The Maison Schiaparelli - Haute Couture and Ready-to-Wear

Over the previous twenty years, two designers had changed not only how women dressed, but the meaning of fashion altogether. The first of those vanguards was Gabrielle Chanel; she liberated women from the corset and put them into body-skimming jersey. She also created the kind of iconography—today, we call them codes—that we now associate with brand language, the kinds of details and motifs that instantly identify a dress or bag as belonging to one fashion house or another.

Then there was Elsa, whose contribution was less about the physical and more about the conceptual. She questioned and challenged what fashion was. Chanel was interested in how clothes could be of practical use to women; Elsa was interested in what fashion could be. Was a dress still just a dress, or could it be considered a piece of art? How could fashion speak to art? How could art inform and speak to fashion? Fashion—and what we want and expect from it—would never be the same.

In retrospect, the years preceding Elsa’s temporary flight from Paris would turn out to be a year of peak elegance, as well as the beginning of the modern era of war. Two poles, existing improbably in the same city, at the same time. 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. Conceived entirely in black-and-white, I wanted the collection to ask whether we can blur the line between past and future: if I deprived these pieces of color, or any notion of modernity, if I focused obsessively on the past, could I actually make a collection that looks as if it was born in the future? Gone are the expected markings of modernism; what remains is something elemental, a return to principles that in turn feels revolutionary. I’m proposing a world without screens, without AI, without technology—an old world, yes, but a post-future one as well. 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.

Along with a new palette, this collection also proposes a new exploration of silhouettes. Absent are Schiaparelli’s famous corseted silhouettes, but in their place is a new exploration of drama, one that defines the waist and hips with unexpected techniques, offering the wearer both intensity and ease.

The house’s famous codes are also explored in indirect ways. Hidden inside the tailoring are the keyhole and anatomical iconographies, realized in handmade ceramic notions of the past. Foulards are stitched with measuring tapes and Swiss dots in silk thread, made with techniques from Elsa’s era.

The entire show was in fact conceived as a surrealist trompe l’oeil, from the makeup to the fabrics, which include Donegal wool and high-shine satines. There are dinner suits, their skirts cut to the knee, their jackets embroidered in silver threads and iridescent blacks. We’ve also introduced the Elsa jacket, a sharp-shouldered piece that references archival work and which we’ve rendered in both cut and woollen fabrics, and bias-cut evening gowns, to introduce a new nightwear language that doesn’t rely on corsets and shapewear.

Then there are the fantasy pieces: Elsa’s iconic “Apollo” cape, reimagined here as an enormous spray of diamanté bijoux in three layers of metal starbursts, galvanized in different shades of black, gunmetal, and satin silver; a tulle “Squiggles and Wiggles” dress, with shell-shaped 3-D embroideries atop a poof of white silk organdie, complete with black silk organdie parasol; matador-inspired jackets and coats, encrusted with baroque pearls, metallic leopard spots, black jet beads, all in codes of the Maison; and, finally, what I’m calling our “Eyes Wide Open” embroidery, a dress with a hand painted iris motif, encased in resin Cabochons, embellished with metallic thread lashes and lids, and a waterfall back of silk tulle.

It’s too easy to romanticize the past. It’s too easy to fear the present. In January of 1941, Elsa returned for a brief visit to Paris despite the war, stopping first in Portugal, where she delivered 13,000 vitamin capsules to the French minister in Lisbon on behalf of the American-French War Relief. In May of that year, she flew back to New York, and rejoined many of her Surrealist friends and compatriots who’d also sought shelter there. This collection reminds you that looking backwards is nothing if we can’t find something meaningful to bring into our future.

Daniel Roseberry