How the Victoria & Albert Museum Is Bringing Elsa Schiaparelli to Life
3 min readElsa Schiaparelli was raised in Italy and spent her career in Paris, but England’s Victoria & Albert Museum has its own relationship to the pioneering Surrealist designer. In 1971, the museum’s landmark exhibit “Fashion: An Anthology” by Cecil Beaton featured 11 Schiaparelli pieces, making it the largest museum exhibit to feature her work to date. Fifty-five years later, the V&A is honoring her once again with “Schiaparelli: Fashion Becomes Art.” Filled with some of the designer’s most famous pieces, from her haunting Skeleton dress to a little-seen 1934 wedding gown, the show explores the house’s history from its beginning through the present day.
Schiaparelli models in 1936.
The exhibit “oscillates between Elsa Schiaparelli’s designs and designs by [the brand’s current creative director] Daniel Roseberry,” says Sonnet Stanfill, the senior curator of fashion at the V&A. For her, it illuminates the significant connection that Schiaparelli had with London. “The U.K. was a really important source not just of textiles, but also of clients, for Schiaparelli. Her London house was a key outpost that helped the ripple effect of Schiaparelli’s shocking creations expand beyond Paris.”
The show will include one of the last remaining examples of the Skeleton dress, part of the 1938 “Circus” collection, which Schiaparelli designed in collaboration with Salvador Dalí. The gown clings to the skin and has embroidery that depicts ribs and bones. “It’s quite macabre. It looks like the wearer’s own skeletal structure has come to the surface of the dress,” Stanfill says. Another highlight is a 1937 silk jersey evening coat. Ribbon roses cover the shoulders, while two faces are embroidered in profile further down. They were created from a sketch done by Jean Cocteau, another one of Schiaparelli’s Surrealist collaborators.
Cynthia Erivo in Schiaparelli.
The show will also feature family photographs lent by Marisa Berenson, Schiaparelli’s granddaughter, as well as items like perfume bottles, trimmings, and adornments, which are Daniel Roseberry’s favorite pieces in the exhibit. “It’s impossible to re-create that kind of beauty,” he says. “There’s a hardware room with all her jewelry, buttons, and bijoux, and this is where you see the most freewheeling side of her, which was constantly evolving. In terms of the clothing, seeing the Schiaparelli jacket represented in all its incarnations, with its sharp shoulder and nipped waist—she called it the Nutcracker silhouette—feels at once timeless to me and very now.” Schiaparelli’s story is unusual. She was raised in a family of aristocratic Italian academics and had no technical fashion skills when she began her business in the ’20s. “As a single mother, raising a young child and starting a business, not having any formal fashion training, being born in Italy, found herself an outsider,” Stanfill explains. “Making her way to the beating heart of the French couture industry as a female entrepreneur showed incredible nerve, determination, daring, and grit.”
A model wearing the brand’s spring/summer 2026 collection.
While so much of Schiaparelli’s work appears, to use a Schiaparelli-ism, shocking, it’s often grounded by simple and traditional lines. Her famous Lobster dress could pass for a demure evening gown—were it not for the large crustacean on the skirt. “This element of a classical silhouette, combined with slightly confrontational surface embellishment, makes her work still look very modern,” Stanfill says. She wants visitors to not only experience Schiaparelli’s groundbreaking career but also gain an understanding of who she was and how her vision remains relevant. That includes drawing attention to boundaries Schiaparelli pushed, such as adding zippers to evening dresses and using unusual textiles, including cellophane, plant fiber, and woven glass. “She wasn’t shy about embracing innovations in materials, and she liked to promote that element of her designs.” “Schiaparelli: Fashion Becomes Art” is about the art, but the artist is just as important. Schiaparelli closed her business in 1954, and it was revived in 2012. “In many ways, the beauty of the house was that it was frozen in time after it closed,” Roseberry says. “It was preserved like a jewel. It was never diluted or ruined over time. But the cost of that dormancy is that many people don’t know that she’s one of the five great couturiers who truly changed fashion. There is truly a before and after Elsa Schiaparelli. That’s what I hope people will bring home with them.”
This story appears in the April 2026 issue of ELLE.