Schiaparelli’s Art Triumphs Over Corporate Luster at London’s V&A

Parisian fashion of the 1920s had many notable designers, tailors, and houses, but no two figures captured the moment better than Coco Chanel and Elsa Schiaparelli. Yet the women themselves could hardly have been more different. Ms. Chanel’s originality lay in taking garments from men’s sportswear and military dress and remaking them as practical womenswear. Chanel is now synonymous with quilted leather handbags and pink bouclé suits, yet Ms. Chanel’s brilliance lay in bringing much-needed practicality to a woman’s wardrobe.Ms. Schiaparelli took the opposite approach. A lover of art, she elevated couture’s creativity, taking the finest and strangest fabrics and rendering them into forms fashion had never seen. Her suits, dresses, and coats were elegant and wearable for a night out, but form dominated function. Her archives are still influential today.The history of the two houses has been rather different too. Ms. Chanel’s inconvenient associations with Nazi officials and her subsequent retreat to Switzerland didn’t stop the Jewish Wertheimer family from building Chanel into one of high fashion’s biggest brands. Karl Lagerfeld carried its design legacy forward and became almost as famous as Madame Chanel in the process. Schiaparelli, despite the influence of its founder’s work, didn’t have the same commercial success and folded in 1954. Italian businessman Diego Della Valle acquired the house’s name and archive in 2006, paving the way for its 2012 reopening. The appointment of Texas-born Daniel Roseberry as creative director in 2019 has swiftly returned Schiaparelli to the top of couture. Look at a red carpet or big cultural event, and the most striking, attention-getting, artistic garment will bear the house’s name.Courtesy of Ross AndersonTherefore It’s only fitting that London’s Victoria and Albert Museum — whose Gabrielle Chanel retrospective closed two years ago — would now mount a display of Ms. Schiaparelli’s work. If anything, the new show is an even greater triumph. “Schiaparelli: Fashion Becomes Art” opened March 28 and closes November 8, and has become the city’s must-see fashion exhibition. It is the first British exhibition devoted entirely to the house and spans its history, from Ms. Schiaparelli’s 1920s originals to Mr. Roseberry’s latest work, containing 100 ensembles and 50 artworks, along with accessories, jewelry, photographs, perfume, furniture, and archival material.The exhibition succeeds for the same reason Mr. Roseberry’s time at the house has: His work is modern and unmistakably his own, yet it carries the archival work’s spirit and silhouette forward. It’s only fitting that the exhibition opens with Ms. Schiaparelli and Salvador Dalí’s black 1938 Skeleton dress beside Mr. Roseberry’s autumn 2021 black gown and its rhinestone-encrusted, lung-shaped brass necklace.Courtesy of Ross AndersonThe rest of the exhibition works mostly linearly, with some sections — like the accessories — cleanly pairing Ms. Schiaparelli’s work with Mr. Roseberry’s. The wall text is fine, if a little light. It says more about the era surrounding Ms. Schiaparelli’s work than the clothes themselves. Her work is spectacular. So many of her clothes look like outfits from decades later, their creativity matched only by the quality of her tailoring. One hourglass jacket — a blazer with a curved, cinched waist — may be even more impressive than Dior’s famous Bar jacket.Mr. Roseberry’s work gets a similar amount of shine, with many of his best-known designs on display, from the ruby-red couture gown Ariana Grande wore during the 2025 Oscars opening medley to the black velvet gown with gilded brass bones that Dua Lipa wore at the 2024 Golden Globes. These are theatrical clothes, best appreciated here under spotlights on raised platforms.It isn’t a complete history, though: Like the Chanel retrospective, the V&A created this exhibition in collaboration with the fashion house. The earlier partnership resulted in some distasteful whitewashing of Ms. Chanel’s World War II history; here the lapse is less offensive and more corporate.For example, Mr. Della Valle’s revival began with a 2013 collection by Christian Lacroix. Marco Zanini followed, showing the house’s first couture runway since 1954; Bertrand Guyon then spent nearly four years as design director. None of his work is shown or even mentioned; everything moves directly from the founder’s 1954 retirement to the 2006 acquisition and then onto Mr. Roseberry’s arrival in 2019.Mr. Roseberry’s work is incomplete in some convenient ways. The exhibition contains not one example — or even a mention — of the spring 2023 couture gowns bearing lifelike faux-taxidermy heads of a lion, a leopard, and a she-wolf. The handmade foam-and-resin creations drew online criticism for glamorizing trophy hunting, even though no animals were harmed. The controversy was undeserved, and their omission is cowardly.In short, this exhibition, which costs about $38 on weekdays and $40 on weekends, is Schiaparelli as told by Schiaparelli™. But the work is so fantastic that you can overlook the corporate gloss. Ms. Schiaparelli’s clothes are fashion’s best case for clothing as art. It’s only fitting, then, that they are shown in a leading gallery.

Schiaparelli’s Art Triumphs Over Corporate Luster at London’s V&A

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