In the bustling Aberdeenshire town of Braemar, close to the late Queen’s beloved Balmoral, there’s a rather chi-chi hotel called the Fife Arms. Originally a stout stone Victorian building for tweedy country types, it is now a fabulous art-filled mecca of maximalism, attracting celebrities and wealthy Londoners looking for a bit of Highland bling.There’s a Freud in the lobby, a Picasso in the drawing room, and a winged stag in the dining room, but perhaps most interesting of all, there’s a cocktail bar called Elsa’s, named after Elsa Schiaparelli, the Italian fashion designer. With strong art deco vibes, accents of shocking pink and a menu of exquisite concoctions served in elegant stemmed glasses, Elsa’s has to be the coolest place for a martini north of Edinburgh.I had heard of Schiaparelli, but the actual woman herself, I knew very little of. And what a woman! Now the V&A’s latest blockbuster exhibition, Schiaparelli: Fashion Becomes Art, brings to life the story of the designer who came to Paris at 23, and gave Coco Chanel a run for her money between the wars.Where Chanel pursued simple elegance and minimalist style, Schiaparelli – a prominent surrealist alongside the likes of Man Ray and Salvador Dali – loved adornment, embellishment and trompe l'oeil designs. She was the first to create shoulder pads, use animal prints and employ unusual pocket placement. And of course, Schiaparelli is forever remembered as the woman who created “shocking pink”.Designing fashion as a surrealist, her sculptural shapes and arresting details (the shoe hat, anyone?) were only for the most audacious women. When she retired to Tunisia in 1954, the house of Schiaparelli was no more. But in 2019, to great excitement, the name was revived under the direction of designer Daniel Roseberry who has restored Schiaparelli’s reputation for unpredictable daring. If you love fashion, this is a show you should not miss.Resistance and rebellionTwo very different portrayals of resistance are on release this week. First, The Testaments is a TV adaptation of Margaret Atwood’s sequel to The Handmaid’s Tale which was turned into a TV drama in 2017 and ran for six seasons. The show quickly transcended its source material, our reviewer Debra Ferreday explains, “to become a feminist touchstone, inspiring a vivid visual and cultural language of resistance across politics, performance, music and the arts” – just as life in the US became an eerie echo of Atwood’s world.In the Gilead of The Testaments, women still exist within an enforced patriarchal rape culture where Handmaids are reduced to brood mares. Here, violence masquerades as justice and entertainment, and control, order and cleanliness are paramount. But this world is not without hope as the young women find subversive ways to resist and rebel, finding solidarity, connection and even joy in likeminded souls.My Undesirable Friends Part I is Julia Loktev’s extraordinary documentary about young journalists fighting to report the truth in Putin’s Russia. Filmed on her iPhone over four months in late 2021 and early 2022, Loktev follows the lives of her friends as they share their fears over the worsening political situation.From concerns over increasing censorship to their horror at the invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, Loktev captures their earnest discussions of widespread abuses of power as the more democratic society they had hoped for slips away. But just like The Testaments, these young people find courage and resilience as the film examines how they can resist an oppressive state, stay safe – and know when it’s time to get out.Horror real and imaginedFor ten years architect Albert Speer was a friend and protege of Hitler, elevated to being in command of Germany’s military equipment throughout the war. His impressive orchestration of the Nuremberg rallies as architectural spectacle fed Hitler’s propaganda machine and contributed to Nazism’s dark mythology. And yet he somehow resisted being absorbed into it in same the way as Goebbels, Goring or Himmler, often viewed as a “good Nazi”.This is down to the dedicated self-mythologising he embarked on after the war which many regarded as bare-faced lies, evasions and self delusion. Speer is now the subject of a masterful novel by Jean-Noël Orengo, which seeks to examine how Hitler’s courtier was able to so successfully rehabilitate his image, exploring important questions of Nazi memory, myth-making and moral reckoning.My favourite kind of horror film is one that slowly builds an almost unbearable sense of dread and unease. This week’s Undertone sounds like it fits that bill perfectly. Evy is a young woman looking after her dying mother at home while co-hosting a podcast that explores supernatural phenomena.A non-believer to her co-host Justin’s acceptance of the paranormal, Evy records in the middle of the night, as Justin lives in a different time zone. As the pair begin to explore a particularly disturbing case based on audio clips, Evy’s scepticism deserts her. The genius here is that the horror lies purely and intimately in sound. It is not a film, our reviewer warns, for the faint of heart.