Schiaparelli review – it’s cocktail o’clock with fashion’s surreal goddess who out-lobstered Dalí and turned a polar bear pink

V&A South Kensington, London
The Italian designer loved to shock and this dazzling show is like sashaying through a party in 1930s Paris with Schiap and her darling friends Cocteau and Dalí

Naked mermaids and prancing horses, silk carrots and unshelled peanuts, gilded elephant trunks, drums and masks – and those are just a few of the buttons. The V&A’s lavish spring show is a weird and wonderful tumble down the rabbit hole that is Schiaparelli, fashion’s house of surrealism.

Elsa Schiaparelli designed clothes to be witty, not just pretty, and that lively spirit runs through this show. A shoe becomes a hat, bones grow on the outside of a dress, a telephone dial becomes a compact mirror. A stroll through the galleries feels less like admiring a beauty pageant lineup of frocks, and more like taking a turn through a 1930s Paris cocktail party with Schiaparelli and her friends Salvador Dalí and Jean Cocteau: bracingly avant garde, mildly unsettling, all visual puns and in-jokes and never a dull moment. Turn a corner from a Man Ray painting of a lit candle wearing a harlequin coat and you encounter a mannequin perched on a ledge, wearing a jacket that sprouts gold palm trees at the shoulders. It is wild, and it works.

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