip fastening, which she began incorporating into fashionable sportswear and outerwear around 1928, at a time when it was still associated primarily with utilitarian clothing rather than high fashion. In Schiaparelli’s hands, even something as trivial as a zipper could become a statement of modernity.
Innovation was another constant throughout Schiaparelli’s career. One early example was her embrace of the zip fastening, which she began incorporating into fashionable sportswear and outerwear around 1928, at a time when it was still associated primarily with utilitarian clothing rather than high fashion. In Schiaparelli’s hands, even something as trivial as a zipper could become a statement of modernity.
The exhibition succeeds visually, too.
Dramatic silhouettes, intricate embroidery and flashes of Schiaparelli’s famous shocking pink create an atmosphere closer to entering a surreal dream than walking through a conventional fashion display. Seeing the garments at close range is particularly rewarding. Pieces that can appear simply extravagant in photographs reveal extraordinary craftsmanship, precision and intelligence in their construction.
What also makes the exhibition compelling is the conversation it creates between Schiaparelli’s original vision and the contemporary house. Her spirit survives in the exaggerated proportions, sculptural couture and body-inspired jewellery associated with Schiaparelli today, where Daniel Roseberry is the creative director. The connection between past and present makes clear that her legacy is not merely a recognisable aesthetic. It is a particular kind of creative freedom: permission for fashion to be strange, intellectual, humorous, provocative and beautiful at the same time.
At moments, the theatricality of the presentation risks competing with the garments themselves. Yet restraint would perhaps be the wrong language in which to celebrate Schiaparelli. Her work was about surprise, spectacle and the pleasure of disrupting expectations, and the exhibition embraces that spirit wholeheartedly. Ultimately, the V&A’s Schiaparelli exhibition is more than a retrospective of extraordinary clothes. It is a portrait of a woman who refused the boundaries placed around fashion, art and, in many ways, herself. What stays with you is not simply the lobster, the shocking pink or the surreal silhouettes, but Schiaparelli’s restless curiosity. Fashion, in her hands, could clothe the body while also expressing imagination, humour and spirit. That is what makes her work feel not like a relic of fashion history, but something startlingly alive.
The exhibition is still on until 8 November 2026 at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, UK.
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