From Couture to Cover: Schiaparelli’s Lessons for Luxury Book Design
From creative constraints to materials and legacy, PRINT / The Book Agency Creative Director Camille Dubois reflects on the parallels between couture and designing an illustrated book-object.
This month, I visited the Victoria & Albert Museum in South Kensington to experience Schiaparelli: Fashion Becomes Art, a retrospective of Elsa Schiaparelli’s eponymous fashion house from its establishment in the 1920s through today, helmed by American-born Creative Director Daniel Roseberry.
As a creative, I have always been drawn to fashion and its intersection with art. While touring the exhibition, I could not help but see parallels between the designers’ practices and my own at PRINT / The Book Agency, where, as Creative Director, I design luxury books.
An impressive exhibition of clothing, accessories, jewelry, and Surrealist art — including artwork from Elsa’s collaborators and friends Man Ray, Pablo Picasso, and Salvador Dalí — the show also offers lessons that extend far beyond fashion. From working creatively within constraints to experimenting with materials and translating a creative legacy for a new generation, the principles behind Schiaparelli have striking parallels with luxury book design. The exhibition will remain a source of inspiration for me for years to come.
Creativity Within Constraints: A Commonality Between Luxury Fashion and Book Design
Creatives must work within constraints: a painter with a canvas, a fashion designer with the human body, or a photographer with the frame of the camera’s lens. Just as Elsa Schiaparelli and Daniel Roseberry must construct garments within the realm of fashion, as a book designer, I must stay within the constraints of a rectangular page.
A self-trained female designer working nearly a century ago, Elsa’s designs are truly groundbreaking and modern. She was renowned for pushing boundaries, from encouraging textile manufacturers to experiment with new materials to exploring unconventional color combinations and reimagining traditional styles.
One garment that I gravitated toward was an elaborate embroidered full-length cape from Daniel’s Spring/Summer 2022 collection, a piece that harks back to Elsa’s Apollo of Versailles evening cape (1939) and features the same tuxedo collar designed to appear as though it is worn backwards. A menswear staple, this tuxedo collar has been reinterpreted for a female audience as a detail that is at once playful and commands power.
My own work revolves around the rectangular shape of a book, an object that presents a standardized frame I must work within. As with fashion, however, those constraints create opportunities to explore color, material, scale, and form — from linen covers and rose gold metallic foil to gatefolds with full-bleed imagery spreading across pages.
A luxury book, like a fashion collection, is an assortment of components united by a continuous thread. Text, images, typography, materials, and a cover must harmonize to communicate a brand or individual’s story, just as a collection needs to encapsulate the entirety of a designer’s creative message.
Collage as Clothing: Schiaparelli’s 1935 Newsprint Textile & Medusa Nova Scarves
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One object from the exhibition that particularly resonated with me was Elsa’s newsprint textile (1935), a swatch of cotton fabric printed with a collage of news cuttings and headlines about her own career and personal life. Part of her “Stop, Look and Listen” collection, this fabric was custom-made for Schiaparelli by Colcombet and was used to make dresses, parasols, hats, and men’s ties. The pattern evokes pop culture and reminds me of collages by artists Max Ernst and Joseph Cornell, and the Surrealist artwork that Elsa so often referenced.
Collage is one of my favorite mediums and an art form I’ve experimented with on my own both personally and professionally. I have always gravitated towards pattern and find it calming. In 2018, looking to explore my practice further, I printed my collages on fabric and porcelain and launched my own label, Medusa Nova. My tea set was featured on Moda Operandi, and I designed scarves with my own textiles printed with my artwork. Prior to becoming a book designer, I wanted to be a textile designer, and I hope to one day return to this passion.
Seeing Elsa’s work was a reminder that creative disciplines do not need to exist in isolation. An idea can move from a collage to a textile, from art to fashion, or from a client’s visual identity, archive, or story into the physical form of a book.
A Creative Dialogue Across Generations
The exhibition offered an incredible opportunity to observe two designers from different generations who never knew one another in conversation. Daniel’s clothing builds upon the strong foundation Elsa set forth of feminine power, self-expression, and garments with a sculptural approach. There is a clear storyline connecting the two, from the use of rosettes to anatomically inspired accessories, yet both present a one-of-a-kind, modern look reflecting their respective time periods.
For me, this is one of the most interesting challenges in luxury book design. As a luxury book designer, my role is to collaborate with my client, understand their creative vision, familiarize myself with their aesthetic, and create an art object that embodies their brand and individuality. My creative process involves translating an individual or brand into a completely new medium, which is not without its challenges.
The goal is not simply to reproduce an existing visual identity on paper. It is to understand the creative language behind it well enough to translate that language into something new. Unlike traditional publishers, at PRINT we allow clients to be involved in every step of the process, have significant input into the creative direction of their book, and maintain complete ownership of their work. I never tire of seeing a book I have designed for the first time and holding its fully formed physical object in my hands.
Why Materials Matter in Luxury Book Design
In design, I believe that an object is only as successful as its materials. Elsa’s use of uncommon fabrics and whimsical accents set her apart from her peers. Her determination to offer her clientele the best of the best — requesting that her textile manufacturers supply her with the newest, highest-quality materials — is immensely impressive. Elsa designed avant-garde garments crafted in looped lamé, woven metal threads, cellophane, and “riboulding” rayon crêpe.
While commonplace today, Elsa’s exposed plastic zippers were revolutionary for its time, as this form of closure was not used in haute couture and closures were typically concealed within the garment. Buttons, once a strictly functional feature, were reimagined by the designer as statement pieces and became a defining element of the clothing itself. Using materials such as leather, painted metal, plastic, resin, and enamel, she created buttons resembling comedy and tragedy masks, plastic beetles, peanuts, butterflies, and more. Beyond adding wit and whimsy to a garment, these details could communicate a larger message; a Spring 1940 suit jacket ornamented with enamel globe buttons represented a united world amidst war.
The same principle applies to bespoke bookmaking: material choices are not simply finishing touches. They are part of the storytelling. At PRINT, I work with the world’s leading artisans to produce our books on state-of-the-art printing presses, collaborating with vendors to hand-select premium materials for each project. Like Elsa, I urge my vendors and clients to take creative risks and experiment with new materials and layouts. As with Schiaparelli’s couture, each project is customized to a client’s specifications, from paper selection and binding to format and number of pages. Without the aid of our masterful mills and printers, our book-objects would not be the same.
Designing the Language of Legacy
An extensive overview of Elsa’s life and work culminating in images of today’s pop culture icons — including Ariana Grande, Hunter Schafer, and Daphne Guinness — wearing the house’s clothing, “Schiaparelli: Fashion Becomes Art” is ultimately a study in legacy. Bookmaking provides me with the opportunity to explore legacy as well. Like an exhibition, a book serves as a culmination of a client’s story, from the very beginning through to today. My visit to the V&A South Kensington is a welcomed reminder of what a privilege it is to use my creativity to tell others’ stories and share them with the world.
If you’re in London: The “Schiaparelli: Fashion Becomes Art” exhibition is currently open in London at the V&A Kensington and runs through November 8, 2026. To learn more about PRINT / The Book Agency and our process, please visit our website at https://www.print-thebookagency.com.
