Schiaparelli: Fashion Becomes Art
Opens to the public at The Sainsbury Gallery, Victoria and Albert Museum, from 28th March to 8th November 2026
"For me, dress designing is not a profession but an art.",
Elsa Schiaparelli, creator of House of Schiaparelli, Paris, 1927
On invitation from the board of trustees of the Victoria and Albert Museum (V&A), Nebbia has designed Schiaparelli: Fashion Becomes Art, the UK’s first exhibition dedicated to Elsa Schiaparelli, spanning her revolutionary work from the 1920s to the present day. The show celebrates the visionary designer's influence, tracing the fashion house’s innovative beginnings through to its evolution under current Creative Director, Daniel Roseberry.
Presented within the Sainsbury Gallery as a full architectural build, Nebbia’s design unfolds through monumental planes, layered thresholds, and finely detailed surfaces. It is dramatic, theatrical and unapologetically radical, mirroring Elsa Schiaparelli’s fearless fusion of the arts, fashion and performance.
Nebbia’s guiding concept is déjà vu, a sensation of repeated familiarity that feels slightly shifted. Rather than leaning into the tropes of surrealism, the architects interpreted how déjà vu could be expressed spatially, creating a black-and-white, textural world as a backdrop to exhibit Schiaparelli’s work. Bold structure, sharp precision, and the manipulation of perception converge to create a spatial narrative that feels visceral, tangible, and delightfully disorienting.
The exhibition presents over 400 objects, including garments, accessories, jewellery, paintings, photographs, sculpture, furniture, perfumes, and archive material, each celebrating the Maison Schiaparelli’s boundless creativity and impact on contemporary fashion.
Nebbia’s design unfolds as a sequence of layered portals; a dreamlike continuum, where past and present oscillate. The space is felt as though stepping into a surrealist photograph. Visitors are encouraged to wind back and forth through interlaced spaces, encountering works from shifting vantage points and revisiting moments that transform with light and perspective at each return. The construction enables looping sightlines and visual echoes, giving visitors repeated re-experience rather than linear progression.
The architecture is immersive, layered, and non–linear. Walls running in one direction rise to 3.3 metres, while those in the perpendicular axis reach 4.4 metres, creating interlaced spaces where visitors can loop back to previously encountered objects. Nebbia defines each intersection as an “infinite zoom”: every vignette opens onto a deeper surrounding world, skewing visitors’ sense of time and place while guiding them through a rhythm of discovery.
A continuous datum line runs almost throughout the exhibition, visible in joints, cuts, and folds. This horizon subtly distorts perspective, turning walls into compositions rather than mere display panels. Double mirrors and dynamic lighting further destabilise perception, creating a suspended, twilight-like atmosphere.
Tactility is also an important dimension in this exhibition. Nebbia uses texture-rich materials like suede paint, fabric silk wallpaper and fur to evoke core tenets of Schiaparelli’s house; luxury, craftsmanship and irreverence.
In a unique twist, a significant portion of the exhibition build is crafted in heavy 280 gsm hemp paper, becoming architectural through standing seams, embossed textures, and intricate folds. Here, Nebbia employs trompe-l’œil, an artistic technique which translates to ‘to fool the eye’, by creating illusions of curvature and depth through precise jointing, while MDF is treated to resemble parchment or gelatin prints. Nebbia cleverly elevates delicate surfaces, making the architecture itself become an instrument of illusion.
Schiaparelli’s garments are treated as sculptural presences within the exhibition. Strong silhouettes and intricate embellishments are accentuated by light, shadow, and considered framing. Deep shadows flatten and abstract, while brightness sharpens and dematerialises, allowing objects to oscillate between tangible and ethereal, echoing Schiaparelli’s playful approach to trompe-l’œil, surrealism, and her referencing longstanding collaborations with photographers including Horst P. Horst, Cecil Beaton, Man Ray and George Hoyningen-Huene.
The exhibition is elevated through slow, deliberate sensory transformations using light, motion and sound developed in collaboration with Studio ZNA, Luke Halls Studio and Father. Visitors who linger will notice shifts in changing colours, dimming or brightening of light. Slow motions through AV blurs the boundaries between reality and imagined, whilst spatial sound defines thresholds between areas, creating a moment to focus or signify changes in themes.
The exhibition centers on Elsa Schiaparelli with approximately 85 historic looks, alongside 25 contemporary creations by Daniel Roseberry. The two displays with Roseberry’s works act as counterpoints, oscillating between past and present. His dedicated space is marked by dynamic lighting, placing contemporary couture within Elsa’s avant-garde world.
Key exhibition pieces include the iconic ‘Skeleton’ dress and the ‘Tears’ dress, alongside the upside-down shoe hat created with Salvador Dalí. Artworks by Pablo Picasso, Jean Cocteau and Man Ray spotlight Schiaparelli's collaboration across the arts.
Nebbia has approached temporary exhibition design as architecture itself, embracing impermanence as an idea rather than a constraint. Schiaparelli: Fashion Becomes Art marks a return to major London arts production for the studio, following their Between Forests and Skies aluminium installation for the 2021 London Design Festival in the V&A’s John Madejski Garden, as well as global arts installations at Coachella and upcoming projects in New Zealand and Italy.
The exhibition sits on a sliding scale between art and architecture, translating Schiaparelli’s belief that fashion can become art. Here, architecture becomes the medium for experiencing fashion as sculpture, performance, and illusion; time itself becomes material.
