July 8, 2025 |
In Paris, before WWII, something extraordinary was unfolding. The city stood as the beating heart of modernity – a place where artists, writers and designers collided nightly in salons and smoky cafés. Surrealism was an artistic movement, yes, but also a way of seeing the world, and Elsa Schiaparelli was its most audacious interpreter in fashion. Her designs challenged convention: trompe l’oeil sweaters, lobster dresses painted by Dalí and evening gowns adorned with padded ribs and spines. But then, in June of 1940, that fragile, glittering world collapsed. The war had begun and the iconoclast couturier boarded a ship to New York ahead of the Nazi invasion. It marked the end of an era – not only for haute couture, but for a cultural ecosystem that had fused art, politics and life in radical new ways.
“This collection is dedicated to that period, when life and art was on the precipice: to the sunset of elegance, and to the end of the world as we knew it,” Daniel Roseberry wrote in his show notes, returning to this charged moment in his AW26 Schiaparelli couture collection.
Roseberry opened and closed with modern replicas of the founder’s work: a black skirt suit topped by a sharply tailored embroidered jacket, and a reimagined Apollo cape worn back to front and sprayed with diamanté starbursts. There was a steady undercurrent of the 1930s in the collection’s architecture: flou gowns cut on the bias instead of cinched by corsetry, cigarette skirts paired with foulard neckties, matador jackets stiff with ornament.
Then came a red hourglass satin dress, sculpted with exaggerated hips and fake breasts at the back, echoing Elsa’s anatomical experiments. Around the model’s neck hung a rhinestone-encrusted heart that literally pulsed with the rhythm of life.
“It’s too easy to romanticise the past. It’s too easy to fear the present,” Roseberry concluded in his notes. “This collection reminds you that looking backwards means nothing if we can’t find something meaningful to bring into our future.” Roseberry reminded us that true couture is always about risk.
Photography courtesy of Schiaparelli.
