House of Schiaparelli (Q2052)
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French fashion house
- Schiaparelli
- Maison Schiaparelli
| Language | Label | Description | Also known as |
|---|---|---|---|
| English | House of Schiaparelli |
French fashion house |
|
Statements
2019
artistic director
It’s a good moment to be Daniel Roseberry. Fashion has decided to swap the bland sameness of quiet luxury and the banality of algorithms for a mood that’s more eccentric. And eccentric fashion is something Roseberry excels at, as he’s proven over and over again at his couture shows for Schiaparelli. Ready-to-wear is a newer project chez Schiap and he’s been tinkering with the formula the last few seasons, but even if he dialed down the surrealist touches that founder Elsa Schiaparelli was famous for and that he embraced with such gusto at the beginning of his tenure here, he’s definitely making fashion for extroverts.Consider Kendall Jenner’s blue jeans, whose waistband did a U-shaped dip in the front and back, further accentuating the nipped silhouette of her ivory jersey bodysuit with stretch corset inside. Not your basic five-pocket style denim. That hourglass shape was a recurring theme, whether on a zip-front denim day dress or a fancier halter dress in black compact jersey with off-white jersey draping below the hips.But Roseberry’s mission here was to hit a lot of different beats, so this wasn’t a collection about themes or trends; it was more like dipping into the idiosyncratic closet of a life-of-the-party type—one who wears zebra stripes, believes in the power of shoulder pads, and only wears florals if they’re embroidered with hand-painted sequins—and trying on all the highlights.At a preview, Roseberry made a point of saying how few embroideries he used this season. Instead, he created texture and surface interest in other ways: By gathering the blue mesh jersey of a bodycon dress into a series of knots which formed a long braid that the model held coiled in her hand like a whip. Or by stitching strips of suede to a knit dress then shellacking the ends for a touch of shine. “It’s all about taking that oomph that people love from the couture and making it just super-effortless,” he said. That rule also applied to the season’s new shoes. Roseberry has garnered a lot of attention for Schiap’s golden trompe l’oeil toe sneakers. Tweaking that idea, he added a golden toe ring to the trompe l’oeil toes of leather babouche slides—unconventional and fun.
27 September 2024
“I had this dream of finding a forgotten couture collection in the basement of Elsa’s country house.” Schiaparelli is a couture label that flourished in the 1920s and ’30s. As its creative director, Daniel Roseberry has never seemed hemmed in by that era, but this season he made his restless gaze more explicit. “I wanted people to feel the collection was referencing a different time… and there was something about the ’50s that felt so fresh and simple. You’ll find homages to those silhouettes.”The show was in fact staged in a basement—the basement of the Hôtel Salomon de Rothschild, whose upper salons have long been used for couture shows. In the dark, chandelier-lit space Roseberry conjured something of the haute couture shows of old, with models emerging at a stately, almost reverential pace, and making eye contact with the audience, which included Doja Kat and Kylie Jenner, as they criss-crossed the room.The 1950s are regarded as the acme of haute couture, and turning his eye to that time is a signal of Roseberry’s ambitions. He said he wanted to “show the elasticity of the brand, and also the range of what I think I can do and the ateliers can do.” Indeed, together what they can do is quite stunning. Like the show-opening cape, with the broad shoulders of an eagle—or a phoenix, which was the show’s mascot, Schiap being so good at reinvention, Roseberry explained—with silver lozenge embroidery arranged to look like gleaming feathered wings. Or a black party dress, its tulle skirt in a permanent can-can kick flip, exposing an underside lavishly embellished with coppery pink rhinestones. Another impressive technique was the millefeuille circles that trimmed the arabesque hems of an hourglass dress.Roseberry expressed a desire to shrug off his “meme weaver” reputation, mentioning his last couture’s much-Instagrammed robot baby. That’s an excellent instinct, but this is Schiap we’re talking about, so the cups of a bustier dress in pink silk duchesse were shaped like high heel shoes, after a famous hat Elsa once made, and a mostly sheer number gave new meaning to the term “naked dress.”Its neckline was a 3-D rose, which was repeated on a slithering satin cocktail dress accented with pillow-stuffed thorns that hit a sweet spot between the house’s surreal legacy and the kind of seduction that anyone can understand. “There’s a real embracing of the body this time around,” Roseberry noted.
One dress we’re all sure to see again is the lace bustier gown with an absinthe green bow-front skirt when it turns up on an A-lister on the red carpet.
24 June 2024
The crowd lining both sides of the narrow pathway into Schiaparelli’s Place Vendôme venue was hundreds of people deep. The irony is not that there were no celebrities at Daniel Roseberry’s show (there were, but they were minor ones): the collection was conceived and developed intentionally without them in mind.“For the past few years the word visibility has come up,” Roseberry said at a preview in the Schiaparelli salons. His runway coups and front row gets have made the brand as visible as its significantly larger and better known competitors. But having done so, he’s moving on to another goal: “It’s more about adding a layer of legitimacy to the way people think about the house,” he said. “So that when you think of Schiaparelli you don’t just think of celebrities, you don’t just think of couture. You also think of everyday pieces that you could be wearing right now.”Last season, Shalom Harlow opened in a minidress with shoulders out to there and a snatched waist. Tonight Mona Tougaard sported a tweedy mannish suit sans shirt and bra, the pants high-waisted and full through the legs. The tailoring felt new—more relaxed in cut and attitude—and so did the styling, which juxtaposed unlikely pieces. A corset, for example, was matched with ultra-oversized pants held up on the hips with a bandana tying the belt loops together.Roseberry said he took cues from the things the women in his life want to be wearing. Top of the list is statement outerwear, from a navy peacoat, its buttons spelling out the brand name, to a puffer jacket quilted with six pack abs and featuring brass nipple buttons. “What they want from us is still this humor, this creativity, but made effortless,” he said.Hence the stretch jersey dresses with the trompe l’oeil leotard, a nod to Geoffrey Beene, said Roseberry, and the hourglassly beaded evening equivalent. Another trick was to let a lot of the accessories do the work. High-top sneakers had the molded toes of previous seasons, and heels were shaped like S’s and picked out in rhinestones. “I think people only get a sense of the extraordinary with us and I want them to know that there’s a true reality,” said Roseberry.
29 February 2024
Schiapar-alien! The pictures from Daniel Roseberry’s surrealist sci-fi Western spring haute couture collection—and the arrivals of Zendaya, Hunter Schafer, and Jennifer Lopez—were all over the internet before the show had finished. A robot baby, a dress swishing a (faux) horse’s tail, a bodice carapace sculpted almost like a space pod—all these threw further fuel on the runaway sensation he’s ignited around the brand.Before liftoff, in a quiet-ish moment backstage, Roseberry shared some of the thoughts that have been propelling him. Essentially, they swirl around the big questions about what it means to be creative, and human, in the age of machine learning. “I’ve even seen, online, people taking my work and doing AI interpretations and asking, ‘Who did it better?’” he exclaimed. We know what likely triggered that: his fake lion’s head, as sported by Kylie Jenner and on the runway in his spring ’23 Dante’s Divine Comedy couture show. What’s been his reaction? “It’s just made me dig deeper into the parts of myself that feel like the most tender, the most childlike,” he replied. “Because what differentiates us as humans is our memories. I think of this as in music—like in an album where you have all these different references being mixed together. And then the composite is something that feels really original, a handwriting that feels unique to the house. But if you go inside the looks, it’s really like a treasure trove of personal references mixed with the past.”It was a case of back to the future, then—a meld of retro technology, classic sci-fi movies, and references to the grand haute couturiers of the past and Roseberry’s Texan upbringing. There were exoskeleton dresses and an entire 3D spine inspired by both Elsa Schiaparelli’s radical 1938 skeleton dress and Giger aliens from theAlienmovie series. Silver-tipped Western belt buckles formed a corset and bristled up over the arched sleeves of a biker jacket and along the flanks of a pair of jeans. A heavily embroidered, sculptural black velvet cape was paired with casually belted sandy suede pants. “Dressage braids” inspired the knots on a cream leather suit that nearly looked like it could have been a space uniform from NASA.Maggie Maurer, nestling a robot baby on her hip, was wearing a white singlet and conceptual couture cargo pants—Roseberry’s tribute to Sigourney Weaver as Ripley. “I’ve watched theAlienseries, like, six times,” he said.
His robot-woman dress and the baby were glittering constructs of nostalgic tech elements like defunct electronic motherboards, CDs, flip phones, mirrors, and gems—“all things that I grew up with that now seem as antiquated as Charles James!” the designer said.Haute couture is the last handmade bastion of fashion that still exists, the place where extreme fantasias can manifest because of human skills. Roseberry leaned strongly into that. An equal part of his couture research was looking at the wonders of Cristóbal Balenciaga (the capes, the volumes) and Yves Saint Laurent (the black cropped tribute jacket with white sequined lapels), which Azzedine Alaïa collected and are currently exhibited at the Palais Galliera. Roseberry didn’t neglect to design a segment of gowns with an eye to the awards season, a duchesse satin balloon dress outstanding among them. But maybe there was a final comment from him on the value of hands-on human creativity versus AI to be read in the most normal-looking outfit on the runway. It was a pencil threaded through the collar of a white shirt. “It’s from our studio,” he smiled.
22 January 2024
Normal, real fashion is the subject du jour at the spring shows, but not chez Schiaparelli. Having grabbed the world’s attention with spectacular red carpet moments, Daniel Roseberry is now building the house’s ready-to-wear identity, and he’s embracing the “madness of Elsa’s approach.”The show-opening zip-front coat dress, plain save for the measuring tape embroidery down one side of the neckline, belied the eccentricity that followed. It took many forms, from the spilled nail polish and leather cigarette embroideries on the tailoring to the three-dimensional lobster placed suggestively on the front of an ivory skirt.A Salvador Dalí-painted lobster famously featured on a lawn dress by Elsa Schiaparelli worn by the Duchess of Windsor; its sheer material and erotic suggestiveness scandalized 1930s England, which had been primed by her paramour’s abdication of the throne. Roseberry swore not to touch the lobster in his early days at Schiaparelli, thinking it was too obvious a reference to indulge. But four years on, having lived through the mini conflagration stirred up by the animal heads at his January couture show, he said he’s down for more fun, hence the giant lobster and crab necklaces here and the enormous gold cuff bracelets that took their cues from Brancusi shapes.Shalom Harlow and Amber Valletta walked the show, and Guido Palau and Pat McGrath were on hair and makeup duty—the A-team, who have decades of experience between them. Backstage Roseberry called the collection an “ode to youth,” but these were dressed-up clothes, not so much young as they were linked back to his Americanness. He designed high-top sneakers with the molded gold toes he’s used on more formal shoes, and showed dark-rinse wide-leg jeans slung low over y-front briefs, with only a pinstripe blazer to accompany them on top.Perhaps the greatest indication that Schiaparelli has moved beyond the realm of haute couture and into the real world is the upcoming launch of an eyewear line. But trust us, these are not your basic shades.
28 September 2023
At its best, haute couture is intrinsically surreal. It’s the magic that happens when you can barely believe that the things you’re seeing are the work of human hands. This season, Daniel Roseberry took that realization to heart, liberating himself from the big-S Surrealist Schiaparelli-esque tricks he’s been performing thus far in bringing so much attention to reestablishing the identity and visibility of the brand.“I wanted this season to feel much more free, spontaneous, painterly,” he said before the 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.”So this was the moment when Roseberry went into territory of his own, 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.It would be remiss not to mention “what happened”—the faux taxidermy lion head which instantaneously broke the internet in January, causing a farrago of controversy which inadvertently obliterated the rest of what Roseberry was trying to get across as a couturier. “It was a lot more than we had bargained for,” he admitted, while sounding if he’s still processing the pros and cons of stoking a worldwide reaction. “I became so fatigued by all of that stuff. But it was an important moment for the house, too. I loved it. I absolutely loved it.”But this season he was on a different tack, taking 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.
Given all the commercial success he’s brought to the house with the jewelry and accessories, Roseberry has earned the luxury of branching out. Haute couture, after all, should be a site for experimentation and pushing at the limits of the possible.
3 July 2023
“The higher you go in the stratosphere of luxury, the more basic it feels.” Daniel Roseberry was not mincing words in a preview of his first Schiaparelli ready-to-wear collection to hit the runway—make thatthefirst Schiap ready-to-wear collection to ever hit the runway.It’s been just over a month since the fake animal head dresses in Roseberry’s haute couture collection caused a social media conflagration. The experience, as overwhelming as it might have been, hasn’t seemed to soften his resolve. He mentioned watching the four-part documentaryThe Kingdom of Dreams, which chronicles the rise of LVMH and PPR (now Kering) from the late 1990s into the luxury conglomerates they are today. “Then it was raw creativity fueling the machine, now it’s the machine fueling creativity,” he said. His goal today was to make his entrée into Paris Fashion Week an “antidote to that mass feeling.”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.”What delivered the most bang for the ready-to-wear buck was a strapless velvet number with the gold bijoux eyes, nose, and mouth forming a smiley face on the bodice. Call it an antidote to the classic little black dress.
2 March 2023
The ‘leopard’ that leapt from Shalom Harlow’s chest, the ‘wolf’ that stared from Naomi Campbell’s coat, the ‘Lion’ heads sported by Irina Shayk on the runway and Kylie Jenner in the front row: Daniel Roseberry blew up the internet with his fake Schiaparelli taxidermy pieces this morning. It was predictable that they’d instantly take on— as it were—a controversial life of their own.Shocking has been integral to Schiaparelli’s DNA since Elsa’s day, but unlike Roseberry, she didn’t live in an age when people will draw distressing colonial inferences from big game imagery, a moment in which environmentalists and animal activists hate fashion for depicting dead animals, even when it’s known that they were constructs of foam and faux fur.It’s an irony that Roseberry’s mind was in fact focused on a different hell—the Inferno of Dante’s Divine Comedy—and not looking to stoke the fires of social media, or rather, inadvertently reap unforeseen negative reactions to his haute couture stunt. “The animals are one of the four literal references that I took from Dante’s Inferno,” he’d explained while preparing the collection. “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.”Why choose the terrors of hell as a concept, though? It’s the risk he took to find something new—a corollary of the huge success that Roseberry has brought to the previously sleepy house. The fun and the spectacle of the pre-show parade of paying couture clients decked hat-to-molded-toe platforms in Schiaparelli black and gold, trompe l’oeil skeleton-embroidered jackets, and gilded body-part jewelry, said that. Only to be upstaged by the entrance of Doja Cat, her face and head smothered in fiery crystals, with her red-clad entourage. “Oh!” quipped one riveted onlooker. “Do you think she’s come as the devil?”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.
”It’s a shame that all the explosive attention drawn by the three sinful animal symbols Dante wrote of (Lion: pride; Leopard: lust; Wolf: avarice) 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. “Putting women in menswear, but making the silhouette hyper feminine,” as he phrased it.Roseberry’s aspirations were set high for this collection. “Nothing is as it seems,” he said in advance. You could say that’s an N.B for all the conversations that have swirled around his show since this morning.
23 January 2023
Today at the Hôtel d’Évreux, Daniel Roseberry said that Schiaparelli needed to move its show because the house’s salons next door were too busy with selling appointments. Meanwhile, the Musée des Arts Décoratifs’s Schiaparelli exhibition, “Shocking!,” is drawing crowds of its own. Roseberry has rounded the three-year mark at Schiap. From Lady Gaga at the inauguration and Bella Hadid in Cannes to that museum show, 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, as a walk around today’s presentation demonstrated. 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, to Roseberry’s own interpretations, painted in gold on an icy blue column. No schtick here. Just chic.
29 September 2022
“Shocking! The Surreal World of Elsa Schiaparelli,” the high-impact exhibition opening this week at the Musée des Arts Décoratifs, includes pieces that fellow designers—among them Yves Saint Laurent, Jean Paul Gaultier, Azzedine Alaïa, and Christian Lacroix—created in homage to the house’s founding genius. For this season’s Schiaparelli haute couture collection, Daniel Roseberry, the house’s brilliant artistic director, took this idea of “being in conversation with the people who had been so inspired by her.”Earlier this year Roseberry had an in-person conversation with Lacroix himself, “which was really inspiring,” as Roseberry noted during final fittings on the eve of his show. “We talked about color, we talked about volume. We talked about [Lacroix’s native city of] Arles, and for him it meant black bulls, white horses, and the gold of the sun, which just kept ringing in my ear. It was probably, for him, a passing conversation, but for me it felt like someone plugged me into the wall a little bit, and I wanted to make a collection that brought me back to the kind of fashion that I fell in love with and that period of fashion that feels, in retrospect, very naive in a way.”And so Roseberry evoked the euphoria of Christian Lacroix’s 1987 debut collection with its giddy pouf silhouette, bustles, gigot sleeves, coruscating toreador embroideries, and severe matador hats. For Roseberry, ’80s nostalgia is in the air—as he points out, Kate Bush’s 1985 anthemRunning Up That Hill, given a new life viaStranger Things, has been on top of the Billboard Global 200. But the collection was also informed, as Roseberry confided, “by the way Elsa dressed herself,” which meant rigorous tailoring. That was exemplified by the coatdress worn by Carolyn Murphy with trompe l’oeil drawers for pockets—a detail that Salvador Dalí himself conceived for Schiap and now a piece that will go directly from the runway to the museum exhibition—and what Roseberry described as “this sort of sensual body-conscious and body-obsessed eveningwear, everything built around the bustier and the corset.”That meant vertiginous evening necklines that plunged south of the navel and cantilevered bodices, some of them erupting into the cloudy volumes that Roseberry has made such a signature of his work at Schiaparelli, others so low cut that they revealedbelles poitrinesspangled by Pat McGrath with silver moon dust.
Some sprouted floral displays inspired by designer and society titan Carolyne Roehm’s bookA Passion for Flowers, a copy of which sat on Roseberry’s grandmother’s coffee table when he was an impressionable boy. Seen up close these were remarkable triumphs of embroidery—sunflowers and roses and lavender fronds crafted from hand-painted and sequined silk and even leather molded onto the back of spoons to create the petals.There were subtle homages to Elsa Schiaparelli’s own Surrealist inspirations, like the neckline of a black velvet jacket cut into a face’s profile à la Cocteau and the crusted Lesage embroideries that she reveled in. A simple black velvet evening dress that looked like one of Roseberry’s dramatic fashion sketches come to life was brought into Schiap’s madcap world thanks to a pair of earrings dripping bunches of golden grapes and so heavy that they had to be secured with a discreet tiara hair band. Hopeful doves of peace brought the collection into 2022.Meanwhile, Stephen Jones’s magnificent wide-brimmed hats bristled with what looked like fields of wheat that on close inspection turned out to have been simulated with glycerinated ostrich feathers. It was all, as Roseberry himself promised, a “mash-up between something that felt incredibly modern and then also wildly romantic.” It certainly left the audience on a high. “Wasn’t that amazing?” trilled Emma Watson. “It gave me life!”
4 July 2022