Schiaparelli at the V&A review – ‘She lived to shock’

It wasn’t Roland Penrose, nor was it Herbert Read. It wasn’t André Breton, nor even Peggy Guggenheim. No, it was Elsa Schiaparelli who first brought surrealism to London – three years before the landmark London ‘International Surrealist Exhibition’ opened in 1936. When the Italian fashion designer introduced her extraordinary designs to Britain via her Mayfair store, it became the first surrealist space in the country. It is hard to imagine how the sight of this very foreign incarnation of flamboyance and glamour would have appeared to Depression-era Londoners, but, of course, Schiaparelli lived to shock.

This revelation, of the designer’s immeasurable impact on British art and cultural history, is brought to the fore at V&A South Kensington’s excellent ‘Schiaparelli: Fashion Becomes Art’, which opens on 28 March 2026. The first of its kind in the UK, the show comprises over 200 objects, including garments, accessories, jewellery, paintings, photographs, sculpture, furniture and perfumes, from the 1920s to the present day – with a particular emphasis on the reciprocal relationship that Schiap, as she was known, had with the avant-garde art scene of interwar Europe.

‘It started,’ we are told, ‘with a sweater.’ In 1927, Schiap debuted her famous tromp l’oeil sweater, a black-and-white knit with a bow effect in pour le sport style, by wearing it herself to a party. It was an instant hit, and the ‘things are not as they seem’ approach to design remained a hallmark of her creations for the rest of her life. In fact, Schiap’s cultural fluency, which put her totally in step with the modernist zeitgeist, was already being cultivated pre-sweater. Born to an erudite, aristocratic family in Rome’s Palazzo Corsini, today a Baroque art museum, Schiap was exposed to modern art from an early age, attending lectures given by Italian futurists and later moving in bohemian circles following a move to New York City during her short-lived marriage. It was here she was introduced by her friends Gaby and Francis Picabia to some of the key players in the nascent surrealist movement – relationships that would shape the direction of her work for years to come.

What did this influence look like? Unlike some of the other artists in Breton’s surrealist orbit, Schiap wasn’t utilising techniques such as automatic drawing or harnessing the subconscious to unlock creative potential, yet her preoccupation with quintessential surrealist themes and motifs – the uncanny, the fragmented, the animalistic – placed her firmly within their world. A silk dress from the 1938 ‘Circus’ collection is printed to look like fabric being torn away to expose pink negative space beneath; the inspiration for the silhouette is taken from Salvador Dalí’s Necrophiliac Spring (1936), but the tromp l’oeil is pure René Magritte. An evening coat designed in collaboration with the artist, poet and filmmaker Jean Cocteau features the double image of two faces in profile and a vase of roses in bloom atop a plinth. A sculptural evening coat from circa 1937, made from bulbous gilt braid, sits somewhere between scarecrow and papal cassock. Virtually every fastening, whether zip or button, is an opportunity for intrigue: a smart wool suit is finished with discreet buttons featuring Commedia dell’arte masks, a sleeveless, body-contouring dress of ruched silk jersey features a suggestive front zip from hem to belly button.

‘I think it’s interesting how Schiaparelli’s fashion kind of flips a surrealist interest, particularly in accessories,’ Dr Rosalind McKever, the V&A’s curator of paintings and drawings, tells Wallpaper*. ‘Gloves, hats, shoes are all fetishised objects which were of real interest to the surrealists because of their ability to stand in for fragmented body parts. And so Schiaparelli takes those images, and kind of flips them back on themselves.’ If it feels as though design is fundamentally at odds with surrealist methodology, then objects such as these say otherwise.