It began with a sweater.
In 1927, Elsa Schiaparelli arrived at lunch at the Ritz wearing a black knitted sweater decorated with what appeared to be a white cravat tied neatly around the neck. Except there was no cravat. The bow was knitted into the garment using trompe-l’oeil, the Surrealist trick of making the eye believe it’s seeing something that’s not really there.
The sweater caused a sensation. Almost a century later, standing before it at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, Schiaparelli Creative Director Daniel Roseberry describes it as “her first garment, basically”.
“She made this trompe-l’oeil bowknot sweater in 1927, and everything kind of came from this,” he says during a YouTube interview for the V&A Museum. “It speaks so much to her modern perspective on the woman’s wardrobe.”
The sweater announced a designer who would spend her career challenging ideas about what clothes should do. Elsa is widely credited as the first designer to use music during runway shows, and was a pioneer of themed collections, exposed zips, visual merchandising, and unisex fragrance. Fashion, for her, could amuse, provoke, unsettle, and start conversations.
It’s this legacy that Schiaparelli: Fashion Becomes Art, at the V&A South Kensington until 15 November, examines, tracing a creative universe in which the boundaries between fashion, painting, sculpture, theatre, and performance repeatedly dissolve.
Born in Rome and based in Paris, Elsa became, as Sonnet Stanfill, V&A Senior Curator of Fashion, puts it, “one of the most discussed designers of interwar Paris”. Her approach was never simply about making women beautiful. It was about making people look twice.
Making People Look Twice
Schiaparelli collaborated with Man Ray, Jean Cocteau and, most famously, Salvador Dalí. She described working with artists as “exhilarating”, and the resulting garments were less exercises in embellishment than wearable Surrealism.
When Fashion Became Surreal
Her 1937 Lobster Dress, created with Dalí and worn by the Duchess of Windsor, remains one of fashion’s great acts of provocation. A large lobster was positioned across the front of an otherwise elegant white evening gown.
The same year produced another masterpiece – an evening coat created with Cocteau and embroidered by Maison Lesage. Viewed from behind, its decoration shifts between two faces staring at one another and a vase overflowing with roses. Metallic embroidery traces the image like a drawing, while blue beads form glinting eyes and ruby-red metal strips create lips.
“It’s a very exuberant, almost storytelling approach to dressing,” says Sonnet.
Even its fastening is a joke: a button shaped like the skirt and single leg of a cancan dancer. The coat, originally made for Viscountess Castlerosse, illustrates the level of confidence Elsa expected from her clientele. “She created conversation starters with clothes like this,” Sonnet says. “The women who wore the clothes… would have had to have a lot of confidence to walk into a room wearing something like this.”
Those women included Josephine Baker, Marlene Dietrich, Mae West, and aviator Amy Johnson. Schiaparelli’s fascination with performance also extended to theatre and film, with designs for productions in New York, London, and Paris.
From Elsa to Daniel
The House eventually closed in 1954. Yet the vocabulary Schiaparelli created – trompe-l’oeil, anatomy, displacement, humour, Surrealism, and objects placed where they seemingly do not belong – proved remarkably durable. When American designer Daniel Roseberry became Artistic Director in 2019, he was not simply inheriting a famous fashion house. He was inheriting a mythology.
Daniel’s answer has been neither nostalgic recreation nor wholesale reinvention. Instead, he’s taken Elsa’s central proposition – that fashion can behave like art – and translated it for an era in which a couture dress might be experienced first through a phone screen. “There’s something about the immediacy of black velvet, black satin, boom, just the embroidery, that feels so Schiap and so predictive of the digital instant gratification age that we live in,” he says while examining an archival embroidered cape.
A New Era of Schiaparelli
There was the sharply shouldered, extravagantly embroidered Matador jacket from autumn/winter 2021; the anatomical creations of Purgatorio, in which Daniel’s paintings were enlarged to human scale and individual brushstrokes translated into embroidered paillettes; and spring 2024’s Schiaparalien, inspired by Alien’s Ripley and the emergence of artificial intelligence.
One of that collection’s most unforgettable creations incorporated motherboards, cables, crushed CDs and DVDs, mirrors, paillettes, and Swarovski crystals. Even the embroidery became a collision between past and future.
Dressing the Moment
His Schiaparelli has also become a fixture of contemporary celebrity dressing. Ariana Grande’s ruby-red Academy Awards gown, created for her performance of Somewhere Over the Rainbow, concealed a pair of ruby slippers on its back – an Elsa-like act of visual displacement that turned as the singer walked away.
“What I’m always looking for… is what’s gonna make it an unforgettable moment, not just a dress,” Daniel explains. For him, dressing a performer is an “act of service”. “Our job is to help her tell a story and make her feel amazing while she does it.”
He brought the same approach to the outfit he created for Beyoncé for her record-breaking Renaissance tour. Yet it is couture where Daniel’s ideas become most concentrated. “Couture is sort of the moment for a House to say something about what it stands for, in the creative space,” he says. “Schiaparelli, the legacy is art and fashion.”
His autumn/winter 2026–2027 Haute Couture collection (which he voiced as the soundtrack) pushed that philosophy further. Beginning with the French concept l’appel du vide – the call of the void, that strange impulse to step towards the unknown – Daniel deliberately pursued ideas he could not immediately resolve. “I wanted to do something that I couldn’t figure out,” he says.
The vision arrived, unusually, almost fully formed as he left the set of the previous couture show: mirrored floors, silver chrome, a particular colour palette, and the need to invert what had come before. For him, couture increasingly “starts to feel less like clothes” and more like “a mirror in and of itself to where we are in culture”.
“What is our eye hungry to see in an age and in a day or an era where our eyes are so exhausted from seeing so much?” he asks. “What can we put in front of people, and even what can we put in front of ourselves?” His answer lies in connection rather than simply commerce.
“The beauty of Schiap is that we’re not trying to sell you anything. We’re trying to inspire you. We’re trying to connect with you.” It’s difficult not to hear Elsa in that sentiment.
From a sweater that made diners at the Ritz look twice to a couture house creating images capable of stopping the endless digital scroll, Schiaparelli has always understood attention differently. It’s not enough to make something beautiful. It should be strange enough to linger in the mind.
Daniel describes the House today as existing “outside of the machinery”. More importantly, he believes its scale still allows it the rare privilege of uncertainty. “It’s such a luxury to ask questions,” he says. “It’s a luxury to not know.”
Perhaps that is the thread connecting Elsa Schiaparelli’s cravat sweater to Daniel’s most fantastical couture. Neither tells us exactly what fashion should be.
Instead, almost 100 years apart, they ask us to look again.
Schiaparelli: Fashion Becomes Art is on at the V&A South Kensington Museum until 15 November 2026.
IMAGES: VICTORIA AND ALBERT MUSEUM; EMIL LARSSON; P HORST (GETTY IMAGES); KUBA DABROWSKI COURTESY PATRIMOINE SCHIAPARELLI, PARIS; BRIDGEMAN IMAGES; GIOVANNI GIANNONI; FREDRICH BAKER CONDÉ NAST (GETTY IMAGES)
BOOK EXTRACT
Schiaparelli: Fashion Becomes Art
From childhood games of dress-up to Hollywood and the Parisian avant-garde, this extract explores the enduring pull of performance on fashion’s great provocateur.
Stage and Screen by Simon Sladen
‘Had I not by pure chance become a maker of dresses, what could I have become?’ While best known as an acclaimed fashion designer, Elsa Schiaparelli’s life mirrored the theatricality of her garments, with both stage and screen playing a significant role throughout her career. In her autobiography, Shocking Life (V&A Publishing), she admits: ‘To be an actress would have tempted me… The sublime power of throwing oneself into all kinds of emotional situations, to be able to play on an expectant audience… yes, that I would have liked. And many times I have lived this career in my dreams.’
Schiaparelli’s affinity with the performing arts can be seen throughout her fashion career. Early collections took inspiration from the circus and Commedia dell’Arte, with garments featuring equestrian and harlequin-style patterns and buttons in the shape of acrobats and theatrical masks. While the eagle-eyed might have spotted Schiaparelli as a background artist in films, and her Paris salon appearing as a backdrop itself, it was her designs and garments for theatrical productions in New York, London and Paris, as well as Hollywood blockbusters, that put her well and truly centre stage.
An inquisitive and creative child, one of Schiaparelli’s earliest memories was spending hours alone in her family’s attic, trying on her mother’s wedding gown and other old dresses. Perhaps the hours of ‘examining these treasures’ were an early example of Schiaparelli encountering the transformative power of clothing. Through dressing up, Schiaparelli’s make-believe transported her to another time and place, exploring different emotions and momentarily becoming someone else, just like the art of acting.
Schiaparelli’s autobiography is rich with storytelling full of embellishment, anecdote and conflicting statements for dramatic effect. Indeed, it is surprising that Schiaparelli’s life has not been made into a film or musical with its excellent potential for eccentric characters, settings and plots, from her short-lived marriage to Vaudevillian husband ‘The World Famous Dr. W. de Kelor!’, whose act was described by Variety as ‘fortune-telling for members of the audience’, to a tale of Isadora Duncan stripping and dancing for her husband having ‘marked him as to be won’.
Schiaparelli seemed to find herself at home in communities of creative people, particularly performers. She befriended many stars of stage and screen, such as Russian actress Alla Nazimova, her first private customer, American actress and writer Anita Loos (Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, 1925), members of Barnum & Bailey Circus, and Polish opera singer Ganna Walska. Schiaparelli even asserted that not only did she discover Katharine Hepburn, but was also once mistaken for Russian ballet dancer Anna Pavlova. Her eclectic performance tastes ranged from the Ballets Russes to Shakespeare, Charlie Chaplin, Ram Gopal, The King and I, The Pickwick Papers and cabaret. After being introduced to the cabaret bar Le Bœuf sur le toit by Man Ray, she spent many evenings in the company of avant-garde, innovative and influential artists, performers and musicians, including Jean Cocteau, who later asked Schiaparelli to design costumes for his 1940 play Les Monstres Sacrés at Théâtre Michel, Paris. Schiaparelli and friends enjoyed a mixed programme of entertainment at Le Bœuf sur le toit, which featured British puppeteers Frank and Maisie Mumford and their puppet Mademoiselle Zizi, billed as ‘sex appeal on strings’ and for whom Schiaparelli is said to have designed a sheath dress of silver sequin net overlay fabric lined with shocking pink nylon jersey.
Schiaparelli: Fashion Becomes Art is text copyright © Victoria and Albert Museum, 2026.
Shocking Life is text copyright © Schiaparelli SA.
