In 1937, Elsa Schiaparelli bottled a perfume named Shocking inside a glass torso sculpted by the Surrealist artist Leonor Fini. The flacon was molded after the exaggerated hourglass curves of Hollywood star Mae West, for whom Schiaparelli had tailored costumes without ever meeting her in person—West had simply sent a plaster cast of her own body to Paris.
To wear Schiaparelli was never merely to dress; it was to inhabit a sculpture, a provocation, a joke, or a nightmare.
In Schiaparelli: Fashion Becomes Art at the Victoria and Albert Museum’s Sainsbury Gallery, this fearless fusion of fashion, performance, and fine art receives its definitive retrospective. Curated by Sonnet Stanfill alongside a powerhouse team of V&A specialists, the UK’s first major survey of the Maison brings together over 400 objects spanning nearly a century of radical sartorial invention.
Architectural Déjà Vu: Nebbia’s Spatial Illusion
To step into the exhibition space—designed by London-based architectural studio Nebbia—is to walk directly into the high-contrast grain of a Surrealist photograph. Rejecting standard museum display pedestals, Nebbia constructed a dreamlike, non-linear maze anchored by the psychoanalytic concept of déjà vu.
The gallery architecture operates on looping sightlines. Perpendicular walls rise to asymmetric heights of 3.3 meters and 4.4 meters, intersecting to form what Nebbia terms “infinite zooms.” Visitors double back through layered thresholds, encountering the same garment from altered vantage points under the waxing and waning twilight lighting designed by Studio ZNA.
Instead of rigid plasterboard, vast expanses of the gallery walls are folded from heavy 280 gsm hemp paper with crisp standing seams—mimicking the intimate atmosphere of a couture atelier’s backstage. Surfaces coated in cream-white suede paint, faux fur, and fabric silk wallpaper mirror the tactile subversion that defined Schiaparelli’s 1930s output.
The Dialogue Across Time: Elsa Schiaparelli and Daniel Roseberry
The exhibition opens not with a historical chronology, but with a visceral visual collision across generations. Elsa Schiaparelli’s famous 1938 Skeleton Dress—a midnight-blue silk crepe gown featuring padded, bone-like quilting created in collaboration with Salvador Dalí—stands adjacent to Daniel Roseberry’s 2021 Lung Dress.
Roseberry’s piece, featuring a gilded brass bronchial tree neckpiece worn by Bella Hadid at Cannes, mirrors the structural audacity of Elsa’s work so closely that the decades separating them dissolve entirely.
Throughout the gallery, Roseberry’s 25 contemporary couture looks act as rhythmic counterpoints to Elsa’s 85 historic garments. In one room, Roseberry’s S/S 2024 white haute couture bridal gown displays a exaggerated keyhole cutout—a direct homage to Schiaparelli’s revolutionary brass padlock clasps from 1935. Nearby, his Ruby Slipper gown reinterprets the surrealist inverted Shoe Hat co-designed with Dalí in 1937.
Subversive Networks: Female Collaboration in Modernism
A central triumph of the exhibition—driven by V&A senior art curator Rosalind McKever and photography curator Lydia Caston—is its re-framing of Schiaparelli’s artistic circle. Rather than treating her purely as a muse or passive recipient of male Surrealist genius (such as Jean Cocteau or Salvador Dalí), the show highlights her position at the center of an expansive network of female creators.
Display cases showcase Meret Oppenheim’s fur-trimmed bracelets alongside clear vinyl necklaces crawling with metallic insects—jewelry presented as biological specimens rather than conventional ornament.
The exhibition also features Pablo Picasso’s portrait of Nusch Éluard wearing Schiaparelli, illustrating how 20th-century artists were drawn to couture’s power to blur the boundary between fine art and modern life.
The Art of Vanishing: Mounting Haute Couture
The seamless continuity between historical garments and modern couture relies heavily on invisible technical craftsmanship. V&A senior costume mounting specialist Rachael Lee collaborated with the Maison Schiaparelli Heritage team over an 18-month period to engineer two custom mannequin silhouettes.
Painted in light-absorbing matte black, these custom figures recede visually within the gallery space. The garments appear suspended in air, their sharp tailoring, padded shoulders, and glistening metallic threadwork emerging directly from the shadows.
A Twilight Legacy
In one of the exhibition’s quietest installations, visitors encounter a precise recreation of Schiaparelli’s 1930s Place Vendôme perfume boutique, originally designed by Art Deco master Jean-Michel Frank. Inside the shop window sit Pascal and Pascaline—two articulated wooden mannequins that Elsa used in place of traditional store displays. They gaze out toward a simulated Parisian twilight.
Schiaparelli: Fashion Becomes Art demonstrates that fashion, when uncoupled from commercial utility and driven by genuine avant-garde intent, ceases to be decorative craft. It becomes a medium for exploring memory, humor, and architectural form—proving that Elsa Schiaparelli’s 1927 manifesto remains as urgent today as it was a century ago.