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Schiaparelli: Fashion Becomes Art reframed couture as a radical artistic force, collapsing the boundary between garment and artwork with enduring impact.
SAMANTHA GREENE
Behind the Scenes: Schiaparelli: Fashion Becomes Art, Victoria and Albert Museum, South Kensington. Photo: David Parry / PA Media Assignments
The relationship between fashion and art has long existed in parallel, occasionally intersecting but rarely fully merging. At the Victoria and Albert Museum, Schiaparelli: Fashion Becomes Art brought that intersection into focus, presenting couture not as a decorative discipline, but as a form of artistic production with its own intellectual and cultural weight.
Elsa Schiaparelli was never content to operate within the expected boundaries of fashion. Born in Rome in 1890 into an intellectually rigorous family, she was shaped early by symbolism, literature, and the sciences, influences that later surfaced in her work through an instinct for transformation and abstraction. By the time she arrived in Paris, she had already begun to position herself not simply as a designer, but as a participant in a wider avant-garde, one that included artists, writers, and cultural provocateurs redefining the visual language of the twentieth century.
The exhibition traced this evolution with clarity and scale. Spanning the 1920s to the present, more than 400 objects, including garments, artworks, accessories, and archival materials, established the breadth of a practice that consistently resisted categorization. Schiaparelli’s early designs introduced a new visual vocabulary for modern dress, while later works moved decisively into surrealism, transforming clothing into a site of conceptual inquiry.
ABOVE: Vogue, 1940. Designer Elsa Schiaparelli wearing a black silk dress with a crocheted collar of her own design and a turban. Photo: Fredrich Baker / Condé Nast via Getty Images
ABOVE: Behind the Scenes: Schiaparelli: Fashion Becomes Art, Victoria and Albert Museum, South Kensington. Photo: David Parry / PA Media Assignments
“For me, dress designing is not a profession but an art,” Schiaparelli once said, a statement that resonated throughout the galleries. Her collaborations with figures such as Salvador Dalí, Jean Cocteau, and Man Ray were not ornamental partnerships, but intellectual exchanges that shaped both disciplines. The 1938 Skeleton dress and Tears dress, presented within this context, made clear that her work was never about decoration. It was about disruption.
That disruption extended beyond the salon. Schiaparelli understood early the power of image and persona, engaging with figures like Mae West to expand her work into the realm of performance and cinema. In these moments, fashion moved beyond private commission and into public consciousness, becoming part of a broader cultural dialogue about identity, illusion, and the body itself.
The exhibition’s staging reinforced this shift in perception. Garments were not treated as historical artifacts, but as autonomous works, carefully isolated and illuminated to emphasize structure, surface, and form. Mannequins became vessels rather than representations, allowing each piece to assert its presence without distraction. The result was a viewing experience that encouraged contemplation rather than consumption.
ABOVE: Mae West wearing Elsa Schiaparelli in Every Day’s a Holiday (1937), directed by Edward Sutherland. Photo: Moviestore
BELOW: Kuba Dabrowski Awar Odhiang, Paris, 2025 Schiaparelli by Daniel Roseberry Schiaparelli haute couture fall winter 2024 © Kuba Dabrowski. Photo courtesy Patrimoine Schiaparelli, Paris
ABOVE: Elsa Schiaparelli in her boutique at 21 Place Vendôme, Harper’s Bazaar, October 1935. Photograph by François Kollar © GrandPalaisRmn - Gestion droit d’auteur François Kollar
The exhibition also extended its narrative into the present through the work of Daniel Roseberry, whose direction of the house has reasserted its position within contemporary culture. His designs, marked by sculptural precision and material intensity, push couture toward objecthood. Hammered metals, exaggerated silhouettes, and surreal references do not revisit Schiaparelli’s past. They continue it, reinforcing the idea that fashion, at its highest level, operates as a conceptual discipline.
What emerged was not simply a retrospective, but a recalibration. The exhibition positioned Schiaparelli not as a historical figure confined to her era, but as an enduring force within a larger artistic lineage. Her work did not follow the movements of her time. It helped define them.
ABOVE: Behind the Scenes: Schiaparelli: Fashion Becomes Art, Victoria and Albert Museum, South Kensington. Photo: David Parry / PA Media Assignments
BELOW: Schiaparelli Haute Couture Fall Winter 2024 Look 30. Photo © Giovanni Giannoni. Photo courtesy Patrimoine Schiaparelli, Paris
In this context, Schiaparelli: Fashion Becomes Art did more than present garments. It clarified a position, one in which couture stands not at the edge of art, but firmly within it.
To explore the exhibition further and access curatorial insights, visit the Victoria and Albert Museum at www.vam.ac.uk