The V&A Opens Its First Schiaparelli Exhibition

The Victoria and Albert Museum in London has mounted the first monographic exhibition the United Kingdom has ever dedicated to Schiaparelli. The House founded by Elsa Schiaparelli in Paris and today led by Daniel Roseberry now occupies the museum’s galleries with more than four hundred objects — gowns, jewelry, photographs, and archival pieces.

The House’s Surrealist axis takes center stage. The Lobster Dress conceived with Salvador Dalí, the Skeleton Dress, and the Tears Dress share the floor with the shoe-hat that Dalí himself signed. These are the pieces that set the mold for what we now call fashion-as-art.

The exhibition’s final section turns to the present. Roseberry contributes pieces from his recent collections, among them the gowns Ariana Grande and Dua Lipa wore on the red carpet. It is a dialogue between the Schiaparelli that invented shocking pink and the one that today competes for the week’s headline with Balenciaga and Valentino.

The exhibition runs through November. With this, the V&A confirms what Milan and Paris already know: the Italo-Parisian House has once again become the industry’s defining reference.