A blockbuster exhibition explores how surrealist designer Elsa Schiaparelli redefined fashion

By Rachel Tashjian, CNN

(CNN) — Fashion has long danced alongside the medium of art, with designers taking inspiration from the work of history’s great artists. With its technical prowess and avant-garde ambitions, many would argue that fashion belongs on the same plane as painting or sculpture.

A monumental new show at London’s Victoria and Albert Museum (V&A) celebrates the connection between the two disciplines in a more urgent way. “Schiaparelli: Fashion Becomes Art” — which opens Saturday, March 28 —presents the groundbreaking work of the late Italian designer Elsa Schiaparelli as embodying the cultural gravity of art. Can the act of wearing a bold or even challenging dress change the way we see the status quo, beauty standards or the purpose of clothing itself?

It can — and Schiaparelli herself showed us precisely how over a handful of decades in the early 20th century. Nearly 100 years later, her predecessor, present-day Schiaparelli creative director Daniel Roseberry, has picked up her mantle, combining thrilling design with the machinery of celebrity to change our notions of female beauty and power. The exhibition pairs their work together, showing the value of shocking style in a moment of conservatism.

“Elsa Schiaparelli was someone who surrounded herself with artists,” such as Man Ray, Jean Cocteau and Salvador Dali, said Sonnet Stanfill, the V&A’s senior curator of fashion. “It wasn’t just Schiaparelli appropriating Surrealist images and sticking them on her clothes. She was someone who was embedded in the creative process, and there was a true collaborative, creative exchange with these artists and creatives.”

Hailing from an intellectual and aristocratic family in Rome, and with no formal fashion training, Schiaparelli’s clothing could be challenging or, to use one of her favorite words: shocking. While peers like Coco Chanel or Christian Dior made clothing that was radically simple or effusively beautiful, Schiaparelli embraced what was surprising, in bad taste or even revolting (a pair of 1938 monkey fur boots, for example). Schiaparelli created clothes like a standup comedian or a philosopher with a flair for the opulent: What if a shoe were a hat? What if a circus-themed jacket had buttons sculpted like horses?

That gave Schiaparelli’s clothing a sense of relevance in pre-World War II Europe’s cultural upheaval and aesthetically traditionalist Paris — a methodology that Roseberry has picked up. In the final room of the exhibition, his boundary-pushing designs — a couture model clutching a robot baby, or a crisis-red gown whose bodice is eerily dense with beads — show how the idea of an unexpected ensemble can provoke and surprise, moving fashion and pop culture forward, where most clothing merely aims to please.

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