Elsa Schiaparelli. Succès Fou.

A leaf in a pink box

Succès Fou is a perfume from the house of Schiaparelli. The bottle in the Victoria and Albert Museum in London is dated by the museum to about 1952 to 1954, made in France, probably in Paris.

It is green glass shaped like a leaf, decorated with enamel and gold leaf. It measures about 9 cm each way and only 2 cm deep. With it comes a matching card box lined with pink fabric. The museum keeps bottle and box together as a set of four parts.

The set entered the V&A in 2025, given by Susan Marks in memory of Diana June Simons, née Davies. In 2026 it went on show in the exhibition Schiaparelli: Fashion Becomes Art at V&A South Kensington.

Succès fou is French for a runaway success, a success that borders on madness. Putting that name on a glass leaf is a light joke: the most fragile object carrying the loudest name.

A couturier without formal training

Elsa Schiaparelli was born in 1890 and died in 1973. According to the V&A, she opened her couture house in 1927 with no formal training. Within five years her salon employed 400 people and produced more than 7,000 garments a year.

She welcomed the new and the experimental, and worked with avant garde artists such as Salvador Dalí and Jean Cocteau. Her clothes carried a surrealist spirit: strange images, objects in the wrong place, details that make the viewer look twice.

Schiaparelli made perfume from 1928, one year after opening her house. For her, scent was not a side business. It belonged to the same world of images. The vivid shade known as shocking pink is bound up with her name, and one of her perfumes, in 1937, was called Shocking.

The package is part of the scent

With Succès Fou, bottle and box do not stand apart from the scent. They are the first layer the buyer touches. Card, pink cloth, green glass, a trace of gold. Each material chosen to stage a small scene before the stopper is opened.

This is a fashion designer's way of thinking. A dress is not only fabric. It is how the wearer enters a room. A Schiaparelli bottle works the same way: it is how the scent enters the hand.

The leaf is also a surrealist image, in a very quiet register. A leaf that does not fall, dry or change colour. It holds liquid inside as a real leaf holds sap. The familiar turns strange when made of another material.

The pink lining is therefore no accident. It is the house colour, set directly beneath the green leaf. Two colours in contrast, one of plants, one of city and stage. Whoever opens the box sees both at once.

Succès Fou belongs to the last years of the house. According to the V&A, Schiaparelli officially retired in 1954. A bottle named for runaway success, made as its namer's path was closing.

Yet the bottle tells no sadness. It stays light, playful, green. It shows that Schiaparelli's spirit lived not only in her famous dresses but also in the small objects on a buyer's dressing table.

To see that whole world, read about the exhibition Shocking! Les mondes surréalistes d'Elsa Schiaparelli in Paris. This green leaf is a very small corner of it, just enough to hold in one hand.