The hottest exhibition in the upcoming London summer season will no doubt be the V&A’s “Elsa Schiaparelli: Fashion Becomes Art”. It’s the first time a major retrospective of her work has been staged in the UK, and it promises to dazzle a new generation with her “moment-making” designs.
“Schiap”, pronounced “Skap”, as she called herself, was as much an artist and impresario as she was a couturière. She understood the power of self-promotion and the publicity — some might say notoriety — gained from working with artists, theatre productions and movie stars.
In today’s terms, she could be seen as an instinctive, shrewd influencer, an image- and culture-maker, unafraid to take risks with her witty, outré creations.
Schiaparelli is most famous for her association with Surrealists like Salvador Dalí and Jean Cocteau. A deeply unconventional woman herself, she envied them their imaginative freedom.
“Working with these artists, and photographers like Cecil Beaton, Man Ray, and [Horst P] Horst, gave one a sense of exhilaration. One felt supported and understood beyond the crude and boring reality of merely making a dress to sell,” she once said.
Probably the most famous piece of clothing she created with Dalí was the provocative “lobster dress”. The lobster was a recurring motif in Dali’s work, representing eroticism and danger.
Wallis Simpson, the Duchess of Windsor, made the dress famous when she wore it for a photo shoot by Beaton, earning it a place in fashion history. The other renowned garment they created was the “skeleton dress”, a black, form-fitting gown with raised bones that resembled an emaciated figure with a protruding spine and ribs. Some saw it as a portent of the dark years of war that were almost upon Europe.
With Cocteau, she produced a dark-blue silk-jersey coat featuring two profiles facing each other, creating a trompe-l’oeil vase of roses spilling onto the shoulders. Another jacket featured a woman’s face, with her golden hair flowing down one sleeve and her hand wrapping around the waist.
These garments blurred the line between fashion and art, showcasing the era’s fascination with psychological visual illusions.
Schiaparelli’s clothes were elegant and wearable, but they featured weird buttons and motifs of lips and eyes or insects. She sewed fake fingernails onto gloves and hair on scarves. We can thank her for introducing animal prints and shocking pink, which became synonymous with her brand.
To accompany the exhibition, the V&A has reissued Schiaparelli’s autobiography Shocking Life, which tells a story as fascinating as her clothes. More a diary than a solid autobiography, it flits between the first and third person, alighting briefly on personal history, world events, famous clients and mad adventures.
She begins: “I merely know Schiap by hearsay. I have only seen her in a mirror. She is, for me, a kind of fifth dimension.”
Schiaparelli came from an aristocratic Roman family full of eminent academics. She was a sprite, barely controllable, and led her parents and the household staff a merry dance. In a typical anecdote, she believed she was uglier than her older sister and one day planted seeds in her ears, nose and mouth in a bid to transform her appearance.
“To have a face covered with flowers like a heavenly garden would indeed be a wonderful thing!” Instead, she ended up in surgery having the seeds removed.
Outgoing and intellectually curious, she registered at university to study philosophy, but when pressured to marry an ugly Russian suitor, she ran off to London with a con man who claimed to have psychic powers but was a charlatan wanted for fortune-telling, which was illegal.
They travelled miserably around the world, the law always on their heels, until they ended up in a tenement block in New York. There, Schiaparelli had her only child, and her scoundrel husband deserted her. The little girl was nicknamed Gogo and suffered from polio.
Schiaparelli (whose mother gave her a small allowance) and her daughter went to live in Paris. She knew the couturier Paul Poiret socially and admired his philosophy of creating clothes that enabled freedom of movement for the modern, sophisticated woman. He noticed how cleverly Schiaparelli draped and manipulated fabric in her clothing and encouraged her to start designing. But it was a humble sweater that launched her.
Always fascinated by fabrics and materials, she stumbled upon an unusual knit by Armenian refugees that used a double-layered stitch with which it was possible to create a trompe-l’oeil pattern. Her first design featured a bow knitted into the fabric at the neck, and it took off.
From there, her collection expanded to include bathing suits, skiwear and linen dresses. Schiaparelli added evening wear to her collections in 1931, and by 1935 she had a 98-room salon and work studios in the prestigious Place Vendôme. Her deadly rival, Coco Chanel, was around the corner on less salubrious premises.
For a beautiful, fleeting moment, it seems Schiaparelli was the very eye of cultural Paris. Her granddaughter, the actress and model Marisa Berenson, remembers: “She loved to entertain. The Place Vendôme was like the centre of the world — a cultural salon. All the important artists, writers and socialites met here. She created this incredible atmosphere where they all fed off each other. She was truly more than just a designer. She was an artist.
“It’s why Giacometti and Cocteau worked with her. It’s why she’s in all the museums next to those great artists.”
• From the April issue of Wanted, 2026
