Schiaparelli

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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“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.