From Shocking Pink to Salvador Dalí’s Lobster Telephone dress, and skeleton gowns to Daniel Roseberry’s sci-fi couture – the V&A’s landmark spring 2026 exhibition Schiaparelli: Fashion Becomes Art makes a powerful case for fashion as the ultimate art form. Fashion journalist Victoria Moss reviews London’s most unmissable show of 2026.
If you like your fashion fantastical with a side helping of surrealist wonder then the work of Elsa Schiaparelli will come as a welcome shocking pink (of course!) hit. Two years after it staged its blockbuster Chanel show, the V&A’s spring 2026 exhibition, Schiaparelli: Fashion Becomes Art, pays the compliment to her arch-rival in London. Sir Tristram Hunt, Director of the V&A, describes her as “one of the most ingenious and daring designers in fashion history.” As well as showcasing Schiaparelli’s exquisite eye for witty sartorial asides, the show is a study in legacy and the relevance of historic maisons in today’s fashion landscape.
The pieces on display offer a dialogue between the groundbreaking fashion of the inter-war period when Schiaparelli flourished and the flashy viral appeal of the house today, led by the American designer Daniel Roseberry. The two designers are juxtaposed from the start: Schiaparelli’s famed skeleton dress – a collaboration with Salvador Dalí – adorned as if the quilted spine and bones of the wearer have poked right through the fabric.
On the opposite side is Roseberry’s homage, a black gown with an enormous gold lung necklace playing peekaboo with the breasts, as worn by Bella Hadid at Cannes in 2021. Of his predecessor’s work, Roseberry has said, “the more I reference her work and use it as a starting point, the better it makes my work.” Where Schiaparelli dressed Mae West for Every Day’s a Holiday, Roseberry has made Kylie Jenner his muse. Celebrity fans are nothing new, after all.
Schiaparelli herself worked under the aegis of artful creation rather than commerce. An opening quote reads, “for me dress designing is not a profession but an art” – a knowing riposte to Coco Chanel, who dismissed her as “that Italian artist who makes clothes”. Within five years of launching her first collection in 1927, having fled her native Rome for the bohemian allure of Paris, her maison employed 400 staff turning out over 7,000 couture garments every year. Her first foray was striking trompe l’oeil knitwear – little black sweaters with white intarsia bows; she wore one to a society lunch and took her first order from a New York buyer for 40 pieces.
She was working at a time when women’s roles were being upended; they needed clothes that represented a new world, breaking down gender barriers (slowly) and stepping out of the home. The flappers of the 1920s had kicked out corsets; these women wanted more than mere decoration. Fashion, as Schiap showed, could be imbued with intellectual reason and power. As she famously said, “in difficult times, fashion is always outrageous”, Her clothes were certainly a glorious distraction from the fevered political landscape of the inter-war period.
Schiaparelli: Fashion Becomes Art follows on showing her knack for creating the wardrobe of the urbane woman of the 1930s. Novel trouser suits came with fitted jackets and angled pockets; skirt suits featured her idiosyncratic button choices – jaunty carousel horses and flying acrobats from her Circus collection. Pour le Soir showcases the development of the evening jacket in rich velvets, bedazzled with gems, coursing the curves of a woman’s body.
Her skill for colour and pattern is rendered through a multi-coloured silk butterfly-printed dress – notably in a shorter “waltz-length” 15 centimetres above the floor – as well as pink florals interspersed with love-note-carrying blackbirds, and most novel of all, visible plastic zips running along the side of the garment. Practicality baked into the clothes with a striking touch. There was a prettiness to her work but also a languid ease; these garments are notably unrestrictive.
Then there’s the colour. Shocking Pink – that searing, bold fuchsia – arrived in 1937, named after her landmark fragrance Shocking, its bottle famously cast from Mae West’s torso measurements. Schiaparelli claimed the hue so completely it became as much a signature as her surrealist wit. As she put it herself, it was “life-giving, like all the light and the birds and the fish in the world put together.”
The richest section of the fashion exhibition comes from placing Schiap within the surrealist art circles through which she flourished, aided and abetted. She was a key player in the surrealist movement, a fact which the show underscores, showing the intense creative collaboration between the designer and her coterie of artists. Her salon on Place Vendôme was a central focus for the creatives, Salvador Dalí viewed it as the beating heart of surrealist Paris, Jean Cocteau saw it as an otherworldly laboratory. This synergy between fashion and art is laid bare through the dialogue between Schiap and Salvador Dali, Pablo Picasso, Jean Cocteau, Man Ray and Eileen Agar, with works from all of them shown against similar motifs in her design.
Dalí’s iconic Lobster Telephone (1937) sits next to a silk dress made by Schiaparelli a year earlier featuring a prominent lobster print. A telephone dial becomes a makeup compact; a shoe, a hat. A suit worn by Marlene Dietrich features wonderful gold buttons by Giacometti depicting a female silhouette in relief. An exquisite black evening coat features pink roses across the shoulders with the outlines of two faces embroidered onto the back, born from a collaboration with Jean Cocteau.
More sharp wit comes from her perfume collection, where bottles were shaped like a female figure and a lit candle, as well as her only men’s fragrance, Snuff – the bottle shaped like a pipe – a knowing nod to Magritte’s Ceci n’est pas une pipe (1929). Then there’s the bedazzling “bijou” section showcasing brooches and buttons featuring everything from bunnies in bed to bats, polka-dot red-taloned claws and gold, pearl-inset elephant heads.
Interspersed throughout are notable pieces from Roseberry’s collections, having led the house from 2019 (Schiaparelli retired, closing the house in 1954; its current iteration was revived in 2006). On show is the sci-fi robot baby made from wires and salvaged tech products from his Haute Couture Spring/Summer 2024 collection, as well as the scallop-waist dress worn by Ariana Grande to the 2025 Oscars, inspired by the shell-like lamps made by Alberto Giacometti for Schiaparelli’s salon– making this one of the most talked-about London exhibitions of 2026. The debate over whether fashion can ever be art rages on; this V&A show delivers a strong case in its favour.
Schiaparelli: Fashion Becomes Art at V&A, Cromwell Road, South Kensington, London SW7 2RL
28 March – 8 November 2026
vam.ac.uk