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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Chanel AF. Chanel SS’97 Couture

April 19, 2023April 21, 2023 | Design & Culture by Ed

On Monday, May 1st, the 2023 Met Gala will take place. This year’s Costume Institute exhibition, “A Line of Beauty,” will celebrate the oeuvre and life of Karl Lagerfeld. The exhibition will see Andrew Bolton and Wendy Yu, curators in charge, examine the work of Karl Lagerfeld (1933–2019). Throughout his lifetime, Lagerfeld worked at prominent fashion houses such as Balmain, Chloé, Fendi, Chanel, in addition to founding his namesake brand. More than 150 pieces will be on display in the exhibition, many of which will be accompanied by Lagerfeld’s sketches. In the following days, I will look back at my all-time favorite Chanel collections, designed by the one & only Karl. Hope some of these magnificent looks will end up on the red carpet on the first Monday in May…

First up is the stunning spring-summer 1997 haute couture collection. It’s a Lagerfeld collection that can be simply summed up as “Chanel af“. Behind the scenes, Amanda Harlech, a trusted arbiter of taste, jumped from Dior to Chanel just in time to put finishing touches on a collection of what Karl Lagerfeld described as nonexistent dresses and exploded shoes. “It’s hysterical Chanel,” the designer said. Harlech expanded on that, telling Hamish Bowles, “It’s about Chanel proportions and luxury pushed to absolute nervous-breakdown extremes!” Just as the rooms he showed in at the Ritz were veiled with tulle, so Lagerfeld wrapped his creations in luxury, replacing buttons with real pearls or diamond camellia clip brooches. Adding a sense of fun were the dramatic headpieces by Philip Treacy, some of which bobbed atop heads like antennae tuned into chic. There were LBDs galore, along with wide-legged pantsuits, however the “unbearable lightness of being” Lagerfeld was after was to be found in the evening looks, many with silhouettes that nodded to the late ’20s and early ’30s—Coco Chanel’s own heyday. Shalom Harlow wore the collection’s pièce de résistance: a feather-white strapless confection, which looked as if it were crafted from air. Over a stem of pale chiffon, the atelier had constructed a 3-D “cage” of many, many camellias made of sequins, and then cut the fabric ground away so that it resembled a Wilson Bentley photograph of a snowflake or the tracery of a stained glass window. Possibly, that’s one of the chicest collection ever in fashion history.

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.