Schiaparelli Goes Demure
Eighteen months ago, for what may turn out to be his last couture collection, John Galliano looked at images from Brassaï and other Paris photographers of the 1930s. On Monday, as another couture season got underway, Daniel Roseberry also looked at photos from that creative decade, by Man Ray and Horst, among others, for Schiaparelli. At the present moment, when the photographic image holds much less power than it once did — apart from news images of war and disaster — it’s striking that two designers found so much contemporary relevance in the medium.
For Roseberry, the result was a collection that felt so much more real and honest than perhaps any he has shown for the house since he arrived there six years ago after a long tenure at Thom Browne. It’s hard, in fact, to now look at some of his earlier efforts, like the 2023 collection that used faux animal parts — the furry head of a lion perched on a shoulder — or that ventured into futurism, or exhausted quite a few Surrealist gags. To be fair, Roseberry created a business and an image for Schiaparelli, after a number of designers had failed. And at every show, couture or ready-to-wear, there’s a huge, dedicated throng of customers dressed to the nines. For the past two seasons, he’s scraped off the accessories and produced some very fine, crowd-pleasing work based on the sculptural, corseted body — rather like a surgeon’s dream — and drenched it in rich color.
But this time Roseberry largely restrained himself, beginning with the opening look: a black tailored jacket embroidered with a palm-tree motif from the house’s archives in silver beads and rhinestones and worn with a matching pencil skirt. The trim suit is evocative of one Schiaparelli herself wore in a 1937 portrait by Horst. There were other dark suits in the line, including a black-and-white tweed pantsuit with saddle-shaped shoulders and matching flared pants, and a couple of terrific matador jackets in black or off-white. A silver leather perfecto had a pair of miniature English saddles worked into the shoulders, nearly evoking epaulets. Or wings. The idea sounds absurd, but think of all the ornate regalia historically attached to the world of horses in many cultures. Saddles were also part of Helmut Newton’s visual language. Later in the show, Roseberry sent out a black bustier replicating a saddle seat in satin and leather and worn with a black velvet pencil skirt. It was ridiculous, but it carries too many allusions not to savor.
Overall, though, the effects of the collection, its tender beauty, were subtle and thoughtful. Several years ago, at the height of his Surrealism phase, when the brand’s golden lips and ears were seemingly everywhere, verging on parody, I asked Roseberry why he didn’t just do something simple. Why did the clothes have to be extreme, every shoulder pumped up? Why couldn’t the feminine expression be more natural and seductive, the humor less forced? I was motivated at the time by a Paris exhibit of Elsa Schiaparelli’s work. Roseberry replied that the world was at a different place and that he was giving women what they apparently wanted. Seeing the change on Monday, I asked him if he could have done this kind of collection five years ago.
No, he said. “I feel like I had to sort of build up the legitimacy to go back [to the past]. Also, I was not interested in it. But now we have the Man Ray exhibit coming up in September. There’s something about that era that feels mournful and also turbocharged at the same time.”
Frankly, I think the somber, mournful quality of this collection — hard to put your finger on it, exactly — is the most legitimate thing about it. In the late 1930s, the world was on a precipice because of Nazism and then the war and occupation of Paris in June 1940. Geopolitical events have again brought us close to an edge, and it also feels like an intense time of change in fashion, or so many designers believe.
That’s how Roseberry came to the present, by looking back at the remarkable ’30s through the lens of black-and-white photography and, of course, his own experience. As he said in his press notes, could he get to something elemental that also felt revolutionary? “I’m proposing a world without screens, without AI, without technology — an old world, yes, but a post-future one as well,” he wrote. “Maybe they’re one and the same. If last season was about making something baroque look modern, this season is about inverting archives to make them look futuristic.”
The scale of the clothes was generally modest, with Roseberry’s links to the future expressed in sleek fabrics or embellishment, like a sleeveless dress in ecru wool with an enameled finish and embroidered with black and silver circles, and a hot but timeless trouser suit in bias-cut black satin. Most of the best looks featured the body, not an exaggerated version of it. These included a black slip dress in flowing satin with sheer panels embroidered with black beads and a low, near-naked back and the red gown worn by Mona Tougaard in red bias-cut silk with simple twists of fabric down her body.
Roseberry did have one or two familiar gestures, like a red gown with a molded, trompe l’oeil torso — breasts shown at the back — and worn with a red beaded heart necklace with a mechanism to make it beat. It will no doubt be a hit with big spenders, but the pleasure of this collection was in its sartorial progress and what it implied about the times.
The intrepid Iris van Herpen is all about the new. Collaborating with a bio-designer named Chris Bellamy, van Herpen created a “living dress” — that is, a gown made of millions of bioluminescent algae that were grown in seawater baths over several months and cultivated or formed into a lovely, blueish dress. It was not quite as luminescent on the runway on Monday as apparently it can be. Still, it was an extraordinary example of van Herpen’s genius. How long can an algae dress last? “No one knows how long it will live,” she said backstage, before Jean Paul Gaultier swept through the crowd to congratulate her. “That’s the beauty of it. It’s very much like a human being.” In other words, it needs care and rest.
The show opened with a dance performance by Madoka Kariya amid laser beams. It was meant to recall the great American dance pioneer Loie Fuller and also evoke the movement and radiance of oceans and deep-sea life. The small collection of one-of-a-kind dresses magically did the same, nearly all drawing on van Herpen’s advanced use of materials, like a sheer fiber made from brewed protein and a resin-coated silk, for the final look, a white garment that swirled like a wave.
At the opposite extreme, in the familiar comfort of her Left Bank apartment, Julie de Libran put on a good show on Monday evening. “This is for the woman who does not chase time,” de Libran said in a brief press note. I don’t think the designer has ever been eager or rushed. Her clothes express confidence and sensuality, in particular the long, plain A-dresses in black or cream silk that opened the small show. Some of de Libran’s shorter styles seemed a bit clunky or, anyway, not as dreamy and unhurried as those long looks, including a black top with a black raffia skirt.