It’s a great shame that Elsa Schiaparelli is less widely known than her rival Chanel. Perhaps that’s down to how difficult her name is to pronounce. Is it “shap,” “skap” or “skyap”? Tristram Hunt, director of the V&A, answers with a quip from Schiaparelli herself: “No one knows how to say it, but everyone knows what it means.”

The V&A’s new exhibition Schiaparelli: Fashion Becomes Art traces the web of influences around one of the great couture houses of the 20th century. Like Coco Chanel (I hate to compare them), Elsa Schiaparelli created clothes for the modern, independent woman – it is now conventional to say so, but they “pushed boundaries.” Unlike Chanel, however – who is usually summed up with the idiotic word “chic” – Schiaparelli was daring, witty, difficult and strange.

She was born between a prison and an asylum and grew up under the influence of mad Italian aristocrats

She was born between a prison and an asylum and grew up under the influence of mad Italian aristocrats

“Schiap,” as she liked to refer to herself, began her career in fashion in 1927. She had found herself alone in Paris with her baby, Gogo, after separating from a failed fortune-teller. Obscure and by no means a professional seamstress – Chanel mocked Schiaparelli’s lack of training, calling her “that Italian artist who makes clothes” – she began designing knitwear. The V&A displays a trio of the adorable black-and-white jumpers – with sailor-smock and pussy-bow patterns – that shot her to fame. The style was lapped up in America but widely counterfeited, and she quickly moved on to the next thing – and, when that was copied, the next: sportswear, practical daywear and eventually eveningwear.

Her broad-shouldered suits, divided skirts and svelte, androgynous silhouettes became the uniform for socialites and intellectuals in Paris, London and New York. American Vogue’s Bettina Ballard described the Schiaparelli type as a woman “protected by an armor of amusing conversation-making smartness”; she dressed, among many others, Peggy Guggenheim, Josephine Baker, Marlene Dietrich, Katharine Hepburn and Greta Garbo. Her signature color was shocking pink: a blinding, hot, modern magenta.

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