The Shocking Schiaparelli: On view at the V&A

12 April 2026, by Jane Francis

In this week's blog post, member Jane Francis reviews the V&A's latest fashion exhibition, Schiaparelli: Fashion Becomes Art, currently on view in South Kensington.

"In difficult times fashion is always outrageous” Elsa Schiaparelli - 1954, Shocking Life

Elsa Schiaparelli, founder of the independent House of Schiaparelli, is now a defining name in luxury fashion. Yet her legacy began as one woman’s singular journey into provocation, imagination, and uncompromising creative vision.

The Victoria and Albert Museum present the UK’s first major retrospective dedicated to Schiaparelli’s expansive creative multiverse. Spanning the 1920s to the present, the exhibition celebrates her enduring influence while tracing the house’s evolution under current creative director Daniel Roseberry. More than a retrospective, it repositions Schiaparelli’s radical practice for a new generation.

 Art & Collaboration

The exhibition positions Schiaparelli as much an artist and impresario as a couturier. Critically engaged with the interwar avant-garde, she was not merely adjacent to Surrealism—she was embedded within it. Her relationships with figures such as Salvador Dalí, Man Ray and Jean Cocteau were not passive associations but active collaborations.

Her work was not simply inspired by art—it was interwoven with it. Garments functioned as extensions of Surrealist thinking, placing fashion in direct dialogue with art, design, and performance. As the exhibition argues, Schiaparelli’s practice effectively elevated women’s clothing into a conceptual medium. For her, fashion was art.

Curated by Sonnet Stanfill, the exhibition is anchored in Schiaparelli’s own declaration that dress design is “not a profession but an art” (Schiaparelli, quoted in V&A, 2026). This statement operates not simply as epigraph, but as curatorial thesis.

I visited the exhibition on a sunny Easter Saturday. The V&A’s spring shows are always popular, and the galleries were buzzing with visitors, drawn into Schiaparelli’s world with visible intrigue.

Although she might initially appear out of step with today’s accelerated, hyper-digital culture, Schiaparelli’s work feels strikingly contemporary. In her topsy-turvy universe, gloves sprout fingernails, boots are trimmed with fur, dresses expose skeletal forms, buttons resemble carrots, and shoes become hats. Nothing is as it seems. Everything provokes.

At a moment when both fashion and culture risk being flattened by technological sameness, Schiaparelli offers something rare: a return to materiality that is handmade, emotional, imperfect, and deeply human.

The exhibition foregrounds her Surrealist collaborations—artists who “shared her love of the absurd and subversive” (Victoria and Albert Museum, 2026). As lead curator Stanfill notes, Schiaparelli “dressed women who were bold and unconventional and unafraid to stand out in a crowd” (V&A, 2026). The garments, like their wearers, resist conformity.

Among the 400 objects on display are some of the house’s most celebrated yet rarely seen works, including the 1938 “Bare Bones’ Skeleton dress created with Dalí. Using trapunto quilting, the design constructs a raised anatomy across the body, giving the uncanny impression of exposed bones beneath the surface. As the V&A notes, the effect “implies we are seeing the wearer’s own flesh and bones” (V&A, exhibition text). It remains one of the most unsettling—and enduring—examples of fashion as illusion.

Building a Modern Brand

Schiaparelli’s life was as unconventional as her designs. Born into aristocracy in Rome, she rejected expectation, moving first to London, then New York, and finally Paris, where she forged an identity defined by reinvention.

Her early success came with her 1927 knitwear—particularly the trompe-l’œil bow sweater. Developed with an Armenian knitter, the technique created the illusion of surface decoration through structure alone. The design spread rapidly, copied globally, signaling both her popularity and her instinct for visual innovation.

Equally contemporary is her understanding of publicity. Schiaparelli embraced spectacle, branding, and media attention long before they became industry norms. From her signature “Shocking Pink” to her perfume Shocking—presented in a bottle designed by the artist Leonor Fini modelled on Mae West’s torso—she understood that fashion extended beyond clothing into image, narrative, and persona.

As Stanfill observes, “she was a great self-publicist… the social media equivalent of her time” She knew by 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.” Haider, BBC-2022 (Haider, BBC, 2022). Visibility, for Schiaparelli, was part of the design process.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The exhibition design by London studio Nebbia, subtly reinforces this Surrealist sensibility. Visitors are guided through looping pathways, occasionally doubling back to encounter objects from new perspectives. This spatial disorientation echoes the logic of Surrealism itself—familiar, yet strange, creating a feeling of deja vu.

Garments are displayed alongside artworks, accessories, and archival materials in carefully staged vitrines and theatrical dioramas. Dramatic lighting enhances texture and surface, drawing viewers into the intricacies of work.

What fascinated me most were the details: the precision of embroidery, the tactility of materials, the small gestures that accumulate into something extraordinary: buttons, embroidery, fastenings and prints. The exhibition does however lean heavily toward finished outcomes. I was left craving a deeper insight into Schiaparelli’s process—her sketches, iterations, and technical development—which would further illuminate the ingenuity behind the work.
 

Hard Chic

Schiaparelli shuttered her house in 1954 following financial difficulties and died in 1973. Yet her visual language persists. Under Texan raised, Daniel Roseberry, appointed in 2019, the maison has been reactivated with a renewed emphasis on Surrealism and what he terms “hard chic.” His work bridges past and present, reinterpreting Schiaparelli’s wit through sculptural silhouettes and contemporary references (Victoria and Albert Museum, 2026).

As Roseberry notes, “with Chanel, Dior or Balenciaga, you don’t get a true personality or sense of humour like you do with Elsa Schiaparelli. That is her greatest legacy” (Roseberry, System Magazine 2024). 

Her influence is not stylistic but conceptual, an attitude, a way of thinking.

Schiaparelli: Fashion Becomes Art succeeds in positioning its subject not simply as a designer, but as a radical thinker who redefined what fashion could be. The exhibition captures the tension between craft and concept, humour and disruption, surface and meaning.

What emerges is not just a body of work, but a mindset—one that continues to challenge, provoke, and inspire. In revisiting Schiaparelli today, the V&A does more than historicise her legacy; it reactivates it.

The exhibition is open at the V&A South Kensington, London, until the 8th November 2026. 

For those interested in a deeper dive: accompanying the exhibition is an extensively illustrated and visually rich catalogue of 272 pages, Schiaparelli: Fashion Becomes Art exhibition Book published by the V&A.

Jane was recently in New York, where she visited the Museum at FIT's spring exhibition. You can catch up with her review on our blog.