Schiaparelli Touches the Stars for Haute Couture Spring 2024
Elsa Schiaparelli famously had a range of niche interests: Greek mythology, ancient religious rites, psychic phenomena. Another one of her fascinations? Astrology, which runs like a river through the fashion house she built. For Schiaparelli’s spring 2024 haute couture show, creative director Daniel Roseberry used the stars as a starting point for the collection—fitting, of course, for a label whose founder studied the heavens as a child with her astronomer uncle, Giovanni Schiaparelli.
This morning’s runway show—attended by the likes of Zendaya, Hunter Schafer, and J.Lo—took place inside the Petite Palais in Paris, where visual explorations of space (both figuratively and literally) abounded. Dresses were sculpted and curved to the high heavens, with angles that felt intrinsically out of this world. Playing with old-world ideas and artifacts against the backdrop of haute couture, one of the most deliciously shocking gowns was composed of a collage of circuit boards, cell phones, and Y2K technology. Roseberry called it “a motherboard-and-strasse microchip dress encrusted with pre-2007 technological artifacts—now, the technology I grew up with is so antiquated that it’s almost as difficult to source as certain vintage fabrics and embellishments.”
Still, the designer has mastered his own system of contradictions, which was clearly defined in this collection. Heavy Western-style buckles were juxtaposed with patent sculpted materials; excessive fringe swayed and rocked, deserving of its very own slow-mo camera. Roseberry may have Texas roots (and it shows) but his work is firmly planted in the upper echelons of haute couture. The backs of dresses in particular demonstrated the stunning craftsmanship for which couture is known: There were funnel collars that laced up to the back of the neck like corsets; armor-like silver spines that stretched towards the audience, and layers upon layers of fringe. As much as Roseberry has cemented surrealism as a feature of the brand and brought it to the forefront of fashion, he’s also set a high standard for wildly interesting fashion at every angle.
Taking things in a more literal direction, the collection dove headfirst into extraterrestrial textures, perhaps a nod to “martians,” the term coined by Elsa Schiaparelli’s uncle Giovanni, who was the director of the Brera Observatory in Milan in the late 1800s. Guests were even sent an invite to the show that resembled a Schiaparelli version of The Golden Record, which was placed aboard the Voyager 1 spacecraft in 1977.
While Roseberry may have anchored the collection in the stars, space, and contradictions of the avant-garde, he also cited, “art (and nature)” as “teaching us again and again. The things and ideas that seem diametrically opposed to each other can also combine to make startling chimeras, objects composed of familiar parts that, when united, create something unexpected and new.”
If all of that wasn’t proof enough of a dazzling runway show, one only had to listen to the whooping cheers at the end of the show, when the audience gave a rousing standing ovation—a rarity in the buttoned-up world of haute couture.
