Private Air New York Magazine
Issue link: https://privateair.uberflip.com/i/1545665
www.privateairny.com | 51 Private Air Summer 2026 Opposite Page (Top): Behind the Scenes: Schiaparelli: Fashion Becomes Art, Victoria and Albert Museum, South Kensington. Photo: David Parry / PA Media Assignments Opposite Page (Bottom): Vogue, 1940. Designer Elsa Schiaparelli wearing a black silk dress with a crocheted collar of her own design and a turban. Photo: Fredrich Baker / Condé Nast via Getty Images Above: Behind the Scenes: Schiaparelli: Fashion Becomes Art, Victoria and Albert Museum, South Kensington. Photo: David Parry / PA Media Assignments Right: Mae West wearing Elsa Schiaparelli in Every Day's a Holiday (1937), directed by Edward Sutherland. Photo: Moviestore Collection Ltd / Alamy T he relationship between fashion and art has long existed in parallel, occasionally intersecting but rarely fully merging. At the Victoria and Albert Museum, Schiaparelli: Fashion Becomes Art brought that intersection into focus, presenting couture not as a decorative discipline, but as a form of artistic production with its own intellectual and cultural weight. Elsa Schiaparelli was never content to operate within the expected boundaries of fashion. Born in Rome in 1890 into an intellectually rigorous family, she was shaped early by symbolism, literature, and the sciences, influences that later surfaced in her work through an instinct for transformation and abstraction. By the time she arrived in Paris, she had already begun to position herself not simply as a designer, but as a participant in a wider avant-garde, one that included artists, writers, and cultural provocateurs redefining the visual language of the twentieth century. e exhibition traced this evolution with clarity and scale. Spanning the 1920s to the present, more than 400 objects, including garments, artworks, accessories, and archival materials, established the breadth of a practice that consistently resisted categorization. Schiaparelli's early designs introduced a new visual vocabulary for modern dress, while later works THE COLLECTION