Elsa Schiaparelli Collaborated With Salvador Dalí and Jean Cocteau to Imagine Fabulous Surrealist Ensembles

A new exhibition at the Victoria and Albert Museum lays out the history and legacy of the House of Schiaparelli, focusing on its founder’s unique creative processes

Sonja Anderson

– Daily Correspondent

April 10, 2026 9:33 a.m.

A vibrant red lobster printed on a silk evening gown. A shimmery optical illusion embroidered on the back of a jacket. A quilted skeleton protruding from a fitted black dress. Each was a fashion invention of Elsa Schiaparelli, the 20th-century couture icon whom Coco Chanel famously called “that Italian artist who’s making clothes.”

“Schiaparelli would have taken that as a compliment,” Rosalind McKever, a curator at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, tells the Associated Press’ Sylvia Hui and Hilary Fox. McKever notes that she once said, “Dress designing … is to me not a profession but an art.”

The designer’s unconventional oeuvre is now on display in “Schiaparelli: Fashion Becomes Art,” a new exhibition at the Victoria and Albert Museum (V&A) in London. Visitors can see more than 400 objects related to Schiaparelli and her luxury fashion house, including jewelry, paintings, photographs and 100 outfits.

Born in Rome in 1890, Schiaparelli opened her first atelier in Paris in 1927. The designer rose quickly to prominence, attracting international attention for her strange patterns. As Schiaparelli’s operations grew, her designs became more experimental—especially when she began collaborating with creators working in other mediums.

“Schiaparelli was someone who surrounded herself with artists,” says Sonnet Stanfill, the V&A’s senior curator of fashion, to CNN’s Rachel Tashjian. She was especially partial to Surrealism, a 20th-century art movement led by the likes of Man Ray, Jean Cocteau and Salvador Dalí.

Schiaparelli’s 1937 and 1938 collections included several garments that Dalí helped conceive: a shoe-shaped hat, a dress printed with illusory rips in the fabric, the lobster dress and the skeleton gown. The last of these was inspired by a sketch that Dalí sent to Schiaparelli, along with the message “I like this idea of ‘bones on the outside’ enormously.” The resulting dress would have been unimaginably “shocking” at the time, McKever tells the AP. “It is a kind of punk look.”

Another Surrealist collaboration on display in the exhibition is an “evening coat” from Schiaparelli’s spring 1937 collection. The back of the jacket is embroidered with two curvy faces in profile, about to kiss. In the negative space between them—formed by the lines of their brows, noses and lips—is the shape of a vase holding flowers. Cocteau drew the illusion for Schiaparelli in colored pencil.

“It’s essentially a Cocteau artwork on the back of your coat,” Stanfill tells Louis Lucero II of the New York Times.

Schiaparelli didn’t simply copy others’ visual art onto her garments. As Stanfill explains to CNN, the designer was “embedded in the creative process, and there was a true collaborative, creative exchange with these artists and creatives.”

“Fashion Becomes Art” is the United Kingdom’s first-ever exhibition dedicated to Schiaparelli. A section of the show is devoted to her English exploits. In 1933, the designer opened a satellite salon in London, which she later deemed “the most masculine city in the world.” The “Schiaparelli London” label was short-lived—the salon closed in 1939—but her designs did sell among women in Britain, Stanfill tells the Times. They “bought clothes that were as colorful, as vibrant, as unusual, as some of the Paris clients,” Stanfill says.

Production at the House of Schiaparelli declined in the 1940s, largely in response to World War II. In 1954, Schiaparelli retired, and her business declared bankruptcy. She died in Paris in 1973, at age 83. The label remained dormant for decades, until an Italian businessman purchased it in 2007. He then relaunched it in 2012. Since 2019, the brand has been under the leadership of creative director Daniel Roseberry. His “spectacular creations” make up the last section of the V&A exhibition, per a statement from the museum.

“Schiaparelli’s fearless imagination and radical vision redefined the boundaries between fashion and art,” Schiaparelli CEO Delphine Bellini says in the statement. “This exhibition celebrates her enduring influence through iconic collaborations with 20th-century masters and a pioneering fusion of creativity and commerce.”

“Schiaparelli: Fashion Becomes Art” is on view at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London through November 8.