Schiaparelli at the V&A
The V&A has opened 'Schiaparelli: Fashion Becomes Art,' London’s first major Schiaparelli show linking Elsa Schiaparelli’s surrealist couture to contemporary designer Daniel Roseberry. (apnews.com) Retail and red‑carpet echoes arrived fast — Harrods staged a windows takeover tied to the exhibition, and Nicole Kidman recently wore a sheer Schiaparelli look from the brand’s Fall/Winter 2026 line to a premiere. (us.fashionnetwork.com) (aol.com)
London’s Victoria and Albert Museum has opened a Schiaparelli show that runs until November 8, 2026, and it is the museum’s first major exhibition in the United Kingdom devoted to the house. The show sits at V&A South Kensington and traces Elsa Schiaparelli’s work alongside the modern revival under Daniel Roseberry. (vam.ac.uk) That pairing is the whole point of the exhibition: Elsa Schiaparelli built her name in Paris in the interwar years, and Daniel Roseberry has been the house’s creative director since 2019. The museum is treating them less like two separate designers and more like two chapters of the same visual language. (vam.ac.uk) (schiaparelli.com) Elsa Schiaparelli was never a quiet dressmaker. Her house, founded in 1927, became famous for turning clothes into conversation pieces through collaborations with artists including Salvador Dalí, Jean Cocteau, Man Ray, and Alberto Giacometti. (schiaparelli.com) (vam.ac.uk) That is why her best-known pieces still sound like museum labels instead of wardrobe basics: the 1937 coat embroidered with a Cocteau face motif, the 1938 “Pagan” collection jewelry, and the Lobster Telephone sitting in the V&A’s exhibition highlights. Schiaparelli’s old trick was to make fashion behave like surrealist art without stopping it from being worn. (vam.ac.uk) The V&A says the exhibition includes more than 200 objects, which means this is not a small capsule show built around a few famous gowns. It is a full survey of how Schiaparelli’s symbols, silhouettes, and jokes moved from 1930s couture into a 2020s luxury brand. (vam.ac.uk) Roseberry’s role in that story is to keep the old house codes legible while making them red-carpet sharp. Since taking over in 2019, he has pushed Schiaparelli’s gold anatomy jewelry, exaggerated tailoring, and sculptural eveningwear into celebrity culture without dropping the surrealist edge that made Elsa Schiaparelli famous in the first place. (schiaparelli.com) The retail world moved almost immediately to turn the museum show into street-level theater. Harrods in Knightsbridge unveiled a Schiaparelli windows takeover on April 8, 2026, with large gold keyhole screens and imagery tied to “Anglomaniac,” a project about the house’s influence on more than 50 British artists. (fashionnetwork.com) That Harrods installation sits a short trip from the museum, so the exhibition is not staying inside one building. It is spilling into London retail at the same moment the V&A is selling tickets priced at £28 on weekdays and £30 on weekends for the show’s run through November 8. (fashionnetwork.com) (vam.ac.uk) The celebrity echo landed just as fast in New York. On April 8, 2026, Nicole Kidman wore a Schiaparelli Ready-to-Wear Fall Winter 2026/27 look by Daniel Roseberry to the premiere of “Margo’s Got Money Troubles,” putting the museum’s historical story into a same-week red-carpet image. (schiaparelli.com) (aol.com) So the V&A is not staging a memorial for a dormant label. It has opened a show about a house founded in 1927 that is now visible in a London museum, a Knightsbridge department store, and a Manhattan premiere in the same week. (vam.ac.uk) (fashionnetwork.com) (schiaparelli.com)
