Inside the world of Elsa Schiaparelli

A show at the V&A Museum in London traces the journey of the designer who celebrated the outlandish

- Pooja Singh

If there’s one haute couture house that has mastered the attention economy, it is Schiaparelli.

Whether it’s Natasha Poonawalla’s metal bustier at the 2022 Met Gala, Kylie Jenner's lion-head dress from 2023, a simple white shirt with a pencil through the collar, or shoes with brass toes, the French fashion house has perfected a language of spectacle.

Creative director Daniel Roseberry is now carrying forward this design vocabulary of Italy’s Elsa Schiaparelli, who founded the house almost a century ago in Paris. A self-taught designer, Elsa was famous for bringing wit, eccentricity and a sense of the unexpected into the everyday wardrobe. At a time when contemporaries like Coco Chanel were refining a language of elegant minimalism, Elsa was putting shoes on heads and lobsters on skirts.

Even today, more than 50 years after her death, her creations have the power to provoke and captivate in equal measure. That's one of the biggest takeaways from Schiaparelli: Fashion Becomes Art, a new exhibition at the Victoria and Albert (V&A) Museum in London, showcasing over 500 objects, including garments, artworks and accessories, drawn from the V&A’s own archives as well as museums in the UK and the US, and private collections.

The show opens in an intimate room with three sweaters knitted by Armenian women, featuring trompe l'oeil scarves, showcasing Elsa’s love for craft and illusion. From there, it unfolds into a broader display of garments and accessories, tracing the full arc of the house, from its early innovations and closure in the 1950s to its revival in 2012 under Italian luxury tycoon Diego Della Valle, and its current chapter under Roseberry, who took over in 2019. Among the more striking pieces are the Tears dress (made of viscose rayon, then a new material, instead of the standard silk), and the Skeleton Dress, with an anatomically precise skeletal form stitched on to its surface.