Extremes. Schiaparelli SS24

September 30, 2023 | Design & Culture by Ed

When you design to provoke, you must also take yourself less seriously: that’s Daniel Roseberry’s ethos for spring-summer 2024. His latest Schiaparelli collection is all about extremes. Extreme chic and extreme humor. The starting point for the Texas-born designer was one of Elsa Schiaparelli’s first successes: a sweater knit with a trompe l’œil collar and bow. Thus his desire to “make the everyday come to more vivid, more surprising life” gave birth to white shirts, suits and smoking jackets – classic silhouettes reimagined with Schiaparelli spice. A simple-seeming ribbed dress bore illusion breasts, and shimmered in a metallic pewter knit. Another ensemble was a play on an emerging formula: a boxy blazer, low-rise trousers, and the flash of a boxer over the waistband. Roseberry served his interpretation in elevated fabrics, embellished with gold bijoux: a sandy short jacket over white boxers and cowboy-style denim. But the most delightful looks were those that unleashed Schiaparelli’s menagerie from the archives, where the most amusing of animal neighbors reside. The lobster, protagonist of Schiaparelli’s famous 1937 dinner dress, clung in ceramic from chain necklaces; so too did crabs and fish skeletons dangle over leather bodysuits and jersey sheaths. A halterneck dress, Roseberry’s signature look, featured the spoils of another creature: the contents of a woman’s bag, spilled over ecru cotton.

Collage by Edward Kanarecki.
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Surreal Lady. Schiaparelli AW23 Couture

July 4, 2023 | Design & Culture by Ed

“I wanted this season to feel much more free, spontaneous, painterly,” Schiaparelli‘s Daniel Roseberry said before the autumn-winter 2023 couture show. “The idea of the last collection was really to suck the air out of the room. It’s what happened. I think the idea was to really try to keep the focus on the collection and go deeper and deeper into the techniques we wanted to show.” The designer went into territory of his own this season, carving and draping sculptural, asymmetrical silhouettes out of black and white materials while experimenting with craftspeople to blur the boundaries between clothing, embroidery, jewelry and collages of textiles. The collection is not only surreal in its look, but also in its richness of textures and vibrant tactility. Roseberry took his conceptual cue sparked by the house of Schiaparelli’s long involvement with artists. It ranged into some exceptional freewheeling artisanal effects. Looking at Lucian Freud’s chaotic paint-dashed studio resulted in a multicolored ‘nude’ dress, made up of an irregular mosaic of paillettes sewn onto chiffon. Thinking about Schiaparelli’s classic gold embroidery led Roseberry to discover that a vibrant Yves Klein blue lies at the opposite end of the color spectrum. Hence the vivid blue that turned up, scrolled into a skating skirt, and continuing into spray-painted body-paint and landing elsewhere in coils of painted wooden jewelry. Roseberry made a smart move in detaching himself from the routine of reiterating too many of the trompe l’oeil body-part house codes he’s been working with since he came to Schiaparelli. Echoes of other couturiers signatures – like Jean Paul Gaultier corsets this season – continue to be a sort of acknowledgement of the haute couture world’s legacy and Roseberry’s great respect for it.

Prêt-à-Porter. Schiaparelli AW23

March 4, 2023 | Design & Culture by Ed

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.
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Click-Bait Couture (And A Question For The Culture). Schiaparelli SS23 Couture

January 24, 2023 | Design & Culture by Ed

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.
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Killer Chic. Schiaparelli SS23

October 2, 2022 | Design & Culture by Ed

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.