Schiaparelli at the V&A: final weeks, and Constantinople coming next
If Schiaparelli has been on your list since spring, the clock is now running. The V&A's Schiaparelli: Fashion Becomes Art, the UK's first exhibition devoted to the Italian-born couturier, closes on Sunday 15 November. Meanwhile, the museum's next big show is already announced for early November, which makes the coming weeks an unusually rich time on Cromwell Road. Here is what to prioritise, and how to fit both into an autumn diary.
Schiaparelli: why go now
Elsa Schiaparelli treated clothes as art, and the exhibition, created in collaboration with the Schiaparelli house, makes the case through her friendships with the artists of her day. The pieces worth slowing down for include:
- Salvador Dalí's Lobster Telephone of 1938.
- The Tears dress with veil and the Skeleton Dress, both 1938 collaborations with Dalí.
- An evening coat made with Jean Cocteau in 1937, shown alongside a Cocteau drawing for the house.
- Man Ray's 1933 portrait of Schiaparelli and Picasso's 1937 portrait of Nusch Eluard.
- A choker from the Pagan collection of autumn 1938.
- Recent haute couture from autumn and winter 2024, showing how the house reads its founder today.
The show is in the Sainsbury Gallery. Popular V&A fashion exhibitions tend to get busier in their final weeks, so book a timed slot on the V&A's Schiaparelli page sooner rather than later. V&A Members go free, which is worth weighing up if you plan more than one visit this season.
Next up: Constantinople to Istanbul
From Saturday 7 November, Galleries 38 and 39 host Constantinople to Istanbul: One City, Two Empires, which traces 1,600 years of the city under the Byzantine and Ottoman empires. The objects announced so far range widely:
- The Veroli Casket, a Byzantine ivory box from the second half of the tenth century.
- A sixteenth-century velvet covering from Bursa and a seventeenth-century Ottoman processional scroll.
- A long-necked lute, or tambur, from around 1750.
- Pisanello's medal of the Emperor John Palaeologus.
- Osman Hamdi Bey's painting Ladies Taking a Walk of 1887 and Gaspare Fossati's 1852 lithograph of Aya Sofia.
The exhibition draws heavily on the V&A's own collection, which gives it real depth. Ticket details are on the exhibition page, and we would expect weekend slots in the opening weeks to be the first to go.
For a week in November the two exhibitions overlap, so a single day could take in Parisian surrealism in the morning and Byzantine treasure after lunch.
Make a day of it
General admission to the V&A is free and the museum is open daily from 10.00 to 17.45, with Friday openings until 22.00. The free London Design Festival displays, Awakenings, remain around the galleries until 18 October. Our V&A guide has suggestions for the permanent collection and the café. If time allows, the Fashion galleries make a natural companion to Schiaparelli, showing the centuries of dress that her surrealist designs were reacting against.
Getting there
South Kensington station is the nearest, via the pedestrian tunnel to Exhibition Road. From Knightsbridge it is a straightforward walk along Brompton Road and Cromwell Road.
