From Salvador Dalí&#39;s Skeleton Dress to the visions of Daniel Roseberry, the retrospective &quot;Schiaparelli: Fashion Becomes Art&quot; in London celebrates the Maison&#39;s legacy of surrealism, haute couture, and art.

Elsa Schiaparelli loved to repeat, &quot;For me, designing clothes is not a profession but an art.&quot; It wasn&#39;t presumption, it was a declaration of intent. And it is precisely from this premise that &quot;Schiaparelli: Fashion Becomes Art&quot; springs, the first major retrospective the United Kingdom will dedicate to the &quot;Italienne&quot; (as Coco Chanel called her, with a hint of venom), opening March 28, 2026, at the Victoria &amp; Albert Museum in London. Don&#39;t expect a simple parade of mannequins. This exhibition is an investigation into how a radical imagination could subvert 20th-century canons, arriving intact and perhaps more vibrant than ever in the sculptural hands of creative director Daniel Roseberry.

The exhibition opens with what we might call the invention of the modern wardrobe. Before Surrealism, Elsa was a pragmatic visionary. The section &quot;Designing the Modern Wardrobe&quot; takes us back to 1927, when the sign &quot;Schiaparelli. Pour Le Sport&quot; appeared in Paris. The exhibition features the famous sweater with a trompe-l&#39;oeil bow, a piece Elsa herself donated to the V&amp;A: an optical illusion that today we would call pop, but which was pure avant-garde back then. Here we see Schiaparelli liberating women with pantsuits and bold cuts, ready for the city (Pour la Ville), without ever forgetting the irony of sculptural buttons or hats that mimic braids. It&#39;s proof that function need not kill imagination. The beating heart of the exhibition, Creative Constellations, is a confrontation between fashion and art. Elsa didn&#39;t use artists; she lived within their intellectual confines. Seeing the 1938 Skeleton Dress (a unique piece in the V&amp;A&#39;s permanent collection) next to the Tears Dress or the shoe-hat created by the genius of Salvador Dalí is to understand that dress can be a political and psychological manifesto.

The dialogue continues with Jean Cocteau&#39;s mirrored profiles that become vases of roses on an evening coat, and with works by Picasso, Man Ray , and Eileen Agar . It&#39;s a universe where Salvador Dalí &#39;s Lobster Telephone and Elsa&#39;s Lobster Dress are not just objects, but fragments of a single lucid dream. One of the major new features of this exhibition is the in-depth look at Schiaparelli London. In 1933, the opening of the Mayfair salon brought Surrealism to the heart of the British establishment. Among the gems on display is the designer&#39;s only surviving wedding dress, a cloud of oyster-colored rayon with metallic threads that conveys a less aggressive yet equally cultured femininity. Finally, the exhibition concludes with Golden Thread, a bridge to the contemporary. Here, the baton passes to Daniel Roseberry. Since 2019, the American designer at 21 Place Vendôme has successfully revitalized the Maison&#39;s codes without slipping into nostalgic vintage. &quot;Roseberry&#39;s work continues to shape contemporary global culture,&quot; emphasizes Delphine Bellini, CEO of the Maison. And we see it in the crystal robot-doll of the latest Couture show, Ariana Grande&#39;s sculptural gown at the 2025 Oscars, and the black and gold Skeleton dress reinterpreted for Dua Lipa.

Elsa Schiaparelli&#39;s fashion has never been a question of trends, and with Roseberry it becomes a question of intellectual posture. As Tristram Hunt, director of the V&amp;A, stated, this is the celebration of a visionary pioneer who knew how to blend creativity and commerce without sacrificing her soul.

<h5 style="text-align: center;">Scroll through photos from &quot;Schiaparelli: Fashion Becomes Art,&quot; the exhibition at the Victoria &amp; Albert Museum.</h5>

"Schiaparelli: Fashion Becomes Art" exhibition at the Victoria & Albert Museum in London

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