He can, however, turn latex into couture.
Schiaparelli has just revealed its latest couture collection, one that leans fully into anatomical surrealism and material experimentation. The main character? Latex. Inspiration, as Daniel Roseberry discovered, isn’t something you can summon on demand. Silicone, paint and latex, however, are at least willing to show up.
I didn’t expect to spend my Monday preoccupied by an ornamental belly button, but here we are. The one Roseberry offers is framed by a silicone orchid-oyster concoction, which, depending on your disposition, either looks like an alien flower or couture labia (cute little pearl clitoris included). His other offerings include glossy, curly black tentacles (very Tim Burton by way of a luxury cephalopod) spilling out from the shoulders of a latex blazer, leaving barely enough time to even register the look’s incredible pants: cut impossibly low and in a gentle curve before narrowing into the skinniest silhouette imaginable. How humbling to everyone in the room thinking they were wearing low rise jeans.
Tops are rigid, almost armour-like, only to fold outward and expose the stomach—the body’s softest, most vulnerable point. A glossy, milky-blue bodice, semi-translucent and sculpted from silicone, exaggerates the hips into an almost surreal hourglass. Another dress, tinted the palest pistachio, appears latched together rather than sewn together, its doll-like bodice separated from the skirt as though connected by invisible joints.
Thinking about Schiaparelli’s last couture collection—The Agony and the Ecstasy, you know, the one with the scorpion tails and peacock feathers— makes it tempting to imagine that Daniel Roseberry always knows what he’s doing before he begins. Roseberry himself was tempted into the same idea: thinking he figured out the formula. Go on lifechanging trip, visit iconic architectural site, have transcendent experience, come back with a vision.
Naturally, inspiration doesn’t appreciate being scheduled. Roseberry admits as much in his notes, writing that “formulas are antithetical to the magic of creation.” Apparently, after last season, he tried to recreate the experience by traveling to Barcelona to see Gaudí’s Sagrada Família finally completed. Which is a wonderfully human thing to do, really—trying to reverse-engineer your own lightning strike. Creativity, unfortunately, tends to disappear the moment you convince yourself you’ve figured it out. So instead of chasing another grand epiphany, he looked somewhere else: materials that belong far from a Paris Atelier – until now that is. Latex, silicone, paint replaced the noble silks, satins, wools and molding techniques. The real miracle, though, isn’t the silicone or the latex. Materials are rather promiscuous things. They do not mind what they become. The miracle is the people who somehow know what to do with them, making them into creations beyond anyone’s imagination of what a dress can be. And, as per his every shownote, Roseberry recognises and celebrates that none of these experiments would exist without the artisans in the ateliers, whose craftsmanship makes all this glorious weirdness possible. Chapeau.
