Schiaparelli Clothing Collection Spring 2023

The leopard that jumped off the chest of Shalom Harlow, the wolf that stared from Naomi Campbell’s coat, the Lion’s head worn by Irina Shayk on the runway and Kylie Jenner in the front row: Daniel Roseberry blew up the internet with his fake Schiaparelli taxidermy cut this morning. It was predictable that they would instantly lead their own controversial lives.

Shocking has been an integral part of Schiaparelli’s DNA since the days of Elsa, but unlike Roseberry, she doesn’t live in an age when people would draw sad colonial conclusions from big game imagery, a moment where environmentalists and animal activists despised the fashion for depicting dead animals. even when it was noticed that it was a construction of foam and faux fur.

It’s ironic that Roseberry’s mind was actually focused on a different hell—Inferno from Dante’s Divine Comedy—and didn’t want to light a social media fire, or rather, accidentally reap an unexpectedly negative reaction to her haute couture act. Animals are one of four literal references I took from Dantes Inferno, he explained while setting up the collection. In the first cycle of Dante’s journey, he faces terror. He faced a lion, a leopard, and a she-wolf. They each represent a different thing. But lions and beasts exist as photorealistic approaches to surrealism and trompe loeil in different ways.

Why choose the terror of hell as a concept? It was a risk he took to discover something new as a consequence of the great success that Roseberry had brought to a previously lonely home. The joy and spectacle of a pre-show parade of paying couture clients wearing cap-to-toe platforms in black and gold Schiaparelli, jackets embroidered with trompe loeil skeletons, and gold-plated body jewelry, says just that. Only to be overpowered by the Doja Cat’s entrance, his face and head splashed with fire crystals, with his red-clad entourage. Oh! joked a stunned onlooker. Do you think he came as a demon?

Roseberry finds creative parallels to her dilemma in Dante’s metaphorical torments of hell. It’s the agony of wanting to surprise, he says. I just want it to be strong in a different way every time. His ambition: to demonstrate the impossible.

It’s a shame that all the burst of attention drawn by Dante’s three sinful animal symbols (Lion: pride; Leopard: lust; Wolf: greed) overshadows the incredible work Roseberry and her team went into shaping, sculpting, and adorning much of the collection. The waisted shape of the classic Schiaparelli Shocking! the perfume bottle is transformed into an extreme hourglass silhouette, corseted in the back. There are plastrons of highly exaggerated, up-to-the-eyeline bustiers (crafted from mother-of-pearl, marquetry, and broken glass jewelry).

He also pulled out an amazingly silhouetted trouser suit, a tuxedo that fell vertically, and stripes that had confusing lines mimicking menswear fabric, but curving in and out in a visually unaccountable way. Putting women in men’s clothing, but making the silhouettes hyper feminine, as she puts it.

Roseberry’s aspirations were set high for this collection. Nothing is as it seems, he said before. You could say it’s been NB for all the conversation that’s been circulating around her show since this morning.