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Daniel Roseberry is often touted as the “perfect” creative director for Maison Schiaparelli. Not simply due to his successful burgeoning of the 95-year-old French label into a very modern, very appropriate couture house for current times but because he, like founder Elsa Schiaparelli, scorns the ubiquitous need to separate art from fashion. They prefer to radicalise it, to blur the line between visual artist and fashion designer and then erase it altogether.
Perhaps then, there is no better setting for Schiaparelli than Paris Haute Couture Week. Although only ordained into the official haute couture Chambre Syndicale in 2017, there are few labels that can so spectacularly resuscitate our nostalgia for imaginative couture than Roseberry’s ‘Schiap’. And while he presents pieces that dip into the archives, he offers a nuanced sense of personal direction. While the Schiaparelli aesthetic is honoured with technical prowess, his is not a case of simple homage.
Roseberry’s collection today offered continued adoration for his founder’s history but also honoured one of its most important influences and past directors, Christian Lacroix. After a conversation with Lacroix about the romantic, sun-drenched couture of his home town of Arles in the South of France, Roseberry was viscerally inspired. So followed a dreamscape that would celebrate the super-80s decadence of Lacroix’s style as well as Elsa’s infamous history. Garish, glorious florals (lavenders, tulips, daisies) arranged as sprouting explosions on the garments were nods to Lacroix’s love of colour as well as chic interpretations of Elsa Schiaparelli’s 1937 ‘Shocking’ floral perfume bottle. Extravagant millinery in both show-stopping matador hats and Stephen Jones’ ostrich feather masterpieces created drama and shade in the most literal and figurative of ways. And trompe-l’oeils of twining wheat and flowers stitched in graphic tactility to bodices and dresses made a lovely sampling of the famed Schiaparelli collaboration with surrealist Jean Cocteau.
The silhouettes, while distinctly that of the sexy, voluminous Lacroix woman, also ventured into the era of Ms. Schiaparelli. Cuts of feminine constriction via laced corsetry, sharp shoulders and hourglass shapes manipulated with opulent decor and raucous detail, could have been worn by the founder herself. Additionally, current water-cooler fascinations in stand-alone belle poitrines, sheer beaded negligees and seductively diaphanous body covers reminded us we’re post-Millenia and will undoubtedly see such on the most daring of fashion darlings come the next red carpet. Roseberry’s discourse here was rich and refined, a story of future as seen through the glorious Art Deco, Film Noir and Silver Screen romance of times past. The supreme velvet gowns, oversized rose-wrapped silk hemlines and cocktail-dress high fashion wouldn’t be out of place in a chic remake of Some Like It Hot and drew a beautiful line to Lacroix’s bubbled taffeta concoctions of the 1980s. The beauty (red lips, slick hair, winged top liner) was poised in an Uptown Girl way, while the invitation of spectacular baroque gold jewellery (some earrings so gigantic they reached the navel) drew in a kind of remastered Material Girl.
Ms. Schiaparelli’s legacy is legendary. Her collections of wearable surrealism, that spanned the 1920s, 30s and 40s before the label’s eventual closure in the mid 50s, have remained the most conspicuously sculptural and buoyantly artistic of all time. Her well-known collaborative relationships with visual surrealists of the time, Cocteau, Man Ray, Salvador Dalí gifted the world an oeuvre of garments that extended the very meaning of what fashion could be. Her Lobster dress, the Dalí shoe hat, the oversized winged sleeves, the giant embroidered insects and faces onto suits were, at the time, dispelled as a kind of fashion mockery. That she was stirring the modernity pot, tempting the style counsels to either love her or loathe her. Just as any artist of any time sets out to achieve, to create conversation and to craft a unique take on the world around them, it’s easy to see why her particular sartorial sculptures have remained a benchmark for modernity.
Roseberry today spurned an almost classic return to glamour, yet he arms himself with such renegade spirit and immaculate craftsmanship that his finesse is elevated into another world. His experimental, artistic appliqué (giant feathered sleeves, exuberant sunflower breast plates, cardiac bustiers) and exaggerated cuts are so wholly overt but remain equally dashing and wearable. And of course they are. His name is top of the hit list for much of the celebrity zeitgeist. Front row today was Hunter Schafer, Emma Watson, Rita Ora, Natasha Lyonne and K-Pop star CL, while the preceding months have seen Beyonce wear a black leather moto dress to the 2022 Grammy Awards, Bella Hadid in his much-discussed “lung” dress at the 2021 Cannes Film Festival and Lady Gaga in a custom-designed peace dove gown at the inauguration of President Joe Biden. Today, Roseberry is not only designing for seasonal collections but for the red carpet, for significant names, for magazine covers. And he is doing it with perfection.
Concurrently, the Musée des Arts Décoratifs in Paris has just opened its groundbreaking exhibition centred on Elsa Schiaparelli as prepared and curated by Roseberry and gallery director Oliver Gabet. Shocking! The Surreal World of Elsa Schiaparelli will present hundreds of original pieces of couture, sketches and designs in a show that will see thousands of guests experience her genius in person while being privy to the label’s future. For a house that prior to its 2014 resurrection was to be relegated to past tense and revered nostalgia, this meteoric rise back to the top is an ongoing cause for celebration.
