Daniel Roseberry was last year celebrating New Year’s Eve in New York when he was handed a chrome egg no bigger than the palm of his hand. It served no discernible purpose and was gifted to him with almost zero explanation from a close friend. It soon began to hatch strange feelings. “I wasn’t even sure if I liked it,” the designer says, dialling in from Schiaparelli’s giltwood headquarters in Paris’s historic Place Vendôme. Three days out from his haute couture autumn/winter 2024 presentation, the sleeves on his denim shirt have been rolled up to his elbows and his salt-and-pepper beard has been clipped and carved into a superhero’s jawline. “But I tried to,” he continues. “I kept moving that thing around the house, from mantlepiece to mantlepiece, just wanting to find it a home.” In time, this stubborn, unremarkable object took a secret hold on the 39-year-old. “It was like a virus”.
The designer says that he has been thinking a lot about the word “allure” since then: how the unknown can be an invitation to feel much more powerful than spectacle, and how difficult it can be to maintain mystique in an attention-scarce culture that encourages its greatest artists to chase clicks. The genius mind who once dressed Kylie Jenner in a lifelike lion’s head and Doja Cat in 30,000 Swarovski crystals – not to mention last season’s robot babies (which he sold to three separate clients) – is now turning against the beautiful meme making that he and Jonathan Anderson first gave artistic credit. “I think that felt important in a post-Covid world where people wanted to be entertained,” he says. “But everything in fashion has become so surface level. I can tell when a collection has just been designed for the screen and I admit I’ve contributed towards that. I don’t want to go back there.”
Roseberry knows that he could continue to successfully court the internet season after season. But to what end? Even the most inspiring cultural products are at this point destined to be discarded in the scroll. “I listen to a lot of pop music, because I think it’s the most immediate barometer of where the culture is at,” the designer says. “And there have been so many major album releases that have failed to make a splash. I was texting a friend about a record that came out three weeks ago and how dated it already feels. It’s so hard to release art into this moment in culture. It’s like a plane landing in smog.” Yesterday’s couture collection – which was unveiled to a small crowd beneath the low-slung chandeliers of the Hôtel Salomon de Rothschild – sent a distress flare coursing through that smog: the designer had turned his gaze towards the analogue and seductively offline “powers of design”.
Despite the technical ambitions of this collection – including neoprene jumpsuits embroidered with zebra-effect horsehairs, swan lake jackets made from a mille-feuille of triple organza feathers, and duchesse satin gowns with hourglass hips built from layers and layers of hand-cut ribbons – there was a straightforwardness to the design. “Each piece is clear in its silhouette and technique,” he explains. “You can see how each look moved from sketch to study to fabric.” Roseberry said he’s revisited vintage fashion illustrations from the 1950s, which felt refreshingly truthful in an era of “gotcha!” fashion and “leather jeans”. Classic couture silhouettes were plucked from those pages – including a 1955 Charles James-inspired butterfly dress and a 1952 dropped-waisted Schiaparelli gown – situating this futurist among fashion’s founding fathers. “I want people to see that I can work with these references,” he says. “I’m a big believer in copying to learn.”
The designer’s last couture presentation – the final act in a trio of collections that began with the taxidermied animal heads of Dante’s Inferno – was rooted in science fiction, but he’s since realised the past holds a perhaps more sacred enigma: the magic of the couture salon and the secrets of its white coats. It reminds me of something Dante wrote in that same poem: “Consider well the seed that gave you birth / You were not made to live your lives as brutes / But to be followers of worth and knowledge.” Even Kylie Jenner – the fifth most followed person on Instagram – had been obscured in a René Magritte-style face veil. (Because there would be no TikTok lip-reading here.) And what about all those 3D stilettos that looked as though they had been surgically implanted into hips and shoulder blades? Talk about allure – a woman in a high heel is always up to something – but was that a nod to Elsa Schiaparelli and Salvador Dalí’s 1937 shoe hat or a fashion meme waiting to be circulated? Roseberry might have distanced himself from the internet, but the surrealist whims of Schiaparelli are never too far from a “Me, when…” gag.
Scroll down below to see backstage details from Daniel Roseberry’s remarkable Schiaparelli haute couture autumn/winter 2024 collection.
