In three weeks, “Schiaparelli: Fashion Becomes Art,” will open at the V&A museum in London. It’s a full retrospective of Elsa Schiaparelli’s life and work, one that suggests that among the ways she transformed fashion was by being the first designer to question the medium of fashion itself. For Elsa, a dress wasn’t just a dress. A dress could have drawer pulls on its pockets, symbolizing the hidden dimensions of the female psyche. A dress could have a skeleton embroidered on it, suggesting the body had been turned inside out. It was a radical, risky assertion then, and it still is today: Fashion is a major business, but it’s also the ultimate forum of self-expression and fantasy. Both things are true at the same time—but that doesn’t mean that there isn’t an inherent tension between these two truths.

The same is also true for Schiaparelli as a house. Like many heritage houses, it’s both blessed and limited by the recognizability and endurance of its codes. Yet recently, I’ve realized that there’s a secret inherent in Elsa’s most famous iconography: the keyhole. For some, it may just be a pleasing shape. But I think it symbolizes something more— both a challenge to the designer to unlock the potential of this brand, and a reminder that every woman is herself an enigma: to others, and to herself. Fashion is how she externalizes the mystery of who she is to the world.  

That tension—between fashion as a business and fashion as a dream factory; between what a dress should be and what a dress can be; between who a woman appears to be and who a woman is; between the weight of the maison’s history and how it exists now—has informed this entire collection. In every piece, in every accessory, there’s an apparent contradiction. Take, for example the look which I call “impossible knitwear”: traditional Aran cable knits juxtaposed with panels of illusion tulle, which creates the effect of something heavy that seemingly floats on the body. Or our liquid plisse silk-blend fabric, topped with a clear lamination, and made into spiral cut gowns and separates. There’s no boning here, no hard lines, and yet the pieces suggest a kind of structure and rigor even as they remain utterly malleable. Or our fitted, leather-effect sheaths, which are actually printed silk wool: the kind of trompe l’oeil work that’s always defined the house. Then there are our dresses that combine stretch-jersey, second-skin tops with airy skirts trimmed with paillettes. Again and again, we used performance fabric to try to represent the authenticity of the maison (Elsa, after all, was one of the first couturiers to embrace jersey).

I also wanted to explore the codes in different ways. The keyhole, for example: you see it in our expanded Schiap bag collection; you also see it in on the label of our blazers—here reimagined in a hand-hammered 24k gold-plated plaque (a nod to Giacometti, who made some of Elsa’s original buttons)—as well on earrings and our new keyhole shoe. Another famous piece of iconography, the measuring tape, makes its appearance on our classic Vendome jacket in stretch boiled wool. Trimmed with dyed bugle beads, it’s completed with a sfumato measuring tape detail.

Finally, Elsa’s love for the natural world finds new and expanded life in this collection, from the “fur”-trimmed jewelry (while an allusion to her love of monkey fur, ours is actually made with thin sprigs of shearling) to our new dog-and-cat shoes and clutches (no pets were harmed in the making of these; they’re rendered from resin and felt) to our expanded anatomy hardware, most notably the cast-bronze egret feet you’ll see at the bottom of some of our new shearling bags.

Schiaparelli has always been radical. But it’s never been radical to the point of alienating its women. And maybe that’s the ultimate legacy of what Elsa built: clothes that made women feel more alive with the dream of who they were…while also feeling comfortable with who they actually were. It was a paradox that worked a hundred years ago. May it be ever so.

Daniel Roseberry