London exhibition shows how Elsa Schiaparelli dressed ‘the most masculine city in the world’

LONDON – Elsa Schiaparelli, a trickster couturier who put shoes on heads and lobsters on skirts, made a certain amount of sense in Paris.

Eccentrics will always have a home in the French capital, where the avant-garde can seem almost de rigueur. But what did she think of London?

“The most masculine city in the world,” she proclaimed in her 1954 autobiography, Shocking Life. And what of the English themselves? “Profoundly honest”, but “mad, mad, mad”.

Italy-born Schiaparelli began her eponymous Paris-based fashion house in 1927 with knitwear with trompe l’oeil motifs before fusing fashion and art, collaborating with the likes of Spanish artist Salvador Dali and French poet-artist Jean Cocteau, whose drawings appeared on her creations.

A rival of Gabrielle “Coco” Chanel, she was known for flouting convention with designs including a dress adorned with a lobster print – worn by American socialite Wallis Simpson – and a hat resembling an upside-down shoe.

In 1933, as Europe was still steadying itself from the aftershocks of the US stock market crash of 1929, Schiaparelli opened a London satellite of her thriving couture business.

The venture was less risky than it might have seemed. She was able to take over a town house in the Mayfair district that belonged to her lover’s brother, promptly filling the residence with some 80 workers who could translate her Parisian designs into made-to-measure ensembles for wealthy British women.

Schiaparelli: Fashion Becomes Art, a new exhibition that opened on March 28 at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, will explore the entire arc of the designer’s namesake fashion house, all the way up to the tenure of its current creative director, Daniel Roseberry.

The show – which ends in November – features more than 200 items, including dresses, hats, gloves, jewellery, photographs and artworks.

But a section focusing on Schiaparelli’s short-lived London operation – it closed abruptly in 1939 – may be a particular highlight, making the case that what Paris’ most provocative designer offered to her British clients was hardly Schiap Lite.

“They bought clothes that were as colourful, as vibrant, as unusual, as some of the Paris clients,” said Ms Sonnet Stanfill, the museum’s senior curator of fashion.

A series of mini-profiles in a publication accompanying the exhibition suggests that the women who wore Schiaparelli designs – American art collector Peggy Guggenheim and German-American actress-singer Marlene Dietrich, aristocrats and an aviatrix – were an international sisterhood of eccentrics and capital-P personalities.

Among them was the glamorous Lady Alexandra Haig, who skied in Switzerland and maintained a friendship with British photographer Cecil Beaton. She owned at least four Schiaparelli ensembles, including a plum-coloured silk velvet evening suit.

On the jacket’s ornately embroidered front panels, the skilled artisans of Maison Lesage used rhinestones, sequins and silver-gilt thread to create a riotous garden of stylised plant motifs.

Sometimes called a dinner suit because of the emphasis placed on what is visible above a table, the style was “a quintessential Schiaparelli garment type”, Ms Stanfill said.

To society women in 1930s London, the embroidery would have been “very identifiably Schiaparelli”, she added. “It would have been almost like having a monogrammed handbag: It was that noticeable.”

Another Schiaparelli owner was British art collector and socialite Maud Russell, who joined the British Naval Intelligence Division to fight the Axis powers alongside her friend Ian Fleming, the creator of James Bond.

Her evening dress featuring a conspicuous plastic zipper at the back would have struck the fashion-conscious set of the late 1930s as highly unusual.

“At that time, a couture dress would never have had a zip fastening,” said Ms Stanfill. Zippers were still a novelty then, she added, mainly relegated to “functional outerwear like galoshes, or for occupational dress – not for haute couture”.

Schiaparelli, who closed her studio in 1954 after financial difficulties, died in 1973. She was 83.

The brand was later bought by Diego Della Valle, founder of Italian leather goods maker Tod’s, and relaunched in 2012.

Roseberry has been creative director since 2019. Among his creations on show at the exhibition is a red gown American singer-actress Ariana Grande wore to perform at the 2025 Oscars.

For his part, he sees the distinction between the two cities in terms of their “different energies”.

“Paris is noble, proud and dignified, a place that celebrates spectacle and stateliness,” he said in an e-mail. “London, on the other hand, is energetic, warm, witty and spontaneous. If Paris is the week, London is the weekend.” NYTIMES/REUTERS