Schiaparelli vs Prada at The Met

Fashion doesn't get much more heavyweight than this. The Metropolitan Museum of Art has just announced that their major Spring 2012 exhibit at the Costume Institute will be Elsa Schiaparelli and Miuccia Prada: On Fashion.

Schiaparelli and Prada are without a doubt two of the most incredibly innovative fashion designers the world has ever seen. Elsa and Miuccia have both changed the face of fashion in fantastically mind-blowing style, and The Costume Institute's curators, Harold Koda and Andrew Bolton, have taken on the huge task of putting these iconic women toe-to-toe. Koda and Bolton were inspired by Vanity Fair's 'Impossible Interviews' of the thirties, drawing out conversations that could have happened between the two women about their work and the world around them, giving fresh interpretations of their best and most innovative creations.

Each woman has brought the notions of art and fashion ever closer together in strikingly similar ways, literally redefining the relationships between to the two disciplines. Elsa Schiaparelli and Miuccia Prada are both unafraid of pushing creative boundaries: Schiaparelli was a fashion designer with the soul of an artist; her lot was firmly thrown in with the Dadaists and Surrealists of the time, except she used fashion as a way to express her wildest visions (her biggest rival Coco Chanel even referred to her as "that Italian artist who makes clothes"); Prada can be considered a fashion designer who produces art (and somehow manages the often difficult task of making it sell, sell, sell with utmost ease), with each collection more visionary than the last, yet somehow still grounded in wear- and wantability.

Schiaparelli most famously collaborated with Dal