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Business of Fashion
07-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Business of Fashion
Schiaparelli: A Swan Song That Fused Then and Now
PARIS — Daniel Roseberry insists that he has swerved the Schiaparelli archives, until now. 'I just wasn't interested,' he confessed on Monday morning, after his latest couture show for the house. So what changed? One thing: He felt he'd needed time to build up some legitimacy before he took a deep dive into Elsa's formidable legacy. And another: Roseberry wants to make a major change in Schiaparelli. 'To rediscover and restructure the atelier, the whole way in which we create. If you want to change the result, you have to change the creative process,' he said. So he saw Monday's collection as a swan song, a farewell to the Schiap he has remade to such great effect. In other words, he was finally accessing the archives in order to say goodbye to them. Schiaparelli Autumn/Winter 2025 (Schiaparelli) If such a notion sounded poignant, the collection itself was anything but. 'Last season was more emotional,' Roseberry said. 'This one, I wanted to be harder, more direct, more confrontational.' The colour palette he found in the archives didn't look modern to him. One easy fix: the timelessness of monochrome. Fade to black and white, which encouraged the silhouettes to be equally graphic. 'Less body modification and radical corseting, less exaggeration,' Roseberry added. The occasional grand floor-sweeping volume still spoke to classic couture, but there was also bias-cutting, rather than corseting, to create shape, and a new moulded shoulder and hip, a pared back, more rational Schiap. As Roseberry pointed out, Elsa herself was 'rigorous and controlled during the day and then at night, she's a swan, a radish, a surrealist…' Schiaparelli Autumn/Winter 2025 (Schiaparelli) Swan? Radish? Why stop at 'modern'? Roseberry decided to head onwards and upwards and make the archives feel futuristic. There was a sci-fi silveriness to the strongest looks. A matador outfit — silver patent Perfecto and matching torero pants — fused Schiap and Ziggy Stardust. A sumptuous black tulle cape embroidered with Versailles's Fountain of Apollo (originally designed by Elsa for Lady Mendl in 1938) duplicated the water in a cosmic starburst of silver pearls, sequins and rhinestones, like something the Vera C. Rubin Observatory will capture in deep space. Maggie Maurer's sheath of lamé chiffon featured tulle cut-outs that seemed to have drawn a cornucopia of silvery slugs (haute body horror). Elsa's old collaborator Salvador Dalí would have appreciated that, as he would have enjoyed the necklace which ended in a human-heart-shaped ball of red rhinestones that pulsated as the model walked. Schiaparelli Autumn/Winter 2025 (Schiaparelli) Schiap's surrealist roots probably run too deep for Roseberry to dispense with them in his 'restructuring,' especially when they loaned an invaluable edge to Monday's swansong. Kudos to Stephen Jones' upended flower pot hats, Pat McGrath's monochrome makeup and an armful of gorgeous bracelets that were a futuristic interpretation of Nancy Cunard's accessories in her iconic 1927 portrait by Man Ray. In his lyrical show notes, Roseberry told the story of Elsa's flight to New York as the Nazis closed in on Paris in June 1940. He dedicated his collection to that period, 'when life and art was on the precipice: to the sunset of elegance, and to the end of the world as we knew it.' Dada and surrealism were artistic responses to a world gone mad. In naming his presentation 'Back to the Future,' Roseberry was, in his own way, acknowledging certain inescapable geopolitical parallels. (He felt the fact that there is a major Man Ray retrospective opening at the Met in September offered subtle confirmation.) On a personal level, he saw looking back to move forward as a way to counter what he himself clearly feels has become overly predictable. 'I was really interested in trying to achieve something that looked identifiably Schiap without needing corsets and even sometimes an overdose of embroidery.' Hear, hear. And mission accomplished. I guess we can wave goodbye to the past and say hello to a brave new Daniel Roseberry. Schiaparelli Haute Couture Autumn/Winter 2025 look 1. (Schiaparelli) Schiaparelli Haute Couture Autumn/Winter 2025 look 2. (Schiaparelli) Schiaparelli Haute Couture Autumn/Winter 2025 look 3. (Schiaparelli) Schiaparelli Haute Couture Autumn/Winter 2025 look 4. (Schiaparelli) Schiaparelli Haute Couture Autumn/Winter 2025 look 5. (Schiaparelli) Schiaparelli Haute Couture Autumn/Winter 2025 look 6. (Schiaparelli) Schiaparelli Haute Couture Autumn/Winter 2025 look 7. (Schiaparelli) Schiaparelli Haute Couture Autumn/Winter 2025 look 8. (Schiaparelli) Schiaparelli Haute Couture Autumn/Winter 2025 look 9. (Schiaparelli) Schiaparelli Haute Couture Autumn/Winter 2025 look 10. 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New York Times
28-01-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
The Joy of Escapism
It was Day 1 of the couture shows in a chilly Paris, and the Schiap pack were tottering around the Petit Palais in their gold-toe shoes and anatomical gold jewelry, swinging their bejeweled Face bags and waiting for the Schiaparelli show to start. That they were a little — um, overdressed for 10 a.m. on a Monday didn't seem to startle anyone. They had loosed the bonds of convention and entered that liminal space known as fashionland, where ball gowns at dawn are a perfectly reasonable response to the trauma of waking up. 'All I really want is to suspend the weight of reality,' Daniel Roseberry, Schiaparelli's artistic director, said backstage before his show. 'I hope people are transported, even if just for 10 minutes. That's my goal.' Then his first look appeared, a high-neck, long-sleeve lace top covered in enamel flowers and dropping into tiers of organza ruffles with the aged look of cloth dipped in tea, like a relic from the courtly era. And it was clear: We were entering a Trump-free zone. Designers love to talk about 'beauty' and 'elegance' as their Band-Aid for the ills of the world; a panacea for the eyes, made to offset a reality that can be harder to see. Often this comes across as defensive; an excuse for not taking a stand on an issue or not getting involved. Sometimes, it can make the industry seem so out of touch, so determinedly frivolous, it's paradoxically unattractive. But sometimes it is exactly what you need. This is one of those times. Reality is so unrelentingly exhausting, so overwhelming and uncertain, that having a moment to escape into fantasy, to ogle at the sheer skill of seamstresses who can perform the kind of material alchemy that would leave Rumpelstiltskin in awe, is a balm. And for this the couture, the handmade for the .001 percent slice of fashion that is not about wearability but rather doing the impossible, is almost perfectly conceived. It brings you sliding down wormholes of reference and craft into moments of how-did-they-do-that delight that have nothing to do with whether you can actually buy the clothes, and everything to do with simply reveling in the view. With thinking: 'Yeah, take me away!' Perhaps that's why, as the shows got underway, time traveling seemed to be something of a theme, with corsets and hoop skirts and the exaggerated S curve of the belle epoque — all padded hips and bottom and bust — dominating the runways. Even the body was being transformed. Perhaps that's why, for a show that wasn't officially couture, but that was entirely couture-inspired, Simon Porte Jacquemus lured his guests to a penthouse aerie in the 16th Arrondissement that once had been owned by the early 20th-century French architect Auguste Perret, and which now is being restored. Then he ferried them upstairs in an elevator staffed by bellhops and took them on a whistle-stop tour of classic haute tropes such as the Trapeze, the New Look and the Caban, built on 1950s corsetry and filmed on a variety of iPhone 16s set up around the space. It had an illusory feel, if not too much originality. And perhaps that's why, at Christian Dior, Maria Grazia Chiuri took a trip down the rabbit hole to a wonderland of her own imagination (and, she said in a preview, childhood memories) made of hoop skirts and frilly pantaloons, Edwardian tailcoats and little black dresses. Since she arrived at Dior in 2016, Ms. Chiuri has often resolutely focused on clothes so subtly accessible they can verge on the banal. But though there were pieces like that in the show, including a great little sleeveless black trapeze shift with ruffles for straps, it was the skirts, built on a carapace of bamboo, covered in trailing vines of flowers made from raffia, feathers and lace, and resembling the love child of an octopus and a parasol, that dominated. Also the playsuits and bloomers (items of clothing that normally have no place in a grown-up woman's wardrobe) made from tulle covered in appliqués that seemed to swirl around the body like mist, popping out from under buttoned-up Jane Eyre jackets as though impossible to restrain. Imagine Queen Titania's minions had escaped from her Midsummer Night's Dream and ended up in a bordello in New Orleans' French Quarter, and you'll get the idea. That none of it made any sense juxtaposed against the surreal embroideries designed by the Indian artist Rithika Merchant, which decorated the walls of the Dior tent in the gardens of the Musée Rodin and had their origins in an entirely different mythical tradition, simply added to the unreality of the experience. Just as, at Schiaparelli, the extreme construction of the clothes — sculpted jackets that circled the shoulders like bejeweled orbital rings before cinching in waists so tiny they suggested ribs might have been removed; trompe l'oeil hip bones built out to dangerous points beneath bullet breasts — underscored the sense that the garments themselves were practically decorative objects. The ability to sit down (or maybe even breathe) had been subjugated to the sheer Dadaist pleasure of wondering whether what you were seeing was a goddess or a vase. Either way, it seemed like a dream.
