Artist,
impresario, couturier: V&A to stage Schiaparelli retrospective
Exhibition
at Victoria and Albert Museum celebrates Italian designer’s moment-making
approach to fashion
Morwenna
Ferrier
Morwenna
Ferrier
Fri 6 Mar
2026 12.14 GMT
When
Kylie Jenner stood on the marble steps of the Petit Palais in 2023, a fake lion
head attached to her off-shoulder dress, even by the standards of the youngest
member of the Kardashian clan, the outfit looked a bit much.
Hand-painted
for lifelike realism, the Schiaparelli head and dress were designed by the
Texan Daniel Roseberry. Although already four years in the role of artistic
director, the look was transformative – earning Jenner front row seats at the
biggest shows and propelling the nearly century-old Paris fashion house, long
overshadowed by Chanel, Balenciaga, and Dior, into viral ubiquity.
As the
focus of the V&A’s new blockbuster exhibition about Schiaparelli wants to
make clear, this moment-making approach to fashion is not simply a reflection
of the social media age but entirely in keeping with the spirit of its Italian
founder, Elsa Schiaparelli. “I don’t consider Elsa to be a dressmaker”, says
Roseberry. “She was an image-maker, a culture creator, and she has been our
north star with every red carpet moment since.”
The lion
dress is sadly not among the 400 objects in the exhibition, which also includes
paintings, sculpture and furniture. But surreality abounds, thanks in no small
part to Schiaparelli’s many collaborations with artists including Jean Cocteau
and Salvador Dalí, including the skeleton dress, a macabre design with padded
black bones, and a hat made to look like an upside-down shoe, both designed
with Dali in the late 1930s.
Acting as
a through-line between the mid-1930s and now, more intimate pieces include a
wedding dress worn to a Golders Green synagogue and “some leopard print
booties, which Elsa never took off”, says Sonnet Stanfill, the V&A’s senior
fashion curator.
This is
the UK’s first major retrospective dedicated to the designer, and it aims to
position the Italian as much as an artist and impresario as a couturier. “She
was a good designer but a great self-publicist and promoter,” says Stanfill.
“She knew flagging that she worked with Jean Cocteau would get publicity. One
of the best ways to get eyeballs on your work was to work with artists and
cinema and theatre because of the audiences. It was the social media equivalent
of her time.”
Stanfill
says the idea was first raised by the museum in 2017, but no one predicted the
Schiaparelli brand would harness the internet quite so effectively in the years
that followed. “The way Roseberry’s work cuts through the culture as Elsa’s did
shows just how uncannily they both mastered capturing the attention economy in
their own time.”
Indeed,
if you’ve so much as glanced at a red carpet in the last five years, you’ll
have seen one of the so-called “Schiap pack” in action. Take Bella Hadid at
Cannes in 2021 wearing a black dress finished with a lung-shaped trompe l’oeil
brass necklace. Or Teyana Taylor’s “party in the back” dress replete with
crystal thong worn to this year’s Golden Globes. The brand is expected to dress
several nominees at next week’s Oscars ceremony.
Part of
the brand’s success then and now has been its ability to make witty but
wearable clothes. “We try to walk a fine line between humour and camp”, says
Roseberry, talking about 2024’s hot accessory: a glittery robot baby.
Mega-retrospectives,
which zero in on household names such as Dior and Balenciaga, have underlined
the V&A’s potential for fashion to broaden its audience. Over half a
million people visited 2019’s Dior exhibition. The V&A is hoping that
Schiaparelli will draw similar crowds.
On
Thursday evening, the designer showed an autumn/winter collection that met
Elsa’s work head on. The whole collection was underpinned by the same trickery
and trompe l’oeil, including “impossible knitwear” that paired Aran knits with
tulle to create the effect of floating clothes, and leather-look sheaths which
were actually made of wool. Anatomical hardware is a key Schiaparelli look,
widely copied on the high street. Here it appeared as egret feet dangling off a
bag (Elsa also loved monkey fur, but Roseberry prefers to use shearling).
“The big
question was what is the point of this other than to give some sort of
historical context to the house that people know today?”, says Roseberry, of
his involvement in the exhibition. “But her contribution has been echoing
through other people’s work for years. Whether that’s Martin Margiela, Rei
Kawakubo or Azzedine Alaïa. All these designers have been sort of carrying that
torch on her behalf.”
Stanfill
agrees. “It’s easy to get caught up with the weirdness, but she also made very
wearable clothes. They just happened to have a strange button or two.”
Schiaparelli:
Fashion Becomes Art opens at the Victoria and Albert Museum, London on 28 March
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