It's tempting to reduce Elsa Schiaparelli to a series of spectacular images: a dress with ripped patterns, a hat shaped like a shoe, silhouettes that defy good taste with insolent elegance. But the exhibition "Schiaparelli: Fashion Becomes Art," presented at the Victoria and Albert Museum, reminds us that the significance of her work goes far beyond eccentricity.
For Schiaparelli, fashion was not merely an ornament of the modern world; it was an active critique, sometimes joyful, often unsettling. The first exhibition in the UK ever devoted to the founder of the haute couture house, the V&A project spans nearly a century of creation, from the 1920s to the present day. It places Schiaparelli at the heart of innovation, a key figure in a prestigious universe blending fashion, art, and performance that stretched from Paris to London and New York, between the two world wars and until 1954. The fashion designer was an entrepreneur, a cultural strategist, and a woman who understood the symbolic power of the clothed body.
In a context where women's fashion was still largely subject to norms of propriety and controlled seduction, Schiaparelli introduced disruption, using humor, absurdity, and provocation as tools of liberation. Her collaborations with Salvador Dalí—the skeleton dress, the lobster dress, the suit with drawer pockets, the repurposed accessories—were not merely artistic flourishes, but political gestures in the broadest sense: a refusal to allow women's clothing to be solely graceful, flattering, or reassuring.
The exhibition brings together more than 200 objects—clothing, accessories, jewelry, works of art, photographs, and archival materials—whose abundance is anything but ornamental. This profusion underscores how Schiaparelli deliberately blurred the boundaries between disciplines, long before fashion asserted its cultural status with such confidence. Couture engages in a dialogue with Pablo Picasso, Jean Cocteau, and Man Ray, but also with film and theater, where his creations enjoyed great popularity, revealing a personality deeply aware of image, performance, and the gaze.
What the exhibition also highlights is Schiaparelli's often underestimated role as an independent economic figure. A woman at the helm of one of the most talked-about fashion houses of the interwar period, she built a creative empire in a male-dominated environment. Her vision of luxury was audacious, sometimes irreverent, but always clear-sighted about the need to seduce, shock, and sell. This tension between commerce and experimentation runs throughout the exhibition, without ever being softened.
The final section of the exhibition looks to the present, with creations by Daniel Roseberry, the house's current artistic director. Far from a simple nostalgic homage, his silhouettes extend the spirit of Schiaparelli by accentuating the sculptural, almost anatomical, dimension of the garment. Bodies are redesigned, amplified, sometimes constrained, reminding us that fashion continues to be a battleground between desire, power, and representation.
Presented at the V&A, an institution that houses one of the world's most important collections of Schiaparelli clothing, the exhibition poses a fundamental question: what does it mean today to assert that fashion is an art? Through Schiaparelli, the answer appears less as an aesthetic claim than as an intellectual stance. Fashion becomes art when it thinks, when it disturbs, when it refuses to conform to expectations. In these times of cultural and political uncertainty, Schiaparelli's famous phrase resonates with particular force: "In difficult times, fashion is always extravagant." Not out of frivolity, but out of necessity; because excess, for her, was a way of saying no, and of imagining things differently.
“Schiaparelli: Fashion Becomes Art”, The Sainsbury Gallery
Victoria and Albert Museum South Kensington
Cromwell Road, London (England)
From March 28 to November 8, 2026
