Schiaparelli: Fashion becomes art at the V&A

Stepping into the Victoria & Albert Museum’s Sainsbury Gallery is like being invited into a fever dream of 20th-century fashion. Schiaparelli: Fashion Becomes Art, the first UK retrospective devoted solely to Elsa Schiaparelli, reads less like a traditional exhibition and more like an encounter with the miraculous mind of a designer who refused to choose between whimsy and intellect.

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The exhibition is staggering in its ambition: over 400 objects - 100 ensembles, 50 artworks, and a miscellany of accessories, theatrical costumes, jewellery, and archival treasures - chart the career of a woman who made the streets of Paris, the stages of London, and the red carpets of New York her playground. At the heart of the show are the pieces that made Schiaparelli a household name in avant-garde circles: the Skeleton dress (1938), its bones eerily padded as if in mockery of mortality; the Tears dress, a shimmering exercise in melodrama; and a hat shaped like an upside-down shoe, a playful wink to Salvador Dalí’s own absurdist genius. Alongside these sit artworks by Pablo Picasso, Jean Cocteau, and Man Ray - not as adjuncts, but as equals in a conversation between art and couture that Schiaparelli orchestrated with unparalleled excellence.

 The exhibition is divided into four thematic chapters, but it is perhaps the personality of the curator’s storytelling that carries you from one room to the next. Designing the Modern Wardrobe introduces us to a Parisian couturière unafraid of trousers on women, trompe-l’oeil sweaters, and circus horses stitched onto dinner suits. Creative Constellations is a love letter to collaboration: here, Schiaparelli is both collaborator and provocateur, trading ideas with surrealists, painters, and sculptors, dissolving the borders between fashion and high art.

London, too, receives its moment in the spotlight. Schiaparelli’s Mayfair salon (1933) is represented with sumptuous garments that capture both the elegance and eccentricity of British high society - a burgundy velvet suit embroidered in gold, a wedding dress in oyster-coloured rayon, and costumes for stage and screen that hint at a designer who understood that clothing could be theatre in its own right.

The exhibition culminates in A Golden Thread, where the contemporary magic of Daniel Roseberry, creative director since 2019, brings the House’s surrealist DNA into the 21st century. Ariana Grande’s Oscars gown sparkles with cinematic drama, while Dua Lipa’s modern Skeleton dress nods to Schiaparelli’s irresistible wit, proving that the marriage of imagination and technique is timeless.

What stays with you most after a visit is the irrepressible personality of Schiaparelli herself: fearless, playful, and mercurial. She was a designer who laughed in the face of convention, transforming ordinary objects into the extraordinary, and coaxing art into the seams of her dresses. In the V&A, her legacy is not preserved behind glass like some dusty trophy; it is alive, exhilarating, and occasionally mischievous.

Schiaparelli: Fashion Becomes Art runs at V&A South Kensington from 28 March to 8 November 2026. For anyone with an appetite for an exhibition that feels like a parody of elegance and extravagance, where couture converses with absurdity and high art collides with theatrical touches, this is a chance to witness fashion not as clothing but as an art form.