"Schiaparelli Fashion Becomes Art" the UK's First Major Elsa Schiaparelli Retrospective

Elsa Schiaparelli once said that in difficult times, fashion is always outrageous. She was right, and she proved it season after season between the wars, then disappeared, then came roaring back through someone else's hands entirely. Schiaparelli: Fashion Becomes Art is on view at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London from March 28. The first major retrospective dedicated to her in the UK with four hundred objects. Nearly a century of surreal provocation. And Daniel Roseberry, the Texan Creative Director who has spent the last several years making the Maison inescapable, involved at every turn.

Elsa Schiaparelli, well known for manufacturing images, moments and cultural provocations. The skeleton dress, constructed with padded black bones in collaboration with Salvador Dalí in 1938, is here. So is the Tears dress with its veil, white silk printed with magenta lips and weeping eyes, another Dalí collaboration from the same summer. The evening coat designed with Jean Cocteau in 1937 turns the back into a face, blue eyes peering out from a cascade of embroidered roses. We have seen these pieces reproduced in books and on mood boards for decades. Standing in front of them is another experience entirely.

Ninety Years Apart, Same Conversation

The Pagan Collection Choker from fall 1938 sits on a bust: a pale top hat form hung with gilded pinecones and tied with purple velvet bows, simultaneously absurd and completely covetable. The Lobster Telephone by Dalí, also 1938, is not a garment but it belongs here completely. The Shoe Hat, inspired by Gala Dalí placing a shoe on her husband's head, sits nearby, this version with a Shocking Pink heel. On the walls, works by Pablo Picasso, Jean Cocteau and Man Ray. Man Ray's Portrait of Elsa from 1933 stares back at you. Perfumes, furniture, sculpture, archival material, film references. Elsa understood that the objects surrounding a fashion house shape its meaning as much as the clothes themselves, and Roseberry has clearly absorbed this. His long sheath gown from the Matador Couture collection, Haute Couture FW2021, in wool crepe with a gilded brass necklace adorned with rhinestones in the shape of lungs, sits a few feet from pieces made ninety years earlier. The dialogue is fluent. It has never stopped.

Roseberry Brings the Maison Forward

Daniel Roseberry has been Creative Director at Maison Schiaparelli since 2019. The first American ever to lead a French couture house. No formal haute couture training. No French. He walked in and made the Maison the most talked-about name on every red carpet. Handbags adorned with anatomical details. Leather bodysuits hand-painted with the female form. Dresses built on "Trompe l'oeil". Elsa's exact playbook, run by someone who grew up in Plano, Texas. Bella Hadid at Cannes red carpet in 2023 in that black gown with the brass lung necklace. Teyana Taylor in crystals at the Golden Globes 2026. And for the Schiaparelli FW2026 RTW Collection, Shown in Paris this last week, the "Trompe l'oeil"logic was everywhere. What looked like a column skirt in heavy jacquard was actually cut thread in pure ivory, light as air. A stretch flocked bodysuit looked constricting but moved like a leotard.

Sonnet Stanfill, the V&A's Senior Fashion Curator, notes that Elsa was a masterful self-publicist who understood that working with Cocteau and Dalí was the attention economy of her era. Roseberry points to Martin Margiela, Rei Kawakubo, and Azzedine Alaïa as designers who carried her torch across the decades she spent in relative quiet. Schiaparelli: Fashion Becomes Art makes that lineage visible. One strange button buried inside an otherwise impeccable garment. That is precisely the move that keeps Schiaparelli relevant across a century and counting.