A fantastical bestiary at Schiaparelli Couture 

Daniel Roseberry presented us a visually rambunctious, animalistic, awe-inducing collection for couture ss26. Here is agony and ecstasy comingled, terrible and exquisite. The first thing to register was the horns. Or beaks. Or whatever unsettling, animal-adjacent protrusions were erupting straight out of the breasts. Fashion has replaced the tit many times before–Madonna’s cones, Lady Gaga’s fireworks, Katy Perry’s whipped cream (though it feels wrong to bring these up in this couture context)–but nothing quite as majestic, abject or arresting as these avian, demonic…extentions. A lá Maleficent, they were disturbing in a way that made it impossible to keep mouths from going agape. 

Feathers (both real and trompel’oueil) shimmer like birds of paradise or hummingbirds caught mid-flight, flashing fluorescent colour. Peacock iridescence appears alongside crane-like crowns. Look eight, with its wings unfurled, feels like a return to the original angels—those that predate cherubs and halos, whose anatomy doesn’t make sense to the human condition. Pearlescent shells cling to torsos like a magpie’s hoard, turning models into mythological specimens rather than people. Some looks are outright dangerous: scorpion tails arc from sheer mesh, spiked and venomous, the fragility of the fabrics they cling to only heightens the sense of threat. Elsewhere, bodies are segmented and cinched into faceted parts, doll-like and exoskeletal. “Who,” says Daniel Roseberry, “after all, can forget Elsa Schiaparelli’s interest in the lobster, the ultimate scaled creature, and an animal indelibly associated with the maison she created?”

The accessories bristle with artificial bird heads, silk-feather sculptures with resin beaks and pearl cabochon eyes, fantastical, uncanny, and another nod to Elsa Schiaparelli’s enduring fascination with the animal kingdom. 

Daniel Roseberry cited the Sistine Chapel as his emotional starting point. Like Michelangelo, he offers not explanation but permission to connect with your inner AWE. So many people ask me what the point is of couture, to which Daniel says: “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 singular fantasy 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.”