Schiaparelli Returns to the Couture Runway With a New Look – WWD

PARIS — The coronavirus pandemic may have forced most of the world into a standstill, but it proved a boon for Daniel Roseberry, who emerged from several seasons of digital-only shows as one of the most electrifying couturiers working in Paris today.

In the last 12 months, the artistic director of Schiaparelli has dressed everyone from Lady Gaga at the U.S. presidential inauguration to Bella Hadid at the Cannes Film Festival, racking up back-to-back Vogue covers along the way.

Meanwhile, the house expanded beyond its salons for the first time since it was relaunched by Italian entrepreneur Diego Della Valle in 2012, with the opening of a boutique at Bergdorf Goodman in New York City and a series of pop-ups at Dover Street Market locations in London, Los Angeles and New York. 

Now Schiaparelli is preparing to return to the runway for the opening slot of Paris Couture Week, facing a whole other level of scrutiny — and with a front row to match. Julia Fox, who arrived at the Kenzo show in Paris on Sunday with rapper Ye, was wearing a Schiaparelli denim jacket and earrings and said they planned to also attend Roseberry’s show. 

“I definitely feel pressure to deliver, because I do really have the feeling that people kind of fell in love with the brand again while in lockdown,” Roseberry told WWD in an interview at Schiaparelli’s historic salons on Place Vendôme here. 

“I’m thrilled to be back showing but it feels very, very, very different,” the Texan-born designer acknowledged. 

Last January, the house unveiled its couture collection just three days after Gaga’s show-stopping performance of the national anthem at President Joe Biden’s inauguration.

“It was really like ground zero for us, as far as building the brand goes. And this season, because we’re showing, because the world has changed again, and because I feel like I’ve changed, too, this feels like a kickoff of a new chapter,” Roseberry said.

Since making his debut at Schiaparelli in July 2019, he’s established a reputation for colorful, billowing designs peppered with Surrealist gilded body parts, like the gold mask that Cardi B wore to the American Music Awards in November. So it might come as a surprise that his spring couture collection will feature none of the above.

“When you’re designing a collection that’s really for images, or for one wear on the red carpet, it’s a different mind-set and you don’t have to think of things as much in a three-dimensional space. It’s more for a screen, and that really played a lot to my strengths,” Roseberry explained.

“I did a chronicle or a cataloguing of everything that happened last year. It’s almost overwhelming, I think, the response that the brand has received and how much it’s been embraced. We all have been so grateful, and not taking it for granted at all. But at the same time, I wanted to kind of set a new challenge for us,” he added.

“That’s really been the number-one assignment for myself this season: what feels right, what do I want to see right now? And I don’t want to see frivolity, I don’t want to see color, I don’t want to see volume. I want to see focus, I want to see something that feels both severe and luxurious,” he continued.

“I’m exhausted by all of those tropes that we all throw around on the red carpets,” he argued. “There’s all these tricks of embroidery and volume and color that you can kind of hide behind, or cheap drama, in a way. And I humbly wanted to say, ‘OK, can I do without all of that stuff?’”

His spring line, to be shown at the Petit Palais, will take its cue from Hadid’s gown in Cannes: a simple black column dress, scooped away at the chest to showcase a huge gilded pendant in the shape of lungs. Roseberry is sticking to a palette of black, ecru and gold, with a strong focus on tailoring, though the collection will be rich in fantasy and embellishment. 

Why do a U-turn just when the brand is gaining traction? “It was, I have to say, really nerve-wracking. I’ve never felt so vulnerable going through a creative process before. But the reward, I think, is deeply felt now. I feel really, really good about where we landed,” Roseberry said.

“It’s a pivot. If I’m scared, if I’m nervous, if I feel uncomfortable, in a way, I think that is a good thing. I think that’s a movement in the right direction. I fell in love with fashion watching designers who were doing collections that changed, sometimes radically, every season,” he continued. 

“And that kind of bravery, that kind of balls-out gutsiness, is something I really cherish. But also it’s the hardest thing to maintain when you have any bit of success, because everyone just wants you to keep doing what you’re doing until they’re bored of it. And then you’re f–ked, basically,” he said. 

The designer was also inspired by his recent conversations with students at Central Saint Martins in London, where he was the guest judge to award the Sarabande Foundation Scholarship to a student accepted on the MA Fashion course.

“I was thinking how really, really hard it would be to be coming out of school, or to be in school right now, and not be able to work with your peers,” he mused. “It just gave me the boldness, or the courage, to try and do something new, and to try and do something unexpected.”

Roseberry has always resisted pigeonholing the type of woman who can wear his clothes, citing the dual personality of founder Elsa Schiaparelli, who juggled between running a business and being a muse to artists like Salvador Dalí and Man Ray. The celebrities he’s dressed range from Beyoncé, Kim Kardashian West and Cardi B to Regina King, Tilda Swinton, Adele and Lily Collins. 

“Schiaparelli can go really, really chic and modern and pulled back. And then it can go really into the surreal, into the ethereal, into the dramatic and the otherworldly. And then it can also go into the pop culture and into the zeitgeist and into this kind of hard-hitting cultural conversation,” he noted. 

It helps that it’s still a small company, without the weight of marketing hanging over every move. “Lots of the big, big houses, they’re too big to be this agile, in a way, they’re too big to change course. And my goal would be to really be as agile as possible, but still have it be one world. You should look at it and you should know it’s Schiaparelli,” Roseberry said. 

“I do get really turned on by challenges like that, and putting myself on the line,” he remarked. “It’s part of what I love about the job, and I also love it because the atelier get really thrilled by it.”  

Being stuck in Paris during the pandemic provided the space to refine his vision of the brand, after a decade working behind the scenes at Thom Browne in New York.

“I really, really loved that whole year and a half creatively. It was so pure and there were far fewer contaminations, in a way, because people weren’t traveling, there were less opinions in general. And it was just a creative bubble for me, and not just me, but also for the team to create inside of that,” Roseberry recalled.

“The silver lining of being so isolated out here, in a city I haven’t yet really connected with, is that I’ve really run to the work and run to the studio. I can’t imagine not doing couture now, I really can’t. The process of building these collections has become such a fantasy in and of itself. It’s almost like the final result is a byproduct. It’s just a cherry on top,” he said.

Now he’s adjusting to the gradual return of pre-pandemic working conditions, even as the spike in COVID-19 infections continues to disrupt preparations for Monday’s show. Not only are the French government’s safety guidelines changing all the time, but several members of his couture workshop fell ill during the making of the collection.

“That is something that is not a glamorous side of this, but it’s such a nightmare, because if this were Chanel and you have eight ateliers or something, you’re always going to be able to have something moving. We have two,” he said.

Bar any last-minute hiccups, Roseberry hopes to have 31 outfits on the runway, and is excited to be working with makeup artist Pat McGrath and hairstylist Guido Palau for the first time. He’s trying not to focus on what happens afterward.

“I don’t want to start measuring success by how many stars we’ve dressed, or how many covers we land. I just want to make work that resonates with our present moment, and be as truthful and as obedient to my own gut instinct. And maybe this collection is less cover material — I don’t think that’s true — or maybe it’s more, but I get really paralyzed if I start thinking about it like that,” he said.

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