V&A Opens First Major U.K. Exhibition on Elsa Schiaparelli, From Surrealist Icons to Red-Carpet Couture

Beneath the Victoria and Albert Museum’s grand stone façade in South Kensington, a silk evening gown embroidered with a bright red lobster now faces a telephone crowned by the same crustacean. Nearby, a black crepe dress traced with padded bones seems to grow a second skeleton over the wearer’s body. Across the room, a gold lion’s head juts from the bodice of a 21st-century couture gown once photographed on a celebrity red carpet.

The staging is deliberate. “Schiaparelli: Fashion Becomes Art,” opening to the public March 28 in the museum’s Sainsbury Gallery, sets Elsa Schiaparelli’s most famous designs alongside works by Salvador Dalí, Pablo Picasso and Jean Cocteau, as well as the hyper-theatrical creations of the revived House of Schiaparelli. The exhibition is billed as the United Kingdom’s first major show devoted to the Italian-born couturier and her namesake fashion house.

Running until early November, the exhibition brings together more than 200 objects—and as many as 400, according to a recent preview—including garments, accessories, jewellery, paintings, photographs, sculpture, perfume bottles and archival documents. It traces a line from Schiaparelli’s late-1920s experiments in Paris through her interwar surrealist collaborations and the house’s contemporary incarnation under creative director Daniel Roseberry.

Tristram Hunt, director of the V&A, called Schiaparelli “one of the most ingenious and daring designers in fashion history” in a statement announcing the show. He said the museum, which holds what it describes as the U.K.’s national collection of fashion, sees her as “an ideal subject for a spectacular exhibition at the V&A” because her work “redefined standards of style and definitions of beauty” and operated at the intersection of fashion, art and performance.

A new fashion blockbuster for the V&A

The V&A is positioning the exhibition as the latest in a line of fashion blockbusters that have become major draws for the museum. Its 2019 show “Christian Dior: Designer of Dreams” attracted more than 500,000 visitors. More recent exhibitions have focused on Alexander McQueen, Gabrielle “Coco” Chanel, supermodel Naomi Campbell and contemporary African fashion.

Tickets for “Schiaparelli: Fashion Becomes Art” are priced at £28 on weekdays and £30 at weekends for adults, with concessions and under-26 discounts available. Members enter free but must book timed slots. Several early weekend dates and members’ previews sold out weeks in advance, and the museum has scheduled additional talks, workshops and an online course around the exhibition.

From trompe-l’oeil knits to surrealist collaborations

Born in Rome in 1890 and based for much of her career in Paris, Elsa Schiaparelli rose to prominence in the late 1920s with trompe-l’oeil knitwear and sharp, modern tailoring. By the 1930s she was widely regarded as Gabrielle Chanel’s great rival, dressing Hollywood stars and European society women.

What set her apart was an embrace of the avant-garde. Schiaparelli cultivated close friendships and collaborations with leading surrealist and Dada artists, including Dalí, Cocteau, Man Ray, Leonor Fini and Alberto Giacometti. She used their ideas—and often their drawings—to transform clothes into visual puzzles and sight gags.

Some of those collaborations, now part of fashion and art history, anchor the V&A show. The Lobster Dress, a white silk organza gown printed with a crimson lobster designed with Dalí in 1937, is displayed alongside Dalí’s Lobster Telephone, completed the following year. The museum’s own Skeleton dress, a black evening gown whose trapunto-padded bones protrude from the fabric, appears with the equally unsettling Tears dress, printed and appliquéd to resemble ripped flesh and worn with a matching veil.

Other pieces include a hat shaped like an upside-down shoe, evening coats bearing Cocteau’s elongated figures and perfume bottles such as “Shocking,” whose torso-shaped flask was designed by artist Leonor Fini. The V&A says it intends to show Schiaparelli not as an isolated couturier hiring artists for decoration, but as a collaborator whose house functioned as a kind of total artwork, with garments, interiors, graphics and fragrances speaking the same surreal language.

A London business—and a modern revival

The exhibition is also the first to scrutinize the London branch of Schiaparelli’s house, which operated alongside the Paris headquarters before World War II. Curators highlight the British clientele and Schiaparelli’s direct role in running the satellite, presenting her as a cross-border businesswoman at a time when female leadership in luxury fashion was rare.

“In difficult times fashion is always outrageous,” Schiaparelli once wrote, a line that appears prominently in the V&A’s material for the show. The museum draws a parallel between the political and economic turmoil of the 1930s and the uncertainty of the 2020s, suggesting that her skeletal dresses, faux-torn gowns and darkly playful accessories were responses to an anxious era as much as they were exercises in whimsy.

The final chapters of the exhibition jump forward, charting the house’s dormancy after Schiaparelli closed her couture business in 1954 and its 21st-century revival. Italian businessman Diego Della Valle acquired the name in 2007 and re-established the house at its historic address, 21 Place Vendôme in Paris. In 2017, French authorities granted Schiaparelli the official haute couture appellation.

Roseberry, a Texas-born designer who previously worked at Thom Browne, was appointed creative director in 2019, becoming the first American to lead a French couture house. Since then, his sculptural, surrealist-inflected collections—heavily featured in the V&A show—have appeared on red carpets worldwide.

The exhibition includes recent Schiaparelli haute couture worn by Ariana Grande and other celebrities, as well as pieces that have circulated widely on social media: a hand-embroidered faux lion’s head attached to a velvet evening gown, lung and heart necklaces cast in gold-tone metal, and sharply exaggerated shoulders and corsets that echo Schiaparelli’s historic silhouettes. Roseberry has said that jewellery and hardware are the most natural way for him to express the house’s surrealist heritage.

Delphine Bellini, chief executive of Schiaparelli, said in a statement that Elsa Schiaparelli’s “fearless imagination and radical vision” had “redefined the boundaries between fashion and art.” She described the V&A as “the perfect setting” to present the designer’s legacy alongside Roseberry’s “bold, sculptural designs that both honour and reinvent her vision for a new century.”

Viral “moments,” legal safeguards, and a wider program

By placing contemporary looks beside 1930s originals and artworks by Dalí, Picasso, Cocteau and Man Ray, the V&A argues that today’s heavily mediated red carpet is a performance space comparable to interwar salons and theatres. The museum’s fashion curators have said they want to show that Schiaparelli’s instinct for what would shock, amuse and be remembered long after a collection had passed prefigures the current emphasis on viral “moments.”

The loans underpinning the show are covered by the United Kingdom’s immunity-from-seizure regime under the Tribunals, Courts and Enforcement Act 2007, a legal protection designed to reassure lenders that works will not be impounded while on public display. The V&A has published a list of items covered, including major Schiaparelli ensembles and high-value artworks, underscoring the scale and international reach of the exhibition.

The museum has also built a wider program around the show, including a five-week online course on Schiaparelli and surrealism starting April 23; a “Teacher Twilight” evening with curator talks; a surrealist fashion illustration workshop; and an embroidery session with London firm Hand & Lock, each using objects from the exhibition as teaching tools.

The stakes for museum and fashion house

For the V&A, the stakes are high. Fashion exhibitions have become some of its most visible offerings and significant revenue sources, helping to drive visitor numbers and retail sales. For the House of Schiaparelli, the show offers museum-scale validation and international visibility at a moment when the brand is expanding globally and courting new clients.

In the half-dark of the Sainsbury Gallery, however, such strategic considerations are not immediately visible. Visitors encounter first the objects themselves: a dress that maps bones onto fabric, a lobster crawling across silk, a telephone rendered useless by crustacean claws, a molten-gold torso worn to an awards show. The V&A’s bet is that, nearly a century after Elsa Schiaparelli first shocked Paris, these images still have the power to draw crowds—and to sustain its claim that, under certain conditions, fashion does indeed become art.