Haute couture is understandably an alien concept to most, who find the notion of shelling out a healthy flat down payment on a dress – exquisite or not – unimaginable. Then, of course, there’s the process of couture, its rigour and rituals, its ceaseless fittings by hand, experts sculpting clothes on the actual body that will wear them. It’s like another fashion planet.
Fitting, then, that was part of the big idea behind Daniel Roseberry’s Schiaparelli collection. He was triggered by the fact that Elsa Schiaparelli’s uncle Giovanni was a famed scientist and astronomer, whose studies of Mars in the 19th century were groundbreaking and mean the name Schiaparelli still resonates with science geeks who have never so much as seen a shoe hat or a lobster-crotched frock. Much was made of Elsa’s connection to that lineage during her lifetime – she did create an astrological collection, after all. But like so much else, it tumbled into obscurity over the years.
Roseberry’s knowledge of Schiaparelli is deep – witness the painstakingly recreated 1949 dress Carey Mulligan wore to the Golden Globes, reconstructed from archive imagery and, in typical Schiap fashion, made to look as if your silk taffeta dress is mildly wardrobe malfunctioning and slipping down to reveal a bead-crusted brassiere (this season, emphatic bras have become kind of a micro-couture trend, if such a fallacy exists). And hey, if you know something inside-out, why not blow it out into its own world – planet Schiaparelli, if you will. Its proportions seemed to have some similarities with earth, but the differences were major.
Difference was what made this show great. It was a gear shift for Schiap and for Roseberry, a re-energising of the volumes and decorative approaches that have become his signatures, moving him and the house onwards and upwards. Witness his odes to 80s couture, to the dress of Tom Wolfe’s ‘Social X-rays’ – inspired by Lacroix and Saint Laurent, who in turn had both been inspired by Schiaparelli – here pumped out to intergalactic proportions, plump spherical skirts below winged bodices in satin or lace. And also his introduction of touches of his own Texas background – hey, could anything be more alien to a Parisian couture salon than Western-wear belts and beaded bandanna patterns?
But Schiaparelli herself loved America – she spent her early marriage there, before her fashion house was born, and ended up spending most of the war years in New York, too. Her approach to fashion had distinctly American overtones, a love of simplicity and sportswear (her fashion house was first subtitled ‘pour le sport’), an obsession with modernity, and a degree of Barnum and Bailey over-the-top-ity to her embellished clothes, as popular with Hollywood in the 1930s as they are now. And when Roseberry declared this collection was inspired by “our modern fascination with creatures from out there,” he could easily be speaking about celebrity.
Elsa Schiaparelli invented the notion of the ‘themed’ collection – which was well on display here. Although every one of Roseberry’s outfits stood alone they also integrated into a whole – an oddball, off-kilter view of the world, in part as if you’d asked an alien to design a couture collection. So obsolete tech became embellishments (there is gold embedded in circuit boards, after all), and proportions went wild. And there was also the somewhat alien sight, at Schiaparelli, of a simple white linen shirt and denim trousers, albeit tightly corseted and executed with couture precision. That felt like something we’d never seen before here – and a giant leap for Roseberry, into something bold and new.