New London exhibition celebrates the surrealist world of fashion house Schiaparelli

London’s prestigious Victoria & Albert Museum is set to unveil an ambitious new exhibition celebrating a century of bold, surrealist designs from the Italian fashion house Schiaparelli, highlighting the brand’s enduring connection between high fashion and fine art.

Opening this Saturday and running until November 8, “Schiaparelli: Fashion Becomes Art” features 400 carefully curated objects that trace the evolution of the brand from its avant-garde beginnings to its contemporary renaissance on today’s red carpets.

“This exhibition celebrates one of the most ingenious and daring designers in fashion history,” museum director Tristram Hunt stated Wednesday, emphasizing the brand’s revolutionary approach to couture.

Founded by Elsa Schiaparelli in Paris in 1927, the house quickly established itself as a boundary-pushing force in the fashion world. Unlike many of her contemporaries, Schiaparelli embraced practical yet forward-thinking designs including trouser suits for women – a radical choice for the era – alongside whimsical creations like leopard fur-adorned footwear.

What truly distinguished Schiaparelli was her deep integration with the Parisian artistic community of the 1930s, particularly her collaborations with Surrealist masters. Exhibition curator Rosalind McKever notes that Coco Chanel once described Schiaparelli as “that Italian artist who’s making clothes,” a characterization Schiaparelli would have embraced. “She even said, ‘For me, dress designing is not a profession, but an art,'” McKever told The Associated Press.

Among the exhibition’s most striking pieces is the iconic “Lobster Dress,” a white silk gown adorned with a large red lobster that Schiaparelli created with Salvador Dalí. The dress gained notoriety when worn by Wallis Simpson, the American socialite for whom King Edward VIII abdicated the British throne. Fittingly, the exhibition pairs this piece with Dalí’s famous “Lobster Telephone” sculpture from 1938, highlighting the creative dialogue between fashion and surrealism.

Another notable Dalí collaboration featured is the “Skeleton dress,” a black creation with three-dimensional quilting mimicking human bone structure. “You cannot imagine how shocking this would have been in 1938 when it was first shown. It is a kind of punk look,” McKever explained, underscoring the design’s revolutionary impact.

The exhibition also showcases an evening coat with pink silk roses, co-created by Schiaparelli and French artist Jean Cocteau, further illustrating the designer’s commitment to artistic partnerships that transcended conventional fashion boundaries.

Schiaparelli’s influence extended to Hollywood, where she dressed luminaries like Mae West and Marlene Dietrich. The latter particularly favored Schiaparelli’s sharply tailored trouser suits, which helped normalize this silhouette for women’s fashion globally.

While Elsa Schiaparelli retired in the 1950s and passed away in 1973, the exhibition demonstrates how the house’s creative legacy continues to thrive under current creative director Daniel Roseberry, who has successfully reinterpreted Schiaparelli’s surrealist vision for contemporary audiences.

Roseberry’s modern creations have adorned celebrities like Margot Robbie and Ariana Grande, bringing sculptural, conversation-starting designs back to prominent red carpet moments. One of the exhibition’s centerpieces is Grande’s spectacular red jewel-encrusted gown worn at last year’s Oscars during her performance from “Wicked.” The sumptuous ball gown features a ruby slipper protruding from its back, a clever homage to “The Wizard of Oz” that captures Schiaparelli’s spirit of playful surrealism.

Beyond clothing, the exhibition includes dazzling displays of jewelry, buttons, and perfume bottles, each conceived as miniature works of art in their own right. These accessories underscore how the Schiaparelli aesthetic extended beyond garments to create a complete artistic universe.

The Victoria & Albert Museum, with its long history of celebrating the intersection of art and design, provides an ideal setting for this retrospective of a fashion house that has consistently blurred the boundaries between wearable fashion and artistic expression over its century-long history.