Schiaparelli‘s very couture-ish prêt-à-porter goes runway. “The higher you go in the stratosphere of luxury, the more basic it feels,” Daniel Roseberry, the brand’s creative director, declared. The collection retained many of the signatures Roseberry has established in his first three years at the house, some inspired by Schiap’s codes and some by those of other Paris couturiers: the gold buttons in the shape of keyholes and body parts, the measuring tape embroidery, the cone bra detailing inset into everything from bustier tops to jean jackets. Roseberry’s own whimsical drawings were hand-painted onto nipped waist boiled coats. The places-to-go sensibility remained as well, but no-one is wearing Schiap leggings to a hot yoga class, or doing the school run in the dark-rinse denim sets. The parkas aren’t hitting the slopes. These were lunch date, cocktails, and stepping out of the car and into the five-star hotel with the paparazzi hot on your tail clothes. Where it differed from the couture most significantly was in the fabrications. The jersey dresses, one with a keyhole on the chest and the other with miniature gold buttons marching up the torso, had an appealing ease; Roseberry called the stretch velvet of a brown halterneck dress a celebrity secret weapon: “it drinks the light.” Chic!
Collage by Edward Kanarecki. Don’t forget to follow Design & Culture by Ed on Instagram!
Daniel Roseberry‘s spring-summer 2023 haute couture collection for Schiaparelli set the internet ablaze. In general, society feels an ease in blaming and targeting fashion – and its industry – in a whole range of humanity’s faults. It’s so frivolous, and it doesn’t have the art world’s intimidating authority to freely touch difficult topics… actually, who needs fashion? That’s why a controversy, or even a stinking hot scandal, can so easily grow out of a fashion scene. Yes, these fake – yet extremely realistic – taxidermy dresses coming from Schiaparelli’s couture atelier, without reading into further context, may instantly associate with a number of horrible crimes, from poaching endangered species to colonialism. But since when is interpreting everything without comprehending the context first a normal thing to do? Now that’s a question for the culture.
Shocking has been integral to Schiaparelli’s DNA since Elsa’s day. And Roseberry knows how to make his couture a clickbait moment for the 21st century. The designer’s mind was in fact focused on a hell – the Inferno of Dante’s Divine Comedy. It’s relevant as ever in 2023, and the three sinful animal symbols Dante wrote of (Lion: pride; Leopard: lust; Wolf: avarice) keep on firing the minds. “The animals are one of the four literal references that I took from Dante’s Inferno,” Roseberry explained . “In the first cycle of Dante’s journey, he faces terrors. He confronts a lion, a leopard, and a she-wolf. They each represent different things. But the lion and the animals are there as a photorealistic approaching of surrealism and trompe l’oeil in a different way.” Roseberry found a creative parallel to his dilemmas in the hellish tortures Dante allegorized. “It’s the agony of wanting to surprise,” he said. “I just want it to be powerful in a different way every time.” His ambition: to “show the impossible.” Regarding the three, now-infamous looks, I will admit they felt too costume-y for me in the first place. It’s a great shame that all the explosive attention drawn by overshadowed the extraordinary work Roseberry and his team lavished on molding, sculpting, and embellishing the majority of the collection. The waisted shape of the classic Schiaparelli Shocking! perfume bottle was transmuted into extreme hourglass silhouettes, corseted in the back. There were ‘plastrons’ of stiffly exaggerated, up-to-the-eyeline bustiers (crafted in mother-of-pearl, marquetry, and broken glass jewelry). He also dealt out incredibly silhouetted trouser suits, vertiginously plunging tuxedos, and a pinstripe which had mind-boggling lines imitating menswear fabric, but curving in and out in some visually unaccountable way. Would the collection look in overall better without the faux-animal drama? Probably. But would it grab the Internet’s attention? Of course, not.
Collage by Edward Kanarecki. Don’t forget to follow Design & Culture by Ed on Instagram!
Daniel Roseberry has rounded the three-year mark at Schiaparelli. From Lady Gaga at the inauguration and Bella Hadid in Cannes to an exhibition at Musée des Arts Décoratifs, his first cycle has been a smash. “The past three years we’ve been building this reputation, this language through the couture and the red carpet,” he said. “The next three will be about building the business side of it too.” The task at hand, Roseberry acknowledged, is holding onto the excitement and exclusivity that surrounds Schiap as Surrealism goes more mainstream and the brand becomes more accessible. “I don’t want it to become a schtick,” he said. Grabbing the world’s attention is easier than keeping it, as any old hand in fashion will tell you. But Roseberry is approaching the task well fortified. The ready-to-wear’s backbone is tailoring – quite literally in the case of a jacket embellished with ribs, after a famous Elsa Schiaparelli skeleton dress suit circa 1938. Others are accessorized by the body-part baubles – eyes, noses, pierced nipples – that are Roseberry’s inventions and have become the identifying markers of the label. “The more extraordinary, the more luxurious, the more exquisite, the more people are inclined to buy,” Roseberry said of his suits. The denim hews to the same more-is-more formula; the dusting of gold sequins across the backside of a pair of jeans, designed to look like sand on the bum, was especially inspired. An evening capsule was born from a summer holiday in Italy, where Roseberry saw women sunbathing in solid-colored swimsuits and big, bold jewelry. He re-created the look here via a brown halter dress suspended from a gold neck plate with a kiss in the middle, and a hooded dress in the brightest red silk jersey. There’s a direct line from Elsa’s skeleton suit through Yves Klein’s body paintings, which once inspired Phoebe Philo at Céline, to Roseberry’s own interpretations, painted in gold on an icy blue column. No schtick here. Just (killer) chic.
Collage by Edward Kanarecki. Don’t forget to follow Design & Culture by Ed on Instagram!
“Shocking! The Surreal World of Elsa Schiaparelli,” the high-impact exhibition opening this week at the Musée des Arts Décoratifs, includes pieces that fellow designers – among them Yves Saint Laurent, Jean Paul Gaultier, Azzedine Alaïa, and Christian Lacroix – created in homage to the house’s founding genius. For this season’s Schiaparelli haute couture collection, Daniel Roseberry, the house’s artistic director, took this idea of “being in conversation with the people who had been so inspired by her.” Earlier this year Roseberry had an in-person conversation with Lacroix himself, “which was really inspiring,” as Roseberry noted during final fittings on the eve of his show. “We talked about color, we talked about volume. We talked about Arles, and for him it meant black bulls, white horses, and the gold of the sun, which just kept ringing in my ear. It was probably, for him, a passing conversation, but for me it felt like someone plugged me into the wall a little bit, and I wanted to make a collection that brought me back to the kind of fashion that I fell in love with and that period of fashion that feels, in retrospect, very naive in a way.” And so Roseberry evoked the euphoria of Christian Lacroix’s 1987 debut collection with its giddy pouf silhouette, bustles, gigot sleeves, coruscating toreador embroideries, and severe matador hats. For Roseberry, ’80s nostalgia is in the air. But the collection was also informed, as Roseberry confided, “by the way Elsa dressed herself,” which meant rigorous tailoring. That was exemplified by the coatdress worn by Carolyn Murphy with trompe l’oeil drawers for pockets – a detail that Salvador Dalí himself conceived for Schiap and now a piece that will go directly from the runway to the museum exhibition – and what Roseberry described as “this sort of sensual body-conscious and body-obsessed eveningwear, everything built around the bustier and the corset.” Some sprouted with floral displays inspired by Carolyne Roehm’s book A Passion for Flowers, a copy of which sat on Roseberry’s grandmother’s coffee table when he was an impressionable boy. Seen up close these were remarkable triumphs of embroidery – sunflowers and roses and lavender fronds crafted from hand-painted and sequined silk and even leather molded onto the back of spoons to create the petals. They instantly reminded me of Yves Saint Laurent’s spectacular spring-summer 1988 couture show, where jackets became tableau vivants of sunflowers and irises. A simple black velvet evening dress that looked like one of Roseberry’s dramatic fashion sketches come to life was brought into Schiaparelli’s madcap world thanks to a pair of earrings dripping bunches of golden grapes and so heavy that they had to be secured with a discreet tiara hair band. Meanwhile, Stephen Jones’s magnificent wide-brimmed hats bristled with what looked like fields of wheat that on close inspection turned out to have been simulated with glycerinated ostrich feathers. It was all, as Roseberry himself promised, a “mash-up between something that felt incredibly modern and then also wildly romantic.” Hopeful doves of peace (another YSL reference) brought some much-needed optimism to 2022’s disturbing state of things. All of it certainly left the audience on a high.
Fierce, bold, shocking – that’s how one might describe Daniel Roseberry‘s Schiaparelli, now known and loved for magnificent couture, surreal molded leather torso bags and jewellery that is all about human anatomy. The ready-to-wear business is blooming as well – something that makes the designer’s position among Parisian insiders and maisons even more important. Autumn-winter 2022 was his most relatable collection so far, rooted in denim embroidered with the illustrations he did for the tablecloths at a Bergdorf Goodman dinner last autumn, and knits that included riffs on Schiap’s famous trompe l’oeil intarsias. Roseberry pointed out that ready-to-wear came first for Schiaparelli and couture only after she’d achieved some level of success. As synonymous as she is with surrealism, the woman had a pragmatic streak. No one would mistake Roseberry for a maker of basics, but there’s an American honesty to the jeans here with their double S’s on the back pockets, and to stretch velvet and stretch leather pieces that take their shapes from athletic wear. As a native of Dallas, Roseberry grew up in and around these kinds of clothes. Likewise, he connects with the energetic, American vibe of Herb Ritts’s photos, which certain images in this lookbook were designed to reflect. But he’s just as fluent in kinky Parisian excess – as the embellished cone bras make clear, he relishes it. The only thing questionable is the punk-y, PVC headwear and masks.
Design & Culture by Ed 