The Victoria and Albert Museum's latest exhibition, 'Schiaparelli: Surrealism and Fashion', is a dazzling exploration of the Italian designer's witty and shocking creations. From naked mermaid buttons to gilded elephant trunks, the show presents a whimsical array of garments and accessories that blur the line between fashion and art. Visitors are transported to a 1930s Paris cocktail party, surrounded by the visual puns and in-jokes of Schiaparelli and her friends, including Salvador Dalí and Jean Cocteau.
Elsa Schiaparelli, born in Rome in 1890, was a natural surrealist. As a child, she once planted flower seeds in her mouth, nose, and ears, hoping to bloom like a garden. This unconventional thinking later defined her career. Moving to Paris in her 30s after a divorce, she launched her fashion line with trompe l'oeil sweaters that featured knitted optical illusions. Within years, she employed 400 staff and was hailed by Vogue as 'the designer of the most exciting clothes in Paris'.
The exhibition highlights Schiaparelli's collaborations with artists like Dalí. Her famous lobster dress, worn by Wallis Simpson, predates Dalí's lobster telephone by a year. A letter from Dalí credits Schiaparelli with the idea for her skeleton dress, which features padded ribs and spine protruding from black crepe. The show argues that Schiaparelli was not merely a fashion designer who associated with surrealists, but an artist in her own right.
Schiaparelli loved to shock, and her favourite colour was shocking pink. She once displayed a taxidermied pink polar bear in her shop window, and was buried in pink upon her death in 1973. The exhibition includes a coat she made for Jane Clark to wear to the 1937 coronation, fastened with a single mermaid button. Modern pieces by current creative director Daniel Roseberry are interspersed with archival items, demonstrating the brand's enduring influence.
The show is a testament to Schiaparelli's prescient creativity, collaborating across culture nearly a century ahead of her time. It is a wild, wonderful journey that reframes her legacy as an artist who made clothes, rather than a fashion designer who dabbled in art. As the exhibition proves, fashion as performance art did not begin with the Kardashians or the Met Gala; it began with Schiaparelli.
