“In difficult times, fashion is outrageous.” This quote from Elsa Schiaparelli’s 1954 autobiography, Shocking Life, describes fashion as a form of resistance – in 2026, it still reflects the current zeitgeist. Today, her foresighted spirit as a revolutionary designer has taken a definitive form in the shape of an exhibit, Schiaparelli: Fashion Becomes Art, a nuanced exploration of the brand’s expansive legacy. From its origin in the 1920s to its current theatrical evolution under Daniel Roseberry, the house of Schiaparelli makes you pause and reflect on the idea beyond the design and its symbolism. This will be the first-ever UK exhibition dedicated to Schiaparelli, celebrating the influence of a design house that juxtaposes fashion, culture and art in a way that remains timeless to this day.
“There is truly a before and after Elsa Schiaparelli. That’s what I hope people will bring home with them,” says Daniel Roseberry, Creative Director of Schiaparelli. “In many ways, the beauty of the house was that it was frozen in time after it closed in 1954. It was preserved like a jewel – it was never diluted or ruined over time. But the cost of that dormancy is that many people don't know that she is one of the five great couturiers who truly changed fashion.” Roseberry’s vision behind the exhibition was not only to celebrate Elsa’s foundational contribution to Schiaparelli but also to make her wider impact on the world of fashion more evident through this experience.
For Elsa, surrealism was at the core of her design language – with it, she disrupted reality, provoked thought and defined fashion beyond functionality. Six years ago, when Roseberry took the reins at legacy maison, the landscape had changed and the art movement was largely obsolete in the context of couture. This was until he took a leaflet out of Elsa’s playbook and converged their journeys with a similar approach. “We picked up the heritage and the DNA of Surrealism right where Elsa left off. André Breton, the French writer, theorist and key architect of the Surrealist movement, believed that Surrealism deals with the space between things: between the real and the unreal, being awake and dreaming, fantasy and reality,” Roseberry reflects. At Schiaparelli, if the past and the present were to meet at an intersection, surrealism will be the chosen language of fashion – just as it serves as the overarching theme of this exhibition.
The exhibition brings together two hundred objects spanning fashion, jewellery, art and furniture, placing a mammoth responsibility on Roseberry to cohesively curate a universe of multitudes. “What I love about Elsa is that she embodied one of the core tenets of Schiaparelli, which is contradiction. There was an inherent contradiction between her work and her world,” he elaborates. But for someone who has been designing for the Schiaparelli woman as long as he has, his insight into Elsa’s mind has created a blueprint of alignment that synthesises the narrative of this exhibition seamlessly. “She was a rigorous businesswoman by day and attended Surrealist cocktail parties dressed as a vegetable or a Greco-Roman statue by night. There was something so multidimensional and multifaceted about her,” Roseberry chimes in with excitement.
While Roseberry’s body of work makes up a certain part of the showcase, when asked about the pièces de résistance, the Elsa aficionado in him took precedence. “I particularly love the hard objects, like the perfume bottles, because they feel so timeless and vintage. There’s a hardware room with all her jewellery, buttons and bijoux and this is where I feel you will see the most freewheeling side of her. In terms of the clothing, seeing the Schiaparelli jacket represented in all its incarnations with its sharp shoulder and nipped waist – she called it the Nutcracker silhouette – is something we keep returning to,” he concludes.
On display at the V&A in London from March 28 until 1 November 2026
