The sumptuous spring exhibition at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, the world’s largest museum of art and design, is a strange and wonderful journey into the land of wonders that is Schiaparelli, the house of surrealism in fashion. The United Kingdom’s first exhibition dedicated to the legendary Elsa Schiaparelli spans from the 1920s to the present and pays homage to the influence of this innovative designer.
Elsa Schiaparelli designed clever clothing, not just beautiful, and that spirit pervades the entire exhibition, which can be visited until November 8. Wandering through the rooms feels less like watching a beauty-pageant parade of dresses and more like strolling through a 1930s Parisian cocktail party with Schiaparelli and her friends Salvador Dalí and Jean Cocteau. The show allows us to appreciate how she worked within the boundaries of traditional tailoring, yet played with transgressive details, extraordinary materials, and the imagery of surrealism to create fashion propositions that are truly one-of-a-kind.
A woman far ahead of her time, Schiaparelli was born into an affluent Roman family in 1890. In her memoirs, she recalled that as a child she considered herself ugly and envied her sister’s beauty. Her solution was to take seeds from the most beautiful flowers in the garden and plant them in her mouth, her nose, and her ears, hoping they would bloom as a ‘celestial garden’. Even then she thought differently, something that would shape her future career.
She moved to London at barely twenty. There she met Count Wilhelm de Wendt de Kerlor, a theosophist and medium. They married in 1914 and had a daughter, Maria Luisa Yvonne Radha, who would give them two granddaughters, Marisa and Barry Berenson. Divorced and with a young daughter to care for, she arrived in Paris and there launched her fashion career with garments such as the the first skirt-pants for the Spanish tennis player Lilí Álvarez, a scandal for the era. In a few years, she had a staff of 400, and Vogue lauded her as “the most exciting designer of clothing in Paris.”
Marisa Berenson and Remembrance of Elsa Schiaparelli
To commemorate the exhibition at the V&A, Elsa Schiaparelli’s granddaughter, the model and actress Marisa Berenson, granted an interview to The Times at the luxurious headquarters of the fashion house in Paris. There, on the illustrious Place Vendôme, her grandmother opened her first haute couture salon, while Coco Chanel, her archrival, had her maison just around the corner, on the less prestigious Rue Cambon.
“She loved hosting guests,” recalls Marisa Berenson of her visionary grandmother to the English newspaper. “Place Vendôme was like the center of the world, a cultural salon. All the artists, writers, and leading members of high society gathered there. She was much more than just a designer. She was an artist.” In those days, Coco Chanel spoke of Elsa Schiaparelli with malice, describing her as “that Italian artist who makes clothes.” Regarding that rivalry, her granddaughter had no hesitation: “I think Chanel hated her. I think Chanel was jealous.”
Marisa Berenson, the granddaughter of Elsa Schiaparelli.
At 79, Berenson can boast of a life full of intensity. She rubbed elbows with the Beatles, was the Queen of Studio 54, and appeared in films such as Bob Fosse’s Cabaret or Luchino Visconti’s Death in Venice. About her grandmother, she recalled that she was a reserved woman who kept her professional life and her family life separate. “She organized wonderful parties. People like Dalí would come. When we were very young, I remember a particular party at which she had my sister Berry and me come down in our pajamas to greet the guests, and the Duke of Windsor took us back to bed.”
Schiaparelli and the Reign of Daniel Roseberry
As a true visionary, Marisa Berenson was convinced that her grandmother would have loved Daniel Roseberry, Schiaparelli’s creative director since 2019. The American designer shares with the Italian couturière her talent for creating viral moments. For instance when he dressed actress Teyana Taylor for the Golden Globes in a black mermaid gown. “Daniel is a brilliant artist,” Marisa Berenson told The Times. “It’s not easy to come to a house like Schiaparelli and make its codes your own, but he has done it, and it is magical.”
Those surrealist codes of Schiaparelli seem tailor-made for the digital era and are highly prized by stars such as Margot Robbie, Dua Lipa, or Beyoncé for their unfailing ability to make a splash on the red carpet. After launching her label in 1927, Schiap, as Elsa was affectionately known, designed garments full of wit and provocation, whose bold colors, dramatic silhouettes, and optical tricks gave them a strong visual language that endures to this day.
