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Italian fashion house Schiaparelli’s recent Fall/Winter 2025 show has got the internet’s heart in a chokehold — literally. Of the 43 looks displayed during the show, the most captivating piece was a wearable piece of art that was the epitome of haute couture: a pulsing heart necklace encrusted with red gemstones, resting on a bright red dress.

The dress itself was a sculpted piece, almost like armour, much like other items in Schiaparelli’s collection. The brand is known for its use of gilded anatomy, especially in gold, as seen in dresses worn by Bella Hadid. This dress was a sculpted bodice resting on the model’s upper back, inverting her silhouette, with the necklace resting on a faux décolletage.

The heart looked like it stepped out of an AI fever dream with its ruby-like sheen, walking the line between real and unreal, as AI often does, especially when real gemstones pulse similar to an animation — like some sort of video game relic. Fans and fashion mavens have drawn heavy comparisons between the heart and the works of Spanish surrealist artist Salvador Dali — and for good reason.

It’s stunningly similar to his 1953 piece, Royal Heart, a jewel-encrusted mechanical heart made to commemorate the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II, complete with a crown and sparkling rubies to symbolise the queen. The apt title “beating heart of haute couture” is now affectionately tied to Schiaparelli’s creative director Daniel Roseberry, after he captioned his Instagram post featuring the necklace with that line.

The Schiaparelli and Dali connection isn’t new. Elsa Schiaparelli and Dali collaborated on several pieces of work, including the Lobster Dress in 1937, made for Wallis Simpson for her marriage to the Duke of Windsor. The dress was a cream silk gown, with a red lobster on the skirt, with sprigs of parsley strewn across it.

The recent Schiaparelli show also included references from more of their collaborative works with Dali, such as the Eye of Time jewellery collection, which included a brooch originally made for the artist’s wife in 1949. Their collaborations often incorporated unexpected elements of playful humour, a combination of art formed by their shared inclination toward scandal and provocation.

Though Dali did the heart first, people are raising the question of who did the dress first. Comments flooded in on a recent Schiaparelli post of their magnum opus, highlighting that Mexican artist Grecia Soto did in fact create a beating heart couture dress first.

Soto’s dress, Heart of the Lower, was first showcased back in 2024 in her collection Gra de Vid. It was a black dress with a beating heart at the chest. The heart was independently engineered by Soto — designed, embroidered, welded, and programmed. After Schiaparelli’s look went viral, netizens began drawing comparisons to similarities to Soto’s work and the originality of the runway look.

Schiaparelli’s take on the dress was drawn more from the ornate look of Dali’s Royal Heart conveyed as a necklace made of red gemstones. Whereas Soto took a more anatomical approach including features such as the different chambers of the heart, aorta, and blue veins, aiming for an almost sculptural 3D replica of the heart, made fully of off-loom bead weaving.

The resurfaced pictures raised questions about credit, and the overlap sparks questions about fashion’s constant referencing and reinvention. In an industry built on a language that is purely visual, the line between inspiration and imitation is a very thin one.