Schiaparelli Review – It’s Cocktail Hour with the Surrealist Fashion Gods Who Outdid Dali and Turned the Polar Bear Pink | fashion

nMermaids and prancing horses, silk carrots and unshelled peanuts, gilded elephant boxes, drums and masks – these are just a few examples of the buttons. The Victoria and Albert Museum’s lavish spring show is a weird and wonderful take on the rabbit hole called Schiaparelli, the surrealist fashion house.

Elsa Schiaparelli designed clothes to be subtle, not just pretty, and that lively spirit runs through this show. A shoe turns into a hat, bones grow on the outside of a dress, and a phone dial becomes a compact mirror. Wandering the showrooms feels less like admiring an array of dresses at a beauty pageant, and more like taking a detour during a cocktail party in 1930s Paris with Schiaparelli and her friends Salvador Dali and Jean Cocteau: audacious, slightly disturbing avant-garde, all visual puns and jokes, and never a dull moment. Turn the corner of a Man Ray painting of a lit candle wearing a clown’s coat and you’ll encounter a mannequin sitting on a ledge, wearing a jacket with golden palm trees sprouting over her shoulders. It’s wild, and it works.

Coco Chanel, Schiaparelli’s contemporary and – in modern parlance – friend, was aggressive and angry when she called her “that Italian artist who makes clothes.” This show recasts that rating as a compliment, except as a backhanded hornet. He argues that Schiaparelli was not a fashion designer touring with Surrealist artists, but an artist in her own right. Case in point: Dalí’s lobster-shaped telephone was included in the show, along with the lobster dress, famously worn by Wallis Simpson, which Schiaparelli made in collaboration with Dalí. The dress preceded the phone by a year.

Next to her famous 1938 skeleton dress, another Dalí collaboration, with padded ribs and a spine of cotton wadding poking out eerily from the black crepe, is a letter from Dalí – “Dear Elsa, I like the idea of ​​‘bones on the outside’ very much” – in which the idea is clearly attributed to her. Picasso’s portrait of Nusch Éluard, dressed as Schiaparelli with a horseshoe-shaped hat, captures a moment when Éluard entered his studio and Picasso was so fascinated by her outfit that he insisted on painting her on the spot.

Born into an intelligent family in Rome in 1890, Schiaparelli seems to have been born with Surrealism in her bones. In her memoirs, she tells how when she was a child, she thought she was simple and was jealous of her sister’s beauty. Her solution was to take seeds from the garden’s most beautiful flowers and plant them in her mouth, nose and ears, hoping they would bloom “like a garden of heaven.” Indeed, she was thinking differently. (Spoiler: It didn’t work, it just made her cough.)

She moved to London in her twenties, arriving in Paris in her thirties, divorced and with a daughter to support, whereupon she began her fashion career with a collection of optical illusion sweaters with knitted “optical illusions” suggesting a bow or bodice. Within a few years, she had a staff of 400, and Vogue magazine was hailing her as “Paris’ most exciting clothing designer.” We meet her in the first room of this show, where she is photographed in a dark suit and lace-up shoes in her studio on Place Vendôme in Paris. Napoleon can be seen in his column through the window behind her. It’s hard to say who looks cooler.

Sheab, as she was known to her friends, loved to shock. Her favorite color was stunning pink, and she made it part of her brand. For a while, a stuffed pink polar bear was displayed in her shop window; When she died in 1973, 19 years after her retirement, she was buried in pink.

This offering includes a coat she made for Jane Clarke, wife of art historian Kenneth Clarke, to wear to the 1937 coronation ceremony, which fastens with a single button – the luminous nude mermaid – at the chest. It seems that fashion as a performance art didn’t start with the Kardashians or the Met Gala.

Sheap emerges as a visionary, collaborating across culture to explore her creativity and promote her brand almost a century ahead of her time. So it’s to his great credit that Daniel Rosebery, the American designer leading the brand’s current renaissance, maintains his own style through modern pieces interspersed in the archives. Rosebery, who joined in 2019, gets it just right: the humour, the charm and the eroticism. He knows how to lean into the grotesque—what he calls “the pebble in the shoe”—while maintaining a backbone of clear thinking that keeps jokes from turning into comedy.

Younger audiences who come to Schiaparelli through TikTok and viral red carpet moments will be thrilled to see the dress Bella Hadid made a splash on the red carpet at Cannes in 2021, a gold bra shaped like a pair of lungs, and the “robot baby” made from old phones and fragments of circuit boards that appeared on the 2024 runway.

Schiap’s reputation has always been based on how she feels about the mingling of fashion and art. Those who feel that fashion should stay the course may not like this show; Those who appreciate clothing that can be outrageous, smart and in conversation with culture will do so. And most importantly – no one will be bored.