At Schiaparelli Couture, Old-World Glamour Meets a New-World Vision
“I’m so tired of everyone equating modernity with simplicity,” designer Daniel Roseberry said. “Can’t the new also be extravagant?”
Schiaparelli’s spring 2025 haute couture story began with antique ribbons that creative director Daniel Roseberry found in an antique shop. Once created in the booming French city of Lyon, the strips of fabric had been hidden away and forgotten for decades. “As I ran my hand among them last year, I realized what I wanted to do: Create something that feels new because it’s old,” the designer explained in the show notes. “I’m so tired of everyone constantly equating modernity with simplicity: Can’t the new also be extravagant? Has our fixation on what looks or feels modern become a limitation? Has it cost us our imagination?”
Titled Icarus, the designer presented his new collection on January 27 in Paris at the Petit Palais. There were Basque jackets of grand proportions, glimmering duchess satin bustier gowns, and embroidered opera coats made from luscious satin neoprene. Pearls, feathers and embroidery dripped from sculpted gowns as models waltzed through the long runway covered in tiles shaped like golden suns. A mere glance at any number of the looks—an S-shaped jacket, a trompe l’oeil monkey fur dress, or the velvet neoprene gown—revealed intricacies and real craft rarely seen in our digital, faster-is-better era.
“All the techniques are basically turn-of-the-century embroidery techniques,” said Roseberry backstage after the show. “It’s the promise of escape because he was looking to escape,” he added of the Icarus theme. “That’s what couture can offer. It’s the promise of just 15 minutes of a suspended reality.”
For the occasion, Roseberry looked back at great couturiers including Azzedine Alaïa, Madame Grès, Charles Frederick Worth, Paul Poiret and Yves Saint Laurent, plucking references from as early as the 1920s to the 1990s. “I didn’t want to copy their work; I wanted to learn from them,” he wrote in the show notes.
Other highlights of the collection included open jackets with sculptural bustles, gowns that dripped with tulle like a futuristic tutu, and of course all the draping, pleating, and corset details that one could imagine, festooned in a sea of feathers, embroidery, and glittering beadwork. “Schiaparelli’s signature, her DNA, is not beholden to a silhouette, which I really like,” added Roseberry backstage. “It’s more of an idea, a concept, an ethos. So I feel permission and freedom to engage with a turn-of-the-century silhouette, or something evocative of the ’30s, the ’20s, the ’50s.”
A few years ago, Roseberry was the unofficial master of surrealism. Today, he’s doing it in an altogether different way. After all, isn’t slow handicraft a rarity so pure that it’s almost unfamiliar?
