Artist, impresario, couturier: V&A stages Schiaparelli retrospective

The V&A is mounting the UK’s first major retrospective devoted to Elsa Schiaparelli, assembling around 400 objects alongside paintings, sculpture and furniture. The exhibition aims to reposition the Italian designer as artist and impresario as well as couturier, showcasing surreal collaborations such as the skeleton dress and the upside-down shoe hat created with Salvador Dalí.

The show stops short of including Daniel Roseberry’s lion dress worn by Kylie Jenner on the Petit Palais steps, but traces the house’s talent for spectacle. Roseberry says, “I don’t consider Elsa to be a dressmaker. She was an image-maker, a culture creator, and she has been our north star with every red carpet moment since,” while Sonnet Stanfill, the V&A’s senior fashion curator, highlights Schiaparelli’s flair for self-promotion and her use of artists and theatre as the social-media equivalent of her time.

UK

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