Daniel Roseberry

L’Appel du Vide. Schiaparelli SS22 Couture

| Design & Culture by Ed

If there’s a real sense of return in the air at this season’s haute couture shows, Daniel Roseberry’s collection for Schiaparelli will be its defining memory. Passing through the Petit Palais, each of his looks was as intriguing to the senses as the inspiration behind them. “There’s this word in French for when you’re driving on a cliffside and you have the sudden urge to go off the road. It’s called ‘the call of the void,’” he said during a preview the day before. In French, the term is l’appel du vide and it’s not as hopeless as it sounds. Psychologically, it’s an intrusive thought that affirms our urge to live. “I think that’s what this spaciness felt like to me,” he explained, surrounded by orbital dresses and planetary bags in his Place Vendôme salons. “The void is the absence of this reality.” In times of refuelled space races, missions to Mars, and the metaverse, Roseberry is not alone in looking to galaxies far way. It’s a mindset that comes natural at Schiaparelli where surrealism goes hand-in-hand with existentialism. If you can use the word effortless in haute couture, that’s what Roseberry’s collection felt like: a seamlessly executed idea for a house it was just right for. “We kept saying ‘Planet Schiaparelli’: I wanted to do something that looked totally unlike anybody else. Nothing else should look like this.”

Roseberry exercised his objective in creations forged in the images of the galaxy and the science fiction we relate to it. Quite literally, saturnian brass rings orbited around a black canvas corset bodice woven with black flowers in jacquard, and encircled a gilded metal bustier that wasn’t just for show. Like previous seasons’ breastplates, Schiaparelli will cast them on the client’s body in-house. A Medusa dress debuted a new technique developed for the collection in which wet gold leather had been stretched and moulded over clay sculptures of the house’s emblems-the lock, the lobster, the dove—which had then been latticed into a mind-blowing jeweled cage and encrusted with cabochon stones from the 1930s. A series of structures evoked the movement of jelly fish, which in turn evoked James Cameron’s The Abyss. A matter of exposed crin gathered around the shoulders of a minidress in black silk crepe and bounced like tentacles as the model moved down the runway of the Petit Palais. A similar effect took form around the ankles of a strapless velvet dress, and in the brass tentacles that vibrated around Mariacarla Boscono’s long black jersey dress. Interestingly, if you removed the science fiction elements, you’d be left with a series of sophisticated black dresses more lightly imbued with what Roseberry referred to as “aerodynamic” details, like the stretched-out neckline of Kiki Wilhelm’s black twill bustier.

That sense of simplicity was the intention. After a year of celebrity exposure that has catapulted Roseberry’s look for Schiaparelli into the consciousness of a new audience he wanted to pull back. “Let’s take a deep breath and start refining the language,” he’d told his team. “How do we illicit the same emotional response that we get from the couture without volume and without color?” It’s why – stripped to their core – his little dresses and jackets were almost down-to-earth in a collection literally based on the opposite. It was a clever way for Roseberry to unite anticipations for Schiaparelli grandeur with expectations for something new. Of course, Roseberry isn’t dialing down on exposure. The day before the show he had fitted Julia Fox in a denim cone bra jacket to wear to the Kenzo show with Kanye West. The new couple also attended Roseberry’s show, with West in one of his masks that completely covered his face looking as existentially stirring as the collection itself. Maybe it’s Roseberry’s genuine affinity for pop culture that makes his haute couture feel so fresh. In its fusion of stupefying craftsmanship, splendor, and consistent sense of humor, the show kind of evoked a time when the likes of Christian Lacroix, Jean Paul Gaultier, and Thierry Mugler – may he rest in peace – opened Paris’s eyes to a different kind of fashion theater.

Collage by Edward Kanarecki.

Surreal Beach. Schiaparelli SS22

| Design & Culture by Ed

“People are coming to us as an alternative to the mass luxury houses,” said Daniel Roseberry said of his extraordinary take on Schiaparelli. “They’re looking for something really strong.” So that’s what he’s prepared for spring-summer 2022. Schiaparelli’s Place Vendôme salons were organized by room, and first up was Roseberry’s wildly imaginative bijoux of body parts – ears, nose, eyes, lips, pierced nipples, and so on – and leather bags embellished with the same. His exaltation of the human form also took the shape of a gold-dipped resin bib molded from a model’s torso and suspended from a chain. There’s an inflatable black leather bolero and matching belt, as well as an inflatable parka, complete with air valves; a fitted knit dress with raised details in the form of Salvador Dalí’s famous rib cage dress; and cone bras à la Gaultier every which way: in leather, denim, and silk arranged in swirls like the petals of a flower. The vibe, Roseberry said, was “David Lynch holiday.” Tailoring and outerwear, meanwhile, were classically cut, but treated to all manner of gilded body part baubles. Many of the cocktail numbers had their beginnings in the couture, including a pair of sublimely draped black silk charmeuse dresses suspended from gold chokers. A cropped but boxy bolero with outsize lapels had a different starting point, Roseberry said. It was based on the jacket he made for playwright Jeremy O. Harris to wear to the Tonys last month. The words Schiap Hotel were stitched around the hem of a densely embellished bathrobe. I’m off to the plage de Schiap.

Collage by Edward Kanarecki.

Outrageous and Fab. Schiaparelli AW21 Couture

| Design & Culture by Ed

“In difficult times fashion is always outrageous“, Elsa Schiaparelli once said. Daniel Roseberry believes so as well – his latest, fabulously dramatic haute couture collection for Schiaparelli is the best proof for that. Visitors at the brand’s Place Vendôme salons are greeted by a lavish wedding gown. Typically, couture shows end with the bride, but Daniel Roseberry gave pride of place to the dress constructed from 70 meters of white cartridge pleated taffeta. “We’ve had so many requests from clients who come looking for this irreverent grandeur that we’ve been doing,” he said. Roseberry’s bride is not the shy, retiring type, but she is representative of what the designer described as the “new kind of prettiness” he was after this season. If this collection is as intense as his past outings, it’s a shade or two less irreverent. There are none of the molded leather six-pack abs corsets that were the defining looks of his last couture, for example. He came at prettiness in several different ways. Following on from that entrance-making bride is a salon devoted to embroidered jackets. These borrow as much from Lacroix and Jean Paul Gaultier as they do from Schiaparelli, with their curvaceous shapes, Versailles colors, and cone bra references. One black jacket blooms with pink silk roses, an ode to a collaboration between Schiap and Jean Cocteau circa 1937. Others are embellished with decades-old gold Schiaparelli threads that the embroiderer Lesage had saved in its stockpiles. All of them are trophies, perhaps especially the denim jacket that’s patch-worked from 11 pairs of used Levi’s sourced at a local vintage store – the very essence of haute friperie. Where this season’s jackets have a delicious propriety, a sculpted gold flower corset worn with a skirt barely clinging to the hips, and a scoop-front dress with a breastplate made of gold-dipped bronchi – the lungs being a locus of our attention in the pandemic – are more provocative. A silver bustier is accessorized by a fringed stole made from shredded black garbage bags, of all things. That’s couture heresy – and fabulously so. For the dessert, a cocktail dress punctuated by a shocking pink rose, a strapless black gown featuring a bust-line shaped like fiery orange lips with a matching train, and a voluminous infanta gown in a shade of lavender Roseberry said that he’s never used before. In his two years at Schiaparelli, he’s only doubled-down on the surreal glamour this historic house is known for. Turns out, he’s very good at pretty, too.

Collages by Edward Kanarecki.

Body, Body, Body. Schiaparelli AW21

| Design & Culture by Ed

Daniel Roseberry has already proven that he’s a genius haute couture designer. With his autumn-winter 2021 collection for Schiaparelli, he also confirms he knows how to make ready-to-wear a ‘wow’ moment. “I really like the freedom in which Schiap explored things,” Roseberry told Vogue over Zoom. “You know, while Chanel was making buttons made out of double C’s and it was very much an exercise in branding, Schiap’s buttons were peanuts and wrenches and hammers and birds and insects. It’s kind of this referential gymnastics that I feel like we can have here, as long as it feels like part of one world and one language. People know they can go other places for more polite designs.” If Roseberry has more freedom than his creative director predecessors that’s largely down to the fact that Lady Gaga wore his designs at the U.S. inauguration. Overnight, as he put it in the days afterward, Roseberry had a place in fashion history, and the label itself had a new international relevance and cachet. The dove brooch (it reminds the pieces Yves Saint Laurent sent down the runway in his spring-summer 1988 couture collection) that Lady Gaga wore to the inauguration has become a visual trope; it perches on the shoulder of a fitted black minidress among several other surreal bijoux and its outline is painted in black on a white button-down. Instant Insta-favourites are of course all the “body-ornaments”: the breasts and pierced nipples, ears, eyes, noses, and lips – all of it has been cast in gold, moulded in leather, or quilted in wool crepe. “I don’t want to be precious about any part of the body; you know, it’s about kind of celebrating the whole thing,” he said. But Roseberry is no doubt well aware that breasts are a cultural flashpoint. Exploiting that flashpoint, he managed to render all the other designers playing with lingerie and kink this season look tame. The fashion industry urgently needs a provocateur, and Daniel is the ultimate answer.

“Live” collage by Edward Kanarecki.

She’s A Goddess, Hero, A Power-Female! Schiaparelli Couture SS21

| Design & Culture by Ed

Schiaparelli and Daniel Roseberry are a match made in heaven. The way the Texas-born designer plays with Elsa Schiaparelli’s codes is so witty and intelligent – and what’s most important, he makes it his and doesn’t try to mimic the maison‘s founder as his predecessors. Spring-summer 2021 couture line-up is his best yet, and truly, it transports the viewer to a wonderland. And since Lady Gaga wore a black fitted jacket, red silk faille ball skirt and a golden dove brooch of his design to sing the national anthem at President Joe Biden’s inauguration last Wednesday, it’s clear more people will pay attention to Roseberry’s magic. “For a house like Schiaparelli,” he told Vogue, “dressing Gaga for the inauguration speaks to capturing the moment. That’s what I’m trying to do with all of our celebrity moments: to nail the zeitgeist.” Daniel’s Schiaparelli is open to big celebrity moments (Kim Kardashian West and Hunter Schafer, for instance), but it also breaks couture conventions and says ‘bye’ to the haute stuffiness once and for all. He’d been pushing the house, which was quite straitlaced before his arrival despite Elsa Schiaparelli’s famous Surrealism, in a new direction. But the eccentricities of his earlier outings were just him warming up. “Ever since I came back from lockdown, there’s been a shift for me mentally here – a focus and confidence that’s come from my relationship to my own process and to the atelier,” he said. Synthesizing his point of view, he added, “it’s just something that’s not as polite as couture typically tends to be.” If there’s one piece that says his incubation period is over, it’s a Madonna and Child breastplate, but there’s no shortage of statement-making bijoux here, from the tooth pearl earrings to the fingernail rings. “It isn’t about being too perfect for me,” Roseberry said, “but it is about shutting the moment down.” On that note, the look book opens with another super-heroine bustier, this one in glossy black finished with a prodigious bow in Schiaparelli’s signature shocking pink. A different dress in the same electric pink hue accentuates not just gym-toned abs, but trapezius muscles and biceps. “If you want to look like a cupcake, you can go somewhere else,” Roseberry said with a laugh before getting serious. “I started thinking, is there something about couture that’s sort of misogynistic, that demands or expects that a woman wants to look hyper-feminine and dainty and ‘Bridgerton’ adjacent?” He clarifies, “It’s not about being a man at all, it’s about being a jacked woman.” A stretch-fabric dress knitted with more than 200,000 Swarovski crystals will appeal to clients whose own well-maintained physiques require no surface-level enhancements. Elsewhere, Roseberry made exuberant use of volume. A black column dress with ample folded sleeves would make a spectacular red carpet dress, but he also designed a couture jean jacket and a couture parka with grand hoods. The contemporary Schiaparelli woman is no longer just an arty party-goer. Now, she’s a goddess, hero, a power-female!

“Live” collage by Edward Kanarecki.