Inside the surreal world of Elsa Schiaparelli

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.

In an interview, Sonnet Stanfill, the museum’s senior curator of fashion, discusses the show and Elsa Schiaparelli’s life and work. Edited excerpts:

The show opens with three sweaters. What’s the story behind them?

That’s part of the first section, titled “The Modern Wardrobe”. Elsa Schiaparelli began her brand with a sweater, originally conceived within a sportswear collection—an arena in which she first made her name. Very quickly, she expanded into daywear and eveningwear.

From there, the exhibition builds on the idea of “The Modern Wardrobe”, introducing key elements such as the embroidered evening jacket—central to Schiaparelli’s design language—alongside accessories like hats, bags and shoes. The visitor then transitions into a room dedicated to her collaborations with artists, including Salvador Dalí, with works such as the Tears Dress and the Lobster Dress. There are also collaborations with the poet Jean Cocteau, as well as a striking wall of portraiture—photographs and paintings of Schiaparelli by figures ranging from Cecil Beaton to Man Ray. Elsa was, in many ways, her own best promoter; these images helped construct a powerful visual culture around her persona.

The penultimate section, “Beyond Paris”, examines how her reputation extended beyond the confines of French haute couture, first through her work for stage and screen. She designed costumes, and her eveningwear was worn by actors both on screen and on stage, including Marlene Dietrich and Mae West.

To wear Schiaparelli, then, as now, required a certain confidence and force of personality. These were not clothes that receded into the background; they demanded presence.

The final section, “A Golden Thread”, examines how Schiaparelli’s legacy has been reinterpreted by Daniel Roseberry. The section opens with three garments designed by Schiaparelli herself, each embodying key elements of her vocabulary, whether it is unexpected textiles, striking embroidery, the use of feathers, or her fearless approach to colour.

The exhibition has the famous sari-inspired gowns. Was Elsa deeply influenced by the sari silhouette as many believe?

I would say the most widely recognised point of connection with India lies in her so-called sari collections. I say so-called because they were not saris in any real sense. These were, in fact, evening dresses paired with headscarves, styled in a way that reflected how a European eye might imagine a sari to be worn. At the time (1930s), this caused a fair degree of confusion. The press referred to them as saris, while Elsa herself used the term “Ihram” in her press materials, referencing a garment associated with the Hajj pilgrimage. Publications like Vogue also described them as “sari dresses”, and that shorthand has persisted among dress historians, even though it is technically inaccurate.

The one we have on display is a beautiful orange silk that we borrowed from a private collector. And to me, it’s very interesting that she was inspired by the sari, and she made dresses that, maybe from a distance and to a European eye, an experienced eye, might have thought of as a sari, but the construction is not sari-like at all. For me, it stands as one of the clearest examples of Elsa perhaps appropriating references to Indian attire in her work. But of course, this was at a time when European designers dipped frequently into the cultures of other parts of the world and did not acknowledge them appropriately.

Did she travel to India?

I don’t have evidence that she travelled to India, but she probably travelled in her mind. In her autobiography (Shocking Life, 1954), Elsa recalls that in 1935, Maharani Sita Devi (of Baroda) visited Paris, and her wardrobe caused a sensation. Elsa credits this moment with sparking her imagination, leading her to create what would later be described as her sari-inspired gowns.

Another thing to note is a chapter done by my colleague Lydia Caston (the project curator) based on her research on Schiaparelli’s clientele. One of the most compelling figures is Rani Molly, a prominent socialite and among Schiaparelli’s earliest eveningwear clients. Born in Australia, she married Martanda Bhairava Tondaiman (of Pudukottai) in 1915. Rani Molly went on to become a significant patron of Schiaparelli. Some of her garments are among the earliest works in the exhibition, including a striking black crepe dress paired with a metallic, almost chainmail-like hood.

How did Elsa’s design vocabulary evolve?

As I mentioned earlier, it really begins with the sweater.

Textiles were central to her early innovation. Elsa actively encouraged textile makers to bring her their most experimental fabrics, and much of the visual interest in these early collections comes from that material exploration.

By the mid-1930s, her work took a decisive turn with the introduction of artistic collaborations. Her first known collaboration with Salvador Dalí dates to 1935, marking the beginning of a more overtly Surrealist phase. Objects and garments become playful, even subversive, like a powder compact designed in the shape of a telephone dial.

From 1935 until the outbreak of World War II, there was an extraordinary burst of creativity. She began to produce themed, named collections—the Parachute Collection of summer 1936, and by 1938, the Circus, Pagan and Zodiac collections. Each is built around a narrative, with embroidery, motifs and even silhouettes responding to the theme. By summer 1939, in the Bustle Collection, she reinterpreted the 19th-century bustle, reintroducing exaggerated volume at the back of the silhouette.

The war interrupted this momentum. From around 1941, Schiaparelli spent much of the war in the US. Her house in Paris remained open but operated with a skeletal staff, and she was no longer directly designing. After the war, she returned and resumed work. Ultimately, she closed the house in 1954 and turned to writing her autobiography. So that’s kind of the story arc around the show.

She’s always been eccentric in her design language. Where did that come from?

I think some of her most striking, conversation-provoking designs emerged from her collaborations with artists. In her autobiography, Elsa describes working with figures like Salvador Dalí, Jean Cocteau and Bébé Bérard as “exhilarating”. It’s a telling word. That exhilaration translated directly into the clothes. Think of the Lobster Dress created with Dalí, or the evening coat embroidered after Cocteau’s drawings, where the image shifts between two faces in profile and a vase bursting with roses across the wearer’s back. These pieces are not just garments; they are visual puzzles.

Schiaparelli has said she thought of herself as an ‘ugly’ child and planted seeds in her throat, ears and mouth, hoping to grow ‘a face covered with flowers like a heavenly garden’. How did her childhood shape her career?

Elsa Schiaparelli was raised in a family of aristocrats and intellectuals—her father was a professor; her uncle, a noted astronomer. But alongside that privilege came rigid expectations of what a woman’s life should look like: to marry well and remain in the background. Elsa resisted that from an early age. She left Rome at 22 for London to look after the children of a family friend.

If you read her life closely, it’s a series of acts of defiance. By the time she arrived in Paris, she was a divorced woman with a young daughter, which was considered socially unacceptable. And so, with those disadvantages, she had to make living for herself to support herself and her young daughter. She had no formal training in fashion, was not French, and was navigating multiple languages. English was her second; French third.

The odds were stacked against her. That sense of being an outsider, combined with her early resistance to convention, seems to have shaped her into a kind of creative rebel. She had to carve out her own space, and perhaps that necessity is what gave her work its edge, its originality, and its refusal to conform.

It’s believed that she was the first designer to add zippers to dresses. Is that correct?

Well, I think that it gets into dangerous territory if you start claiming firsts, because things were in the air. But Elsa Schiaparelli was certainly unusual in the way she used the zip as decoration.

What has struck me most is the consistency of her creativity across her entire career. That imaginative thread runs from her earliest knitted sweaters right through to the end of her career. It is, of course, amplified by her collaborations with artists, but it also speaks to something more fundamental. At its core, fashion is not only about fantasy—it is also about function, about problem-solving. And Schiaparelli managed to hold both in balance, which is what makes her such an enduring and compelling designer.

Any dress that intrigued you the most?

The skeleton dress. It sums up so much of what Elsa Schiaparelli was preoccupied with as a designer. The silhouette is flattering, the techniques are haute couture. It's a kind of quilted, padded, quilted skeletal shape that's stitched onto the surface of the dress that is actually anatomically correct. There are hip bones, a rib cage, collarbone, and on the back of the dress, there is the spine. That dress is like the poster child for her creative collaborations. And because it was so shocking at the time, compared to what Elsa Schiaparelli's designer contemporaries were creating, it would absolutely have stood apart from the conventional quiet glamour of typical 1930s Parisian haute couture. It would stand out even today.

Schiaparelli: Fashion Becomes Art is on till 8 November at V&A, London.