Daniel Roseberry had his Spring/Summer 2026, haute couture, fashion come-to-Jesus moment in a pretty appropriate location. Last year, he took a touristic mini-break to Rome – Elsa Schiaparelli’s birthplace, almost incidentally – and ended up, as many of us do, packed cheek-to-jowl with gawkers in the Sistine Chapel. He looked up. And he thought: that could make a great fashion show. Lofty ideals.
Honestly, your eyes turn slightly heavenward hearing that, although you give a talent like Roseberry the benefit of the doubt. Over his past half-decade or so at Schiaparelli, he’s confounded expectation and avoided cliché, pulling a brave new identity out of dusty, over-referenced archives – archives indeed so often seen many are wrapped in tissue and under lock and key for a few more years to give them a conservational rest. Last season, Roseberry paid dutiful homage to those looks – a major retrospective at the Victoria and Albert Museum is opening in March. This season, he did one better. He pushed the house onwards, and upwards, with a collection that, somehow, managed to stand its ground next to Michelangelo’s heavenly bodies. Let’s be hyperbolic – it was kind of transcendental.
“I think people want a reason to believe – to believe in something,” Roseberry said, quietly, a few days before his couture show. “That felt really urgent.” At couture, belief is in the unbelievable, which is what Roseberry’s clothes looked like. They’re also a little bit inexplicable. The designer himself talked about ecclesiastical restraint, austerity – which, really, you’ve seen in Schiaparelli across a few years, Roseberry paring away silhouettes, shapes, even his hitherto trademark gilded embroideries. “After the past few seasons when there was a lot of editing and rigour and control, knocking things down – this felt like building back,” he said. The comparison, back in the chapel, were the dogmatic, didactic theological scenes studiously decorating the walls, versus the neck-cracking explosion of vitality overhead.
Hey, I’m not going to compare Daniel Roseberry to Michelangelo – and I don’t think he is either. But what he wanted was an allied idea of explosive, unbridled imagination, like staring up and getting a headrush. Angelic? Think again. There were plenty of wings, but these were mythological chimera – chimera meaning both the illusory and unbelievable, and a specific woman-animal hybrid, fire-breathing, predatory. That’s what these Schiaparelli women looked like, unbelievable bestial creatures, satanic even, prowling through a blackout terrain in extraordinary re-imaginings of what couture could do to the human body. They’re not difficult to describe – they’re kind of impossible, both in terms of technique and execution (three-dimensional laces, faux-feather, 3D-printed horned and beaked protrusions). Even Roseberry was stumped to describe them. “These reptilian archetypes turning into these avian … things …” he trailed off. Heavenly, or hellish – in actuality, we were somewhere between. It was sweet purgatory, in the Petit Palais.
So, the clothes fused haute couture and haute animalier, bodies bristling with feathers like exotic raptors, transparent suits in glistening crinoline pierced with spines like exotic poisonous fighting-fish, or with enormous, venomous scorpion stingers in delicate Chantilly lace. Although those stingers also made you think of HR Giger, and his production design for Alien. “You saw the haircut,” Roseberry said, backstage – the model was shaven-headed (he thinks she’s Sigourney Weaver). That’s a brilliant aspect of the brilliance of Roseberry, to combine the highest and lowest, celestial and cinematic in one thick soup of reference. As a total non-sequitur, the jewels were copied from ones nicked in the heist on the Louvre back in October. Why? Why not? There was Elsa here too, in the sculpted evening jackets that she introduced to women’s wardrobes, new iterations twisted back-to-front and with peplums apparently taking flight, and in that whole surreal notion of women fusing with animals. It was Elsa-coded too in the shock – this was a shocking, stunning, provocative collection, unlike anything we’ve seen in quite a long time (an outfit titled ‘Isabella Blowfish’ seemed to nod at the undeniable influence of that great fashion shock-jock Lee Alexander McQueen). Roseberry said it was fun to make. It was giddy fun to watch, too.
This is a pivotal season for the haute couture: there are new talents at two of the biggest houses, and with the chopping and changing Roseberry has, oddly enough, become the métier’s de facto éminence grise. He’s embracing the challenge, rising to it, looking up. “It is so turbo-charged,” Roseberry said, of this truly awe-inspiring biblical epic. Amen to that.
