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Haute couture is a vanishingly small club. With two new members joining the ranks this week at Christian Dior and Chanel, Schiaparelli’s Daniel Roseberry knew it was his moment to flex.
For inspiration he took a trip to Rome, where he had his first encounter with the Sistine Chapel. “I was so struck by the difference between the walls and the ceiling,” he said. “The walls were done 40 years prior by a group of artists. They were so static and controlled and rigorous, and then the ceiling is like this four-year slow motion, orgasmic thing. And I was so inspired by that release.”
The Michelangelo of couture? No, but with the cancellation of Giambattista Valli’s show, due to financial straits, and Giorgio Armani’s passing last September, Roseberry has found himself quite suddenly the metier’s “old master” at 40.
Putting a proverbial stake in the ground, he designed a dramatic collection to showcase not just Schiaparelli’s craftspeople but also his own fierce imagination. “The idea,” he said, “was to keep the rigor of the last few seasons but make it way more expressive.” Among the beautiful creatures who stalked his runway were “Isabella Blowfish,” a rigorously cut tailleur covered in spiny spikes named after the late couture collector Isabella Blow, and a pair of “Infanta Terribles,” one a bustier top, the other a fitted jacket, with almost menacing scorpion tails curving out and up from the small of the back.
Femme fleurs these were not. Other couturiers can have their flora; Roseberry prefers fauna. Elsa Schiaparelli had her own flair for animalia, of course. There was Wallis Simpson’s scandalously sheer lobster dress, and the Costume Institute at The Met owns a fur jacket designed complete with a cat head hood. Roseberry took it into new realms: a feathered wing sprouted from the back of a strapless black dress, and claws (or were they beaks?) grew from the breasts and shoulder blades of feathered jackets. His Schiaparelli draws such serious collectors because of its strangeness, the beautiful made more irresistible with a healthy soupçon of weird.
Roseberry dressed Teyana Taylor for the Golden Globes, where she picked up a Best Supporting Actress award for One Battle After Another, and she was in his audience this morning as a newly minted Oscar nominee. Taylor is the archetypal Schiap client: a daredevil extrovert for whom dressing is performance art. Case in point, she wore a reproduction of the priceless Crown Jewels stolen from the Louvre last year. If she opts to stick with Schiaparelli for the Academy Awards, a bustier gown whose profile “mimics a bird in flight” has winner written all over it.
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