When Kylie Jenner stood on the marble steps of the Petit Palais in 2023, a fake lion head attached to her off-shoulder dress, even by the standards of the youngest member of the Kardashian clan, the outfit looked a bit much.
Hand-painted for lifelike realism, the Schiaparelli head and dress were designed by the Texan, Daniel Roseberry. Although already four years into the role as artistic director, the look was transformative – earning Jenner front row seats at the biggest shows and propelling the nearly century-old Paris fashion house, long overshadowed by Chanel, Balenciaga, and Dior, into viral ubiquity.
As the focus of the V&A’s new blockbuster exhibition about Schiaparelli wants to make clear, this moment-making approach to fashion is not simply a reflection of the social media age but entirely in keeping with the spirit of its Italian founder, Elsa Schiaparelli. “I don’t consider Elsa to be a dressmaker”, says Roseberry. “She was an image-maker, a culture creator, and she has been our north star with every red carpet moment since.”
The lion dress is sadly not among the 400 objects in the exhibition, which also includes paintings, sculpture and furniture. But surreality abounds, thanks in no small part to Schiaparelli’s many collaborations with artists including Jean Cocteau and Salvador Dalí, including the skeleton dress, a macabre design with padded black bones, and a hat made to look like an upside-down shoe, both designed with Dali in the late 1930s.
Acting as a through-line between the mid-1930s and now, more intimate pieces include a wedding dress worn to a Golders Green synagogue and “some leopard print booties, which Elsa never took off”, says Sonnet Stanfill, the V&A’s senior fashion curator.
This is the UK’s first major retrospective dedicated to the designer, though it aims to position the Italian as much an artist and impresario as a couturier. “She was a good designer but a great self-publicist and promoter”, says Stanfill. “She knew flagging that she worked with Jean Cocteau would get publicity. One of the best ways to get eyeballs on your work was to work with artists and cinema and theatre because of the audiences. It was the social media equivalent of her time.”
Stanfill says the idea was first raised by the museum in 2017, but no one predicted Schiaparelli would harness the internet quite so effectively in the years that followed. “The way Roseberry’s work cuts through the culture as Elsa’s did shows just how uncannily they both mastered capturing the attention economy in their own time.”
Indeed, if you’ve so much as glanced at a red carpet in the last five years, you’ll have seen one of the so-called “Schiap pack” in action. Take Bella Hadid at Cannes in 2021 wearing a black dress finished with a lung-shaped trompe l’oeil brass necklace. Or Teyana Taylor’s “party in the back” dress replete with crystal thong worn to this year’s Golden Globes. The brand is expected to dress several nominees at next week’s Oscars ceremony.
Part of the brand’s success then and now has been about making witty but wearable clothes. “We try to walk a fine line between humour and camp”, says Roseberry, talking about 2024’s hot accessory: a glittery robot baby.
Mega-retrospectives, which zero in on household names such as Dior and Balenciaga, have underlined the V&A’s potential for fashion to broaden its audience. Over half a million people visited 2019’s Dior exhibition. The V&A is hoping that Schiaparelli will draw similar crowds.
Timing is on its side, landing just as Roseberry’s work is significantly deepening a wider cultural awareness of the once-dormant fashion house. At her peak between the wars, Elsa died in 1973.
On Thursday evening, the designer showed an autumn/winter collection which met Elsa’s work head on. The whole collection was underpinned by the same trickery and trompe l’oeil, including “impossible knitwear” which paired Aran knits with tulle to create the effect of floating clothes, and leather-look sheaths which were actually made of wool. Anatomical hardware is a key Schiaparelli look, widely copied on the high street. Here it appeared as egret feet dangling off a bag (Elsa also loved monkey fur, but Roseberry prefers to use shearling).
“The big question was what is the point of this other than to give some sort of historical context to the house that people know today?”, says Roseberry, of his involvement in the exhibition. “But her contribution has been echoing through other people’s work for years. Whether that’s Martin Margiela, Rei Kawakubo or Azzedine Alaïa. All these designers have been sort of carrying that torch on her behalf.”
Stanfill agrees. “it’s easy to get caught up with the weirdness, but she also made very wearable clothes. They just happened to have a strange button or two.”