Elsa Schiaparelli’s Surrealist World Takes Center Stage at the V&A
A handwritten note from Salvador Dalí, tucked beneath a sketch for a skeleton dress, now hangs beside the finished 1938 garment at the Victoria & Albert Museum. The pairing is small, but it captures the larger argument of “Schiaparelli: Fashion Becomes Art,” the first UK exhibition devoted to Elsa Schiaparelli: she was not merely adjacent to the avant-garde of 1930s Paris. She helped define it.
The exhibition presents the Italian designer as a figure who moved fluidly between fashion and fine art, and who influenced Surrealist artists as much as she absorbed their ideas. Dalí’s lobster telephone followed the lobster dress he made for Schiaparelli in 1936. Meret Oppenheim’s fur-covered Object emerged after a conversation about a fur bangle Schiaparelli had designed. Man Ray’s 1939 image of a harlequin with a lantern for a head drew on Schiaparelli’s Harlequin coat from her Modern Comedy collection, launched in October 1938. Picasso, meanwhile, was struck by her hats with horseshoes and painted Nusch Éluard wearing one.
That exchange is central to the show’s thesis. Schiaparelli was often dismissed as a designer borrowing from Surrealism, but the exhibition argues for something more reciprocal. Her work helped turn clothing into a site of artistic experimentation, where the ordinary could become strange and the practical could become poetic.
Just as important, Schiaparelli understood the realities of modern women. Alongside her more theatrical pieces, she designed trouser suits, trompe l’oeil sweaters that mimicked blouses, and jackets with expanded pockets so a purse was unnecessary. She used visible zippers, then a new technology, and experimented with plastic-like materials. Her clothes were often witty, but they were also alert to mobility, work, and travel.
That balance between invention and utility runs through the exhibition. During World War II, Schiaparelli made a jacket covered in vegetables, complete with carrot buttons — a playful gesture that also echoed wartime ideas of self-sufficiency and home-grown food. In another room, a case of buttons underscores how seriously she treated detail: some were commissioned from artists, including Alberto Giacometti.
Schiaparelli’s fashion house operated from 1927 to 1954, was later revived by Diego Della Valle, and is now led creatively by Daniel Roseberry. But the V&A exhibition makes clear that her most enduring legacy is historical: she helped collapse the distance between art and dress, and in doing so gave fashion a more radical vocabulary.
