V&A’s New Schiaparelli Exhibition Traces How Surrealism Turned Fashion Into Art
A century before “wearable art” became a marketing phrase, Italian designer Elsa Schiaparelli (1890–1973) was already treating the dressed body as a site of invention, mischief, and transformation. This month, the Victoria and Albert Museum (V&A) in London opens a major exhibition dedicated to her work, positioning Schiaparelli not simply as a couturière with a flair for spectacle, but as a figure deeply enmeshed in the avant-garde culture of the 1930s.
Titled “Fashion Becomes Art,” the exhibition examines how Schiaparelli’s Paris fashion house — founded in 1927 — operated in close conversation with artists who were redefining the boundaries of image-making and the unconscious. The show foregrounds her collaborations with some of the era’s most recognizable names, including Salvador Dalí, Man Ray, and Alberto Giacometti, and argues for Schiaparelli’s role as a designer who translated Surrealism’s visual logic into garments meant to be worn, moved in, and seen in public.
Schiaparelli’s most memorable designs often hinge on a productive discomfort: the body is celebrated, but also reimagined as something mutable. The exhibition highlights her use of intense corsetry and unconventional, curving boning to exaggerate shoulders and hips, creating silhouettes that both enhance and distort anatomy. In other works, she flirted with the idea of the body’s interior — a theme that Surrealists returned to repeatedly — turning what is usually hidden into a theatrical surface.
Among the best-known examples are pieces made in collaboration with Dalí. One dress, shaped by skeletal boning, evokes an exposed framework beneath the skin, while another is adorned with the artist’s lobster motif, a symbol that collapses the boundaries between the erotic, the absurd, and the uncanny. Schiaparelli also pursued hybrid imagery that fused human, animal, and plant forms, a strategy that made the body feel at once glamorous and strangely other.
The V&A show also underscores a key aspect of Schiaparelli’s appeal: her ability to balance darkness with wit. Like the Surrealists who inspired her, she embraced drama and humor as twin engines, allowing playfulness and frivolity to offset more disquieting undertones.
“Fashion Becomes Art” extends its timeline into the present by spotlighting the label’s recent revival under creative director Daniel Roseberry. His reimagining of Schiaparelli has been widely embraced for its high-voltage surfaces and sculptural bravura — designs that often feature gold-toned elements, body-cast plating, sweeping feathers, and a contemporary update of Surrealist fantasy.
In tandem with the exhibition, Artsy has also pointed readers toward contemporary artists whose work echoes Schiaparelli’s sensibility. Among them is British artist Paloma Proudfoot (b. 1992), whose wall-based ceramics depict bodies that bend, break, and expand — rib cages, spines, scales, and feathers rendered with a delicacy that complicates their potentially gory subject matter. Proudfoot’s practice draws on pattern cutting, assembling flat ceramic components into joined forms, a method that resonates with Schiaparelli’s own interest in construction and the body’s architecture.
Also noted is American painter Naudline Pierre (b. 1989), whose paintings conjure clustered figures draped in fiery swathes of feathers that read as wings, cloaks, or growths emerging from the body — imagery that aligns with Schiaparelli’s fascination with metamorphosis and theatrical adornment.
By placing Schiaparelli’s couture alongside the artistic networks that shaped it — and by tracing how that legacy is being reactivated today — the V&A’s exhibition makes a case for fashion as a serious participant in 20th-century visual culture, not merely its glamorous afterimage.
