I’ll be honest. Last season’s collection, “The Agony and the Ecstasy,” felt like a kind of a breakthrough, a new benchmark for Schiaparelli. Great, I thought: I’ve cracked the formula. So when I started working on this collection, I was pretty confident: all I had to do was re-create last season’s creative process, because surely that would ensure a similar outcome. I knew the template I had to follow: 

Step 1: Go on a trip. Be inspired. 

Step 2: Visit an iconic architectural site and have a transcendent experience (for this season, I went to Barcelona to see Gaudi’s work). 

Step 3: Come back inspired and away we go!

It didn’t work like that. 

As it turned out, in seeking to recreate what I thought was a winning formula, I entered a possibility-denying, misery-making cycle where nothing new was given room to come forward. In trying to control the creative process, and ignoring what the French call l’appel du vide—the call of the void—I stifled not only myself, but the work. Formulas are antithetical to the magic of creation, which can be found only in total surrender to the unknown. Naming things, defining things, is comforting. But in doing so, you’re stripping something of its infinite power and magic—you’re making it less terrifying, but also less exhilarating. 

Elsa Schiaparelli understood this instinctively. Her signature Surrealism was never an escape from reality, but a way of revealing unspoken and inexplicable realities. She understood that the most enduring creations don’t emerge from certainty; they emerge from contradiction, intuition, accident, and the courage to trust what cannot yet be understood.  Only when I surrendered to the void did I truly start to enjoy making this collection. 

Couture has always transformed the ordinary into the extraordinary. Here, that transformation asked us to think beyond “noble” materials, asking whether beauty resides in the material itself—or in the imagination capable of reinventing it. We paired haute couture techniques with synthetic materials: instead of the traditional silks, satins, and wools, we instead used latex, silicone, pools of paint baked into sheets and sculpted into silhouettes. 

We also pushed back against some of the house staples, because codes—as beloved as they are—aren’t meant to be static. Elsa herself strongly believed that the familiar should be made unfamiliar. Which is why, for example, the iconic Schiaparelli jacket is treated here as an accessory: embroidered and detailed and meant to enhance the overall outfit. We worked hard to develop new fabrications and materials, ones never before seen in couture. A dress’s hyper-realistic bustier isn’t molded, but instead sculpted before being cast in silicone and painted a milky blue; the skirt’s floral motif is made of hundreds of flowers rendered from hosiery stretched on metal wires and pearls—the colors ombré from cornflower blue to a caramel meant to fade into the tights worn beneath. Another dress bristles with weightless sculpted crinoline tubes. A jacket and matching pair of leggings are encrusted with real flowers, fish scales, and ribbon flowers, while from the shoulders scroll kinetic latex tentacles. And of course, none of this experimentation would have been possible without the extraordinary artisans who work in our ateliers. Their expertise is what gives us the freedom to venture into the unknown in the first place. They remind me that couture’s greatest luxury isn’t its materiality, but the hands that make it. 

We also experimented with color this season, concentrating on tones found in flora and sea fauna: lobster pink, violet, tangerine, saffron, and pale mint—all set against a backdrop of high gloss black, raw wax ecru, and shots of our iconic Schiaparelli gold. Gold, at this house, isn’t just a finish—it’s something more akin to sculpture: a material that transforms the body into an object that’s at once ornament, armor, and art. 

This collision of lightness and kink extends to the accessories as well: versions of our Secret bag are alive with crinoline spikes or embroidered flowers, and our new shoe, The Bubble, an alien metallic shape, is fitted with a silicone sleeve. These same themes—a love of nature; a fascination with the atypical—is found in our jewelry as well, which includes gold-plated shell earrings, their insides blush-pink porcelain; gold earrings, bracelets, and necklaces shaped like writhing octopus tentacles; and a silicone choker and cuff meant to recall sea anemones. 

The process reminded me that while we talk about how couture is something to master, we don’t really think about what true mastery actually means. Is it about being brave enough to create in a space of not knowing? Of being able to take flight, and knowing that the net will appear beneath you? Perhaps this is Elsa’s greatest legacy: not a vocabulary of symbols, but the belief that impossibility itself can become a creative method. 

This collection refused to make itself known until the very end—it was a joyful experience, and at times an emotionally complicated one as well. But making art has always been an elusive journey. Its pains and frustrations aren’t just part of the process… they’re the process itself. The moments when certainty disappears are often the moments when something genuinely new becomes possible. 

So here we go. 

Take my hand: 

and jump off with me into the bliss—

of the abyss. 

Daniel Roseberry