V&A Schiaparelli show reframes designer as artist
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- V&A's spring exhibition on Elsa Schiaparelli displays surreal archive pieces including Dalí-collaborated skeleton and lobster dresses, silk-carrot buttons, and a 1937 coronation coat fastened by a single naked-mermaid button.
- Schiaparelli's 1937 lobster dress for Wallis Simpson preceded Dalí's famous lobster telephone by a year, and a Dalí letter credits the "bones on the outside" concept to her — evidence the show uses to argue she was an artist, not just a collaborator.
- Schiaparelli (1890–1973) launched her Paris career with trompe-l'oeil sweaters, grew a staff of 400, and was dubbed by Vogue "the designer of the most exciting clothes in Paris"; her signature "shocking pink" once filled her shop with a taxidermied polar bear.
- Daniel Roseberry, who joined Schiaparelli in 2019, contributes contemporary pieces to the show including Bella Hadid's 2021 Cannes gold lung breastplate and a 2024 runway "robot baby" built from old flip phones and circuit board shards.
- The show reframes Coco Chanel's cutting dismissal of Schiaparelli as "that Italian artist who makes clothes" as a backhanded compliment, repositioning her decades ahead of the Kardashians and Met Gala as a pioneer of fashion as performance art.
- A Picasso portrait of Nusch Éluard wearing a Schiaparelli horseshoe-hat outfit is included — painted on the spot when Picasso insisted on capturing her after she walked into his studio.
Why it matters: By pairing archive pieces like the Wallis Simpson lobster dress with viral Roseberry runway moments from Cannes 2021 and 2024, the V&A gives a designer long dismissed as a Dalí sidekick equal billing as a surrealist artist — and ties the brand's current TikTok-era relevance directly to a 1930s practice of fashion-as-art.
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