September 29, 2022 |
Timing is everything in fashion, and Daniel Roseberry’s is as finely honed as one of his tweed Schiaparelli suits, inlaid with a perky pair of gold-plated breasts. Thanks to his unique marriage of Parisian haute couture and American pop culture, Roseberry’s 21st-century take on Schiaparelli seriously stands out in a crowded luxury field.
Roseberry arrived at the storied French couture house in 2019 and came of age at the brand during the pandemic’s enforced catwalk shutdown. Instead of the runway he turned to the red carpet and viral celebrity moments to communicate his fashion message. “When I started three years ago, people were not taking risks on the red carpet. The red carpet was really bland and I wanted to redefine what modern glamour looks like,” he says. It’s no surprise that Roseberry quickly set about creating highly stylised looks for an audience starved of spectacle.
When Lady Gaga sang at President Biden’s inauguration, she did so in a huge Schiaparelli gown complete with a golden dove brooch; when Adele took to the stage for her first live concert in years, at the Griffith Observatory in LA, she did the same, in black velvet; when the Cannes Film Festival reanimated itself, mid-pandemic, in 2021, Bella Hadid electrified the red carpet in a frontless mermaid Schiaparelli gown, her bare breasts covered by a golden “lungs” pendant.
These home runs of stunning image-making added up to a dramatic reset of the balance of fashion power in Schiaparelli’s favour. Suddenly it was the brand that everyone needed to know about. “I think Covid primed the audience that we have for those moments. When Gaga emerged from those doors, a lot of people told me it was the first time that they had seen a fashion moment, a gown, come out since the lockdown happened. Bella was the first red carpet moment that had happened post-Covid. Adele was the first huge live concert that had happened. So, because Covid stripped everything away, we got to be part of the re-emergence of pop culture in a way that made everything feel so heightened and special.”
And these viral fashion moments keep on coming. We’ve had Julia Fox’s whirlwind Paris couture week appearance on the arm of her then-boyfriend Kanye West, clad in a cone-breasted, cropped denim jacket from Schiaparelli’s ready-to-wear collection; Cardi B in a golden couture face mask at the American Music Awards; Maggie Gyllenhaal in a gilt-trimmed column at the 2022 Oscars; and Emma Watson, in a dramatic shawl, collared jacket and jeans, front row at Roseberry’s most recent show. Reflecting on his modern marriage of pop and couture, Roseberry says, “I think that we need each other. It’s American pop culture mixed with French traditional values and the rigour of the haute couture. I think if you take away the popness and couture it can feel very stale. And if you take away the rigour and the heritage of couture, Americana can feel sometimes superficial in the context of fashion, so I think that the couture gives it an incredible depth.”
The house of Schiaparelli was founded in 1927 and grounded in surrealism. Rome-born designer Elsa Schiaparelli was best known for her wit and devotion to shocking pink as well as ground-breaking collaborations with artists like Salvador Dalí, Man Ray and Jean Cocteau. Her most celebrated pieces – the 1937 lobster dress famously worn by the Duchess of Windsor, the sun burst cape and shoe hat – take pride of place in international museum collections with the Musée des Arts Décoratif in Paris currently hosting a major retrospective called Shocking! The Surreal Worlds of Elsa Schiaparelli. She closed the fashion arm of the house in 1958 but continued to make fragrances; she died in 1973. Tod’s entrepreneur, Diego Della Valle, bought the house in 2007, reanimating its couture arm with quiet success. Roseberry’s arrival, from Thom Browne, where he was design director, turned up the volume and now the house is pushing hard into ready-to-wear and scoring with its talking points and accessories. Roseberry contrasts his statement pieces – jackets trimmed with golden breasts, coats with lace-embellished pockets, moulded “Face” and “Six Pack” bags – with sporty cycling shorts, sexy little corset dresses and his own cone-breasted take on the Texas tux denim two-piece. It all comes with couture quality embellishments and hardware. The buttons are made “like earrings,” he says.
The cuts are also exquisite (Roseberry’s years with the perfectionist Browne give him couture-level polish). He creates clothes that are vivid, full of energy and intent. These are not clothes for shrinking violets, or minimalists. Instead they offer a type of theatricality and a sense of occasion that has been lacking in recent years.
“Schiaparelli flirts with bad taste with some authority,” explains Roseberry about the “fizz” of his designs. “This is not a house about taste; it’s a house about luxury before taste. I think that humour is part of it. I mean, she [Elsa Schiaparelli] had such a wicked sense of humour and flirted with ideas of vulgarity. She was dressing Mae West, who many thought at the time to be highly vulgar but was full of charm. I think that’s key. Otherwise, then it can feel heavy-handed and unappealing. But humour and charm and wit can save anything that’s in bad taste.”
The theatrical strangeness of Roseberry’s designs – his gilded body part jewellery, the conical breasts and cloud-like volumes – chime with the brand’s surreal heritage but he is much more interested in the Schiaparelli spirit, her wit and attitude, than reproducing archive looks. “Elsa Schiaparelli created a world and a brand that was very much centred around things that are still so relevant today. Primarily iconography. You know, I think that more than a silhouette, more than a colour combo, more than a logo, Schiaparelli is about iconography and images. And I think that has uniquely positioned us in an advantageous position to succeed right now, when that’s everything.”
For Roseberry, whether it’s a show or a red-carpet moment, the aim is to provoke an emotional response. That’s something the Texas-born designer learnt about first-hand, growing up in the church, where his father was a minister. “I know what it’s like to be sitting in a group of people and be moved to tears by music or by a revelation that you could be having. Regardless of what you believe, there’s something undeniable about gathering as a group and feeling something collectively, feeling something together. And I think that that is one of the many elements of growing up in the church that I’ve carried with me here,” he says. His religious beliefs may have evolved but he has never forgotten the power of that emotional connection. Roseberry’s desire to move people with his work also explains his obsession with pop culture. “I’m a big lover of pop songs and pop music, not because it’s so easy to love, but because of how successful it is in connecting emotionally with the audience.”
Roseberry is thinking big and, powered by his outsized imagination, his clothes are designed to inspire fashion worship. “We have executives and CEOs, we have moms, we have philanthropists, there are princesses. The only common thread is this sort of strength and intelligence with which they should make choices,” says Roseberry of his 21st-century Schiap fans. “I think it’s for people who are in charge of their own image-making, those who are passionate about creating culture.”
He describes his three years at Schiaparelli as “the most important years of my life”. After leaving everything behind in New York and moving to Paris, he says, “I’m really here trying to surrender to what it means to start over in your mid-thirties in a foreign country.” For Roseberry it means long days in the studio but a life devoted to work suits his Virgo temperament, he says, admitting that time off at the weekends can be “painful to me”. He spends his dreaded downtime scouring French flea markets or going to bootcamp classes that are so tough he says that “it’s like basically cheating death every time you go, it’s like you see the face of God appear halfway through.” He clearly enjoys a challenge: “I feel like it’s good to put myself in a situation that stretches me so that I stay elastic.”
Part of that elasticity has been learning to deal with the Schiaparelli history. He’d never worked in a heritage house before and felt the need to keep the archive at arms’ length so that he didn’t drown under the weight of all that fashion history. “Karl Lagerfeld once said, ‘Think pink but don’t wear it’ and I laughed out loud at that because I thought it was so great,” says Roseberry, who has confessed to not loving the signature colour of the house. “When I first came here, pink was everywhere and I was determined to change course, so we took a step back from the pink. Because it was a lot to take in and I was coming from Thom Browne, where everything was grey. It was such a shock to the system.”
Gold, black and white have been his preferences so far and while he’s slowly coming around to pink, the last thing he wants to do is a literal, archival look. “I think I’ve learned my own way of relating to the past and her work, and it’s been gradual,” he says. “The world doesn’t need another cocktail jacket, you know, it doesn’t need another lobster on a dress, and that’s such a specific thing. The moment you start working with lobsters, it starts going into a shady [place], a shadow land where I just have not been interested.” Instead, it’s the attitude of the house that he seeks to channel. “I come back to that idea of what does Schiaparelli mean more than what it literally looks like, you know? I find there’s more freedom than that.”
It’s a carnival of creativity and spectacle. Roseberry’s hand-on-hip, arched-eyebrow chic is a love letter to fashion. “I want Schiaparelli to be on the on the tip of everyone’s tongue when you talk about what is happening in fashion that you love. And I want people to love this brand deeply. I want people to fall in love with Schiaparelli. At the end of the day, it’s as simple asthat.” Amen.
Taken from Issue 69 of 10 Magazine – PEACE, COURAGE, FREEDOM – on newsstands now. Order your copy here.
Photographer and Model RICHIE SHAZAM
Fashion Editor ANNA TREVELYAN
Text CLAUDIA CROFT
Hair CHARLIE LE MINDU
Make-up ROMMY NAJOR
Nail Technician MEI KAWAJIRI
Set Designer COOPER VASQUEZ
Lighting Assistant RYAN PETRUS
Photographer’s Assistants BEN DRAGHI and OLIVER ALEX
Fashion Assistant MOHAMMAD DIALLO
Set Designer’s Assistant BRIAN PARK
