Artist, design director and fashion designer: V&A organizes Schiaparelli retrospective | fashion

WWhen Kylie Jenner stood on the marble steps of the Petit Palais in 2023, a fake lion’s head pinned to her off-the-shoulder dress, even by the standards of the youngest member of the Kardashian clan, the outfit looked a bit much.

Schiaparelli’s head and dress were hand-painted for lifelike realism, and were designed by Daniel Roseberry of Texas. Although it’s already been four years since she took over as artistic director, her look has been transformative — earning Jenner front-row seats at the biggest shows and propelling the nearly century-old Parisian fashion house, overshadowed by Chanel, Balenciaga and Dior, into viral ubiquity.

As the Victoria and Albert Museum’s massive new exhibition on Schiaparelli wants to make clear, this moment-making approach to fashion is not just a reflection of the social media age but is entirely in keeping with the spirit of its Italian founder, Elsa Schiaparelli. “I don’t consider Elsa a seamstress,” says Rosebery. “She was an image-maker and cultural innovator, and has been our North Star every red carpet moment since.”

Unfortunately, the lion dress is not among the 400 items in the exhibition, which also includes paintings, sculptures and furniture. But surrealism abounds, thanks in large part to Schiaparelli’s many collaborations with artists including Jean Cocteau and Salvador Dali, including the skeleton dress, a macabre design with black lined bones, and a hat made to look like an upside-down shoe, both designed with Dali in the late 1930s.

The most intimate pieces, which act as a dividing line between the mid-1930s and now, include a wedding dress worn at the Golders Green synagogue and “some leopard-print shoes, which Elsa never took off,” says Sunette Stanfill, chief curator of costume at the Victoria and Albert Museum.

This is the first major UK retrospective dedicated to the designer, and aims to position the Italian as an artist and the fashion purveyor as a fashion designer. “She was a good designer but a great self-promoter and promoter,” Stanfill says. “She knew that announcing her work with Jean Cocteau would get publicity. One of the best ways to get attention for your work was to work with artists, film and theater for an audience. It was the equivalent of social media in her time.”

The idea was first floated by the museum in 2017, Stanfill says, but no one expected the Schiaparelli brand to harness the internet so effectively in the years that followed.. “The way Rosebery’s work penetrates culture as Elsa did shows how adept they are at capturing the attention of economics in their own time.”

In fact, if you’ve glanced at the red carpet in the past five years, you’ll have seen the so-called “Schiap Pack” in action. Take Bella Hadid at Cannes in 2021 wearing a black dress with a copper lung-shaped necklace. Or Teyana Taylor’s crystal-filled “Party in the Back” dress she wore to this year’s Golden Globe Awards. The brand is expected to dress several nominees at next week’s Academy Awards.

Part of the brand’s success then and now is its ability to make witty yet wearable clothing. “We try to walk a fine line between humor and camp,” Rosebery says, talking about the hot accessory of 2024: a sparkly robot baby.

The massive retrospective exhibitions, which focused on household names such as Dior and Balenciaga, highlighted the V&A’s ability to broaden its audience. More than half a million people visited the 2019 Dior exhibition. The Victoria and Albert Museum hopes Schiaparelli will attract similar crowds.

The timing is on its side, as Rosebery’s work deepens the broader cultural awareness of the once-dormant fashion house. At the height of her life between the wars, Elsa died in 1973.

On Thursday evening, the designer showed a fall-winter collection that met Elsa’s work head-on. The entire collection was powered by the same illusions and optical illusions, including “impossible knitwear” that combined aran knits and tulle to create the effect of floating garments, and leather-looking sheaths that were actually made of wool. Anatomical devices are a key feature of Schiaparelli, and are widely copied on the high street. Here they appear as egret feet hanging from a bag (Elsa also loved the monkey fur, but Rosebery prefers to use fur).

“The big question was, ‘What is the purpose of this other than to give some sort of historical context to the house that people know today?’” Rosebery says of his involvement in the exhibition. “But her contribution resonated in the work of others for years. Whether it was Martin Margiela, Rei Kawakubo or Azzedine Alaïa. All of these designers were carrying that torch for her.”

Stanfill agrees. “It’s easy to get caught up in the weird, but they also made clothes that were wearable. They just happened to have a weird button or two.”