AD takes you inside the exhibits at the V&A’s newest exhibition, Schiaparelli: Fashion Becomes Art.
“For me, dress designing is not a profession but an art,” Elsa Schiaparelli once said, a philosophy that anchors the V&A’s latest exhibition, Schiaparelli: Fashion Becomes Art. Here, the designer’s work is presented not as costume, but as a series of bold, often subversive ideas brought to life through fabric and form across a sweeping display of over 400 objects. Spanning nearly a century, the show unfolds less like a retrospective and more like a dialogue across time.
The opening section traces Schiaparelli’s early career, beginning with her first Paris boutique in 1927 under the sign ‘Schiaparelli. Pour Le Sport’. There is an immediacy to these early pieces, from the 1927 trompe l’oeil bow-knot sweater—a gift from the designer herself to the V&A—to sharply tailored suits that still feel strikingly contemporary. Even then, Schiaparelli was pushing against the rigidity of fashion, introducing innovative daywear like trouser suits, which were startlingly unusual for the modern urban woman of the 1930s.
