The emotional core of this collection was revealed to me in October of last year while I was on a creative retreat outside of Rome. One afternoon, I arranged a last-minute tour to see the Sistine Chapel.

If you’ve been there, you know that the first thing you see isn’t the ceiling, but the walls, densely painted by an army of artists in the years before Michelangelo began his work in 1508. They’re decorated by ecclesiastical scenes: images meant to tell, to educate.

But crane your neck skyward, and thought stops. Feeling begins. That’s because forty years later, one man came in and singlehandedly changed art forever, presenting a wild, visually rambunctious, vulnerable and romantic imagining of God, religion, faith, and the human condition. Here is agony and ecstasy comingled, terrible and exquisite. He didn’t tell us what happened, but instead gave his audience permission on how to feel when they looked at art.

It woke up the world. And 500 years later, it woke me up, too. I stopped thinking for the first time in years of how something should look, but instead about how I feel when creating it.That was it. The entire emotional heartbeat of this season became not what does it look like, but how do we feel when we make it? What a relief that was. What a revelation.

That revelation informed every part of this collection. Sharp strokes and rapid squigglesbecame scorpion tails. I drew stingers and snake teeth, chimeraed archetypes of couture with venom woven inside their very silhouettes. I knew these reptilian/arachnid creatures, these “infantas terribles,” as I called them, would become the heroes of the collection, ourceiling: they’d be birds of flight, defy ing gravity, bold in color, explosive in silhouette.

Couture doesn’t exist without structure, without the rigor and rules of its own traditions. But within that, it’s up to the designer to find freedom, to push the rules of the medium to its absolute limits. Yet this collection isn’t just a pushing forward, or a letting go; it’s a celebration of the depth of skill and talent of our ateliers, all working at the height of their technical and imaginative powers. Hand-cut lace is done as a bas-relief to make it 3D, creating depth and shadow. Feathers, both real and trompe l’oeil silk bouquets, are hand painted, air brushed, or dipped in resin and crystals. Layers of neon tulle are stacked beneath lace to give them a sfumato effect. Each look has a “hook” or a name, like “Isabella Blowfish” , an incredible skirt suit in layers of tulle and organza, dusted with shadows of crystals in blowfish colorations and finished with organza spikes. The collection is inspired by the colors of birds of paradise—pinks, blues, saffron—which find their ultimate expression in one of our most fantastical jacket yet.

The accessories in the collection bristle with artificial bird’s heads - sculptures made from silk feathers, their beaks rendered from resin their eyes from pearl cabochons —homages to nature and all its majesty (no birds were harmed in the making of these pieces). They’re fantasies, yes, but they also allude to Elsa’s own, famous fascination with animal life, particularly creatures of the sea and the sky—who, after all, can forget her interest in the lobster, the ultimate scaled creature, and an animal indelibly associated with the maison she created? Along with her signature love of wildlife, there are nods as well to the iconogr aphies she made her own, most notably the keyhole, that portal to mystery.

So many people ask me what the point is of couture. It’s certainly not to create clothing for daily life. But for me, couture allows me to connect with the hopeful adolescent I once was,the one who decided to not go into medicine or finance or law, but to chase that singularfantasy that fashion can still provide. Let the rest of the year be about reality, in fashion or elsewhere. But nothing is more powerful—or timeless—or for me, more now, than getting to unchain my imagination…and, I hope, yours. Couture is an invitation. Stop thinking, it tells you. It’s time to feel. You only have to look up.

Daniel Roseberry