The Victoria and Albert Museum opened its latest blockbuster fashion show in London on 28 March, using the spotlight to bring Elsa Schiaparelli back into view. The exhibition honours the designer’s unusual blend of fine art and fashion, a partnership that helped make her one of the most inventive figures of the 20th century.
Schiaparelli made her name in 1927 with a bow sweater that turned a simple knit into a talking point, and her work soon carried the sharper edge of Paris modernism. Born in Rome in 1890, she was in Paris in 1927 when that collection appeared, and by 1938 she and Salvador Dalí had designed the Skeleton Dress, one of the most famous examples of fashion meeting Surrealism.
The house she built was revived in 2012, and since 2019 it has been under the creative direction of Daniel Roseberry. His name hangs over any current conversation about Schiaparelli because the brand’s modern rebirth gives the museum show a direct line to the present, even as the exhibition reaches back to the work that made her famous in the first place. Francesco Pastore said Schiaparelli did not borrow from Surrealism but translated it into real life, a neat summary of why her work still feels startling now.
That matters because Schiaparelli changed Paris fashion by making designs that interacted with the latest art movements and haute couture, while remaining more prominent in the late 1920s and 1930s than her rival Gabrielle Chanel. The V&A show is meant to tell an under-known story, and it does so by placing the fashion house’s present revival alongside the designer who helped define its original force.
The result is not a retrospective frozen in the past. It is a reminder that daniel roseberry’s current role makes Schiaparelli’s name more than a historical footnote, while the museum’s exhibition gives her back the cultural reach she once had. The unanswered question is no longer who Schiaparelli was, but whether this renewed attention will finally match the scale of her influence.