Elsa Schiaparelli was deeply embedded in the world of art. Having founded her legendary fashion house in Paris in 1927, the Italian designer collaborated with the most iconic names of her time, including Salvador Dalí, Man Ray, and Alberto Giacometti. Her designs made magic of the body, drawing inspiration from the themes of Surrealism. Dramatic items of clothing reimagined exposed insides; one dress made with Dalí, for example, was shaped by skeletal boning. She also created hybrid looks that fused the physical aspects of human, animal, and plant; another Dalí dress was embellished with his famous lobster icon, while a Jean Cocteau collaboration featured a profusion of pink fabric roses.
Schiaparelli’s silhouettes both enhanced and reshaped the body, using intense corsetry and unconventionally curved boning to exaggerate hips and shoulders. Like the Surrealists who motivated her, a major flair for drama and humor ran through her work, offsetting its sometimes dark elements with playfulness and frivolity.
This month, a major exhibition dedicated to the art of Schiaparelli opens at the Victoria and Albert Museum (V&A) in London. “Fashion Becomes Art” delves into the work of a designer who was authentically embedded in the avant-garde creative world of the 1930s, creating wearable pieces that extended far beyond the practicalities or traditional trends of her contemporaries. The show also highlights Daniel Roseberry’s recent, immensely popular reimagining of the brand, with designs dripping in gold, body-cast plating, sweeping feathers, and a healthy dose of contemporary surrealism.
Here are eight contemporary artists that fans of Schiaparelli should know.
Paloma Proudfoot
B. 1992, London. Lives and works in London.
At first, it seems British artist Paloma Proudfoot’s wall-based ceramics should feel stomach-churningly gory; they feature exposed spinal columns, rib cages covered in scales, and feathers protruding from the end of fingers. But they are so delicately rendered that they have a beguiling beauty to them instead. Inspired by the historical treatment of women within the mental health system and wider culture, her flat, multi-piece works show bodies breaking, bending, and expanding, her creaturelike forms finding an empowering escapism.
Proudfoot is also informed by pattern cutting, creating flat shapes from ceramic, rather than fabric, which are then joined together. Her work chimes with many Schiaparelli designs, like the 1938 all-black, exposed corsetry “skeleton dress” created in collaboration with Dalí. This cut-out approach is also visible in her 1936 conical straw hat, which features a pair of nude leather gloves—complete with red nails—sitting at its crown like a pair of eerily disembodied hands.
Naudline Pierre
B. 1989, Leominster, Massachusetts. Lives and works in New York City.
A Kiss Three Times, 2018
Naudline Pierre
New Image Art
In rising artist Naudline Pierre’s transportive paintings, huddles of figures are draped in fiery swathes of feathers that could be read as wings or elaborate cloaks. At times, the feathers seem to grow from their bodies. The American artist is inspired by her own religious upbringing, her intensely dramatic paintings evoking both divine beings and exotic birds in the natural world.
In Bathers (2025), a group of angelic beings lounge and stretch around a glistening pool, their bodies wrapped in flamelike gold and red wings. Flamboyant use of feathers has been a mainstay of Schiaparelli since the early days, extending the bodies of those who wear the brand’s designs and creating wild, creature-like silhouettes. A 1950s Schiaparelli hat, for example, was entirely covered by green and red tinted fabric leaves, featuring a dramatic plumage of golden feathers mirroring the spectacular coifs of birds of paradise.
Julie Curtiss
B. 1982, Paris. Lives and works in New York City.
Venus, 2016
Julie Curtiss
White Cube
Julie Curtiss’s paintings dabble in Surrealism, featuring figures covered by ornate twists of hair, talon-like long fingernails, and fetishistic high heels. In the French artist’s 2021 painting Bathsheba, two figures sit in a salon, one having her feet bathed for a pedicure. The women’s bodies and faces are entirely covered in hair which swirls around their stomachs, knees, and breasts. The combination of elegance and bodily uncanniness evokes numerous pieces by Schiaparelli, including an archival gray skirt suit made in collaboration with Cocteau, which features a woman’s silhouette leaning back over the shoulder, her golden sequined hair tumbling down the arm.
Hannah Levy
B. 1991, New York City. Lives and works in New York City.
Untitled, 2019
Hannah Levy
Casey Kaplan
Untitled, 2019
Hannah Levy
Casey Kaplan
Human and animal hybridity runs through Hannah Levy’s membranous sculptures. The American artist’s works often comprise of two parts: a glistening metal base that calls to mind the shape of bird claws and high heels, and a silicone or glass structure that squeezes between or wraps around it like skin. Her wild works evoke the body, which is shown as both contained and free: These sculptures look as though they could come to life and attack the viewer at any moment. Elsa Schiaparelli often featured similarly weapon-esque embellishments on her clothes, for example, a pair of black 1930s gloves that had gold, talon-like nails extending from the fingers, likely inspired by a Man Ray photo of hands with gloves painted on them by Pablo Picasso.
Felipe Baeza
B. 1987, Guanajuato, Mexico. Lives and works in New York City.
Ahuehuete en el Dia, 2017
Felipe Baeza
Food Bank For New York City Benefit Auction
Untitled (Los Otros), 2024
Felipe Baeza
Public Art Fund Benefit Auction
While many of Elsa Schiaparelli’s pieces were decidedly fierce, she also embraced the soft beauty of the natural world. In her 1954 autobiography, she wrote about planting seeds in her mouth as a child, in the hope they would grow into a garden and cover her face. Mexican mixed-media artist Felipe Baeza’s intricate paintings and collages feature plants growing from the body. In his artworks, the artist, who was featured in the The Artsy Vanguard 2022, evokes mythical beasts and unruly beings that are entangled with nature.
In the2018 ink, collage, and glitter work, Ahuehuete, a vast tree sprouts from a human figure’s mouth; in the painting Por caminos ignorados, por hendiduras secretas, por las misteriosas vetas de troncos recién cortados (2020), the central figure’s skin is entirely overrun by foliage. A 1937 Schiaparelli evening coat designed in collaboration with Cocteau feeds into this aesthetic, its shoulders covered in giant pink fabric roses as though growing from the body.
Becky Tucker
B. 1993, Scarborough, England. Lives and works in Glasgow.
In her sculptural practice, Becky Tucker creates bodies formed from armor-like plates, sometimes embellished with animal features inspired by mythology. The British artist’s sculptures feature divisions where pieces of ceramic seem to have been stitched together, drawing upon corsetry and high fashion as well as traditional sheathing. In Crypt (2024), for example, a human figure cut off at the knees and elbows is formed entirely from three sections of ceramic, sewn with thick suede at the waist and neck. Spikes, claws, and sharp teeth abound in her works, blurring the lines between the body and the human-made structures created to clothe and protect it.
Schiaparelli often embraced the aesthetic of armor, with form-fitting garments embellished with talismans similar to Tucker’s plates. In Schiaparelli’s 1938 Zodiac evening jacket, structured navy silk is covered in celestial symbols, promising spiritual protection for the wearer. Her cape collaboration with fashion illustrator Christian Bérard from the same year is emblazoned with metallic sequins that show the god Apollo surging forth with a group of horses and his bow raised as though charging into battle.
Nevine Mahmoud
B. 1988, London. Lives and works in Los Angeles.
Elsa Schiaparelli had a nuanced understanding of how the erotic could be expressed through material and inanimate objects. A 1938 choker included in the V&A collection, for example, is made up of a gold ribbon, embellished with deep purple velvet bows and a series of cast pinecones hanging from delicate chains. The piece is inherently feminine and sensual yet also ambiguous, the pinecones appearing as both beautiful objects and potential grenades.
Nevine Mahmoud creates a similarly unsettling sense of eroticism in her sculptures, working with refined materials such as marble to reimagine objects like peaches (Peach Ball, 2017) and disembodied deer ears (Decollate, 2024). The British artist’s work, which has been shown at tastemaking galleries like Nina Johnson and Various Small Fires, is refined and richly suggestive, both celebrating and sending up the clichés of female sexuality. She finds an unusual sense of power by portraying items associated with vulnerability or submissiveness, imbuing them with their own erotic magnetism while not entirely rejecting their gendered connotations.
Andra Ursuta
B. 1979, Salonta, Romania. Lives and works in New York City.
Modeled after her own body and created with wax through 3D printing processes, Andra Ursuta’s sculptures combine human and alien forms. At the Venice Biennale in 2022, for instance, the Romanian sculptor presented a series of pieces that showed the body pinched and squeezed, both tightly contained by and bursting out from tightly corseted forms.
Her work is evocative of Schiaparelli’s unconventional presentation of the human silhouette, featuring highly exaggerated angular hip pads, sharply tailored waists, and jutting shoulders. These pieces create powerful impressions of the body but also a sense of awkwardness, contrasting the soft, fleshy human form with the formidable artwork that houses it.
Browse more works by artists like Elsa Schiaparelli in Artsy’s collection.
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