E
lsa Schiaparelli, who will be the subject of an exhibition at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London in 2026, was ahead of her time. In 1927 the avant-garde, Rome-born couturier founded a fashion house defined by bold, surrealist-inspired creations that are reflected in the house’s recent revival under Daniel Roseberry.
Schiaparelli also pioneered the idea of the artist-designer collab, enlisting a number of her friends in the surrealist art scene to work on elements of her designs — from the writer, artist and film-maker Jean Cocteau’s line drawings rendered in sumptuous embroidery to Salvador Dalí’s input on the iconic lobster dress and shoe hat. Schiaparelli also engaged her artist friends to collaborate on different perfume bottles. In 1947 Dalí produced a design that recalls a golden monstrance-style altar piece for Schiaparelli’s Le Roy Soleil perfume — created in crystal in a limited run of 2,000 by Baccarat, and presented in a large, gilded, satin-lined metal shell. On receiving the perfume, the Duchess of Windsor declared it “the most beautiful bottle ever made… It has displaced the duke’s photograph on the coiffeuse!”
The oldest-surviving perfume bottles were made in Egypt in the 2nd millennium BC
