The UK's first Elsa Schiaparelli exhibition runs in the V&A's Sainsbury Gallery to 8 November 2026, from the 1920s house to Daniel Roseberry's couture.
Elsa Schiaparelli, the Paris couturier who coined shocking pink, has her first British exhibition at the Victoria and Albert Museum in South Kensington, to Sunday 8 November 2026. It runs in the Sainsbury Gallery and ends on Daniel Roseberry’s couture for the house today.
Schiaparelli was born in Rome in 1890 to a family of scholars. Her uncle Giovanni Schiaparelli was the astronomer who charted the Martian “canali”. She left for London to escape an arranged marriage, then settled in Paris and opened her own house in 1927.
She built her name on Surrealism: bodies, insects and trompe-l’œil turned into cloth. With Coco Chanel, her rival, she is remembered as one of fashion’s two defining figures between the wars.
The exhibition is built around her work with Salvador Dalí and Jean Cocteau. It shows the Tears dress and the Skeleton dress, both made with Dalí in 1938, and an evening coat embroidered to a Cocteau drawing in 1937. It also includes Man Ray’s 1933 portrait of the designer.
Schiaparelli left the house in the 1950s, and it lay dormant for decades before its revival under Roseberry. The title is her own verdict: for her, dress designing was an art.