You might not be familiar with Elsa Schiaparelli, but you are likely to have been influenced by what she designed.
The fashion legend, who is the focus of the V&A’s forthcoming exhibition, opening this week, is largely responsible for how we think about contemporary style. She showed women that they didn’t need to dress for men; fashion could be clever and experimental, and a way of communicating who we are. Getting dressed in the morning didn’t have to be about appeasing men; it could just be about pleasing yourself instead. Her witty, often avant-garde clothes were about making a statement and being in control of one’s image. She recontextualised unexpected or traditionally ugly items and placed them firmly in the fashion realm – buttons shaped like insects, an oversized mirror brooch designed to resemble a fly, or a necklace composed of porcelain beads in a shape reminiscent of aspirin tablets, the latter of which is now on show – alongside 400 other objects – at the V&A. Before her arrival on the fashion scene in the late 20s, what women wore was elegant and feminine, clothes designed to look pretty. Schiaparelli proved to the world that what we choose to wear can be also be playful, interesting and intellectual.
This was a woman who had zero interest in the male gaze. There would be no Miuccia Prada without Schiaparelli. You might not recognise any famous silhouettes or prints in the V&A exhibition (the UK’s first showcase dedicated to the designer), but you will identify with – or at least appreciate – the mindset that she pioneered: that fashion can be more than simply looking pretty.
Elsa Schiaparelli in her boutique at 21 Place Vendôme, Harper’s Bazaar, October 1935. Photograph by François Kollar © GrandPalais
Her story is a great one. Schiaparelli was born in Rome to Italian aristocrats, but – after her parents tried to marry her off to a wealthy Russian – she ran off to London instead, to work as a nanny. There she met a Polish-Swiss lecturer, fortune teller and ultimately a conman, called Comte William de Wendt de Kerlor, who she married within days of meeting. The couple moved to Nice before ending up in New York where they had a daughter, Gogo. He turned out to be a fraudulent charlatan, repeatedly investigated by the FBI, and eventually she left him. Now a single mother who was clean out of money, Schiaparelli and her child decided to head back to Paris, where she did odd jobs to make ends meet. “If I have become what I am, I owe it to two distinct things – poverty and Paris. Poverty forced me to work, and Paris gave me a liking for it and courage,” the designer later said, as quoted by biographer Palmer White.
Lobster Dress by Elsa Schiaparelli, designed in collaboration with Salvador Dalí. Paris, Summer 1937. Silk organza © 2025 Salvador Dalí
Lobster Telephone
In Paris, she met the famed designer Paul Poiret who became a mentor and encouraged her to enter fashion. Fascinated by the art world, she was introduced to the Surrealists, including Man Ray, Jean Cocteau, Pablo Picasso, Man Ray, Leonor Fini and Dalí – the latter of whom would become one of her most famous collaborators. Her work shaped and contributed to the Surrealist movement; clothes were a perfect medium to translate subversiveness and bold ideas. She used vivid brights colour palettes that weren’t customary in fashion, most famously shocking pink. Silhouettes were wearable, but there was always a twisted detail that made the respective piece a statement. “Dress designing, incidentally, is to me not a profession but an art,” she once said.
It wasn’t about beauty or good taste; Schiaparelli was far more interested in the connection between pop culture and what we wear. Before long, her radical, boundary-pushing designs – a shoe designed as a hat, or the famed lobster dress – made her one of France’s best known designers. Soon her work was worn by the most influential women of the day, including Wallis Simpson, Malene Dietrich and Peggy Guggenheim.
Mae West wearing Elsa Schiaparelli in Every Day’s A Holiday (1937)
Skeleton Dress, designed by Elsa Schiaparelli and Salvador Dalí, 1938. V&A © 2025 Salvador Dalí, Fundació Gala-Salvador Dalí, DACS. Photograph © Emil Larsson
Daniel Roseberry for Schiaparelli photographed by David Parry/PA Media Assignments
Fashion would look very different if it wasn’t for Schiaparelli. Givenchy and Pierre Cardin both trained under her, and McQueen’s radical, subversive looks borrow from the Schiap school of thought. As the Guardian recently highlighted, intellectualism in pop culture is having a moment, but it was Schiaparelli who did it first – she made fashion clever, desirable, funny, demanding and original. Today, the brand is helmed by Daniel Roseberry and is a red-carpet favourite, among Margot Robbie, Kylie Jenner, Demi Moore and Carey Mulligan. Just as Schiap herself intended, these gowns – even today, in our unshockable world – make you stare.
Completely disinterested in what was trending at the time, Schiaparelli beat to the sound of her own drum – and in doing so gave permission for other women to do the same. “Ninety percent (of women) are afraid of being conspicuous, and of what people will say. So they buy a gray suit,” she said in her 1954 memoir, Shocking Life. “They should dare to be different.”
Schiaparelli: Fashion Becomes Art opens at the V&A opens Saturday 28 March.
Ella Alexander is Citizen Femme’s fashion features editor. She started her career at the Evening Standard, and has since held senior editorial roles at Vogue, The Independent and Harper’s Bazaar, where she remains a contributing editor. She also writes for The Telegraph, Sunday Times Style, Service95 and CNN. She is an author, having co-written Dame Zandra Rhodes’ memoir, Iconic: My Life In Fashion In 50 Objects, published by Transworld in July 2024. Her favourite travel destination is Catania, Sicily’s second city.
Lead image: V&A
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