Daniel Roseberry put on his show in the Carrousel du Louvre. It was the home of the Paris catwalks in the 1990s and early 2000s, but a venue that fell out of favor when brands began prioritizing unique spaces on which to stake part of their identity. Roseberry even built a podium, an elevated runway of the kind you see in runway videos of the pre-internet days. For some in the crowd, it felt like walking back in time; for everybody else, that era in fashion might as well be ancient history. In the everything old is new again way, those years feel fresh again and ripe for reinterpretation.
At the beginning of the year, Roseberry said he told his team, “for couture we’re going to lift off, for ready-to-wear we’re just going to go deeper.” The jeans and t-shirt crowd will be forgiven for looking at this collection and not seeing daywear, but Schiap clients are a special breed. Roseberry has modeled his Schiaparelli—and cultivated his loyal following—on a pin Alberto Giacometti made for the legendary designer of a sphynx: half human, half animal.
Putting his decade of designing at Thom Browne to work, he opened with a mannish three-piece pantsuit, shirt collar and jacket lapels popped, and pleated pants rumpling down to a pair of ankle boots with gold-tone brass heels sculpted like faces. The sphynx concept came into focus several looks later with its wilder sister, a skirt suit in the winking style of the artist Sarah Lucas made from wadding-stuffed hosiery. Note the padding at the shoulders, breasts, and hips.
Everywhere you looked there was a flick of the strange: a skirt that extended into a tail with the help of a wire hem; Aran knits that seemed to cling to the body in strips, thanks to the illusion tulle base they were built on; hirsute fur prints and painted crocodile scales. One top and skirt were made from unspooled cassette tapes and crushed CDs—ready-to-wear not as usual, but unusual. And then consider the accessories: pumps with snarling kitties on the toes, or Doberman puppies, ladylike purses perched on chicken feet.
Roseberry is about three weeks shy of the gala opening of a Schiaparelli exhibition at London’s Victoria & Albert museum, a show that will include Elsa Schiaparelli’s designs and his own. That will be confidence-boosting occasion if ever there were one, but he’s not exactly hurting for those. Witness Demi Moore in one of his haute couture numbers at the Actor Awards last Sunday. And so he gave us Schiap at its Schiapiest, but we also saw him pushing at its boundaries. He said the inspiration for the wrapped and draped pieces with Fortunyish pleating were inspired by the late Alber Elbaz. “He had teams of people doing single seam dresses, and that’s what we did here.” He’s the right designer to be looking at if you’re trying to to conjure a dressed-up glamour that’s not associated with couture. “I’m having more fun now than I did at the beginning,” Roseberry said. “I just feel like I’m vibing.”
