Inside the peculiar rise of surreal but chic celeb fashion: From lion heads to alien horns and dinosaur spikes… Stars are stealing the limelight with outfits inspired by the likes of Salvador Dali

After season after season of ‘naked dresses’ made of sheer fabric or peek-a-boo lace, there is finally a new way to attract attention on the red carpet. Welcome to the era of eccentric luxury.

Why train for weeks wearing next to nothing this awards season when you can make just as many headlines wearing a jacket made of 7,000 real rose petals (J-Lo), alien horns (Katy Perry) or a stegosaurus spine (Rita Ora) instead?

It may sound like Halloween has come early, but this is a movement inspired by haute couture — specifically Schiaparelli, the Italian-born, France-based fashion house synonymous with luxury of the four-figure, gold-dipped private jet variety. . (The bag made to look like a Modigliani-esque human face, as J-Lo wore to Schiaparelli’s haute couture show in Paris this week, costs around £4,700).

Real rose petal coats may seem like the last days of Rome to many, but that’s nothing new for this label.

A hundred years ago, Elsa Schiaparelli made a name for herself as a couturier in the interwar period by often turning fashion into surrealist art.

Weird but beautiful: from left to right a winged dress from Schiaparelli, Irina Shayk in the label’s lion dress and a striking lace design

She threaded aspirin tablets instead of pearls into a necklace. She placed the phone button on a compact powder box. She called these her “little jokes,” but in reality, she changed the fashion world forever.

We gasped when John Galliano sent a model down his Dior catwalk in a newspaper-print dress in 2000. But Schiaparelli had done the same thing in 1935, creating a collection of newspaper clippings about himself in a self-referential way that today’s influencers would applaud. She made clothes from safety pins decades before Liz Hurley stepped into Versace’s safety pin dress in 1994.

In 2021, actress Zendaya wore an open-back dress by Roberto Cavalli, complete with golden skeleton bones, to Cannes, but Elsa got there first: with a skeleton dress designed for her 1938 circus-themed collection.

In fact, that dress was made in collaboration with her old friend, the surrealist Salvador Dali. Designed to resemble protruding bones, the padded edges are an eerie reference to the emaciated bodies of starving civilians during the Spanish Civil War.

Last week, Naomi Campbell closed the Balmain menswear show in Paris with a gold belt that resembled hands holding a bouquet of flowers. Adorning women with petals and leaves – sometimes so dramatically that it seems as if they themselves are turning into flowering plants – is a long-standing trademark of Schiaparelli. The designer admitted in her autobiography that as a child she planted seeds in her throat, ears and mouth in the hope of making flowers sprout and becoming less ‘ugly’.

Rita Ora attends The Fashion Awards 2023 presented by Pandora at Royal Albert Hall in London on December 4, 2023

Naomi Campbell walks the catwalk during the Balmain Homme Menswear Fall/Winter 2024-2025 show as part of Paris Fashion Week on January 20, 2024

Schiaparelli was the first designer to truly understand how shocking fashion can be; she even coined the term “shocking pink” to describe a particular shade that was her signature. And it is the continued production of clothes that are both repulsive and enchanting that makes the label so influential today.

In fact, many would argue that harnessing the power of a shocking outfit is even more important now than it was in the heyday of surrealism in the 1930s.

In today’s competitive, fast-paced world of celebrity and fashion, there’s no better way to make us stare for more than a few seconds than by dressing not only beautifully, but also outlandishly.

For example, you may not have heard of rapper Doja Cat, but when she wore custom Schiaparelli to the label’s couture show last January — 30,000 red crystals covering her from head to toe, including face, as if she were drenched in blood — she became the biggest talking point in the front row, with reactions ranging from disgust and confusion to awe. Other designers and celebrities have quickly learned the lesson, with model and podcaster Abbey Clancy this month wearing a Moschino bodysuit adorned with crudely surreal body parts (straight from the label’s Spring/Summer 2024 catwalk). Katy Perry wore prosthetic alien horns to Jeff Bezos’ 60th birthday this weekend (what better way to stand out in a sea of ​​couture-clad billionaires?). While that crazy chrome dinosaur spine worn by Rita Ora actually appeared to emerge from her back, adding a luxurious touch to her dress – which cost just £50 from a range she was promoting at Primark – at the British Fashion Awards in December.

In 2021, actress Zendaya wore an open-back dress by Roberto Cavalli, complete with golden skeleton bones, to Cannes

But it is Schiaparelli, now under the creative control of Texan Daniel Roseberry, who remains the master of the art. Take the gold embellishments on the custom Schiaparelli gown worn by pop star Dua Lipa at this month’s Golden Globe Awards: a macabre drawing of ribs, hipbones and spine on an otherwise traditional velvet column dress. Or the dresses decorated with bizarrely large and realistic lion heads that Kylie Jenner and model Irina Shayk wore during the Schiaparelli couture show last year. They are outfits that are specially designed to attract attention.

At this week’s show, Euphoria star Hunter Schafer wore the brand’s iconic ‘toe shoes’ (£2,825): a seemingly normal black pump adorned with quasi-monstrous, gold toes. It is the everyday that is made playful and grotesque. Ditto J-Lo’s white turtleneck, which she wore under her rose petal jacket. Perfectly normal, even a little mother-like – until you see the octopus’ tentacles crawling along the torso, a nod to the creepy sea life motif on some of Schiaparelli’s most iconic designs. Elsa Schiaparelli closed her debt-ridden house in 1954, the same year that her great rival Coco Chanel returned to work after her fifteen-year hiatus due to World War II.

Elsa understood that in a climate of post-war austerity there was no place for the haute luxury of fantastic fashion and had no desire to cut back or water down her designs. She died in 1973, and although the male artists she collaborated with (Dali, Jean Cocteau, Marcel Vertes) are now household names, her contribution to surrealism is almost entirely forgotten and her influence on fashion is similarly downplayed. Until now.

This awards season is getting underway quickly for the Schiaparelli shock factor. As stars compete for their red carpet moment—and the need to grab attention, for the right reasons, on social media—Elsa’s grotesque yet beautiful aesthetic has become celebrity’s quickest shortcut to unparalleled visibility. Le freak, c’est chic.