“This exhibition is a gorgeous collision between a distant past and a very immediate present. We’re picking up where Elsa left off,” says Schiaparelli’s creative director Daniel Roseberry. The 40-year-old Texan designer is contemplating the time-warp impact of the V&A’s new show, Schiaparelli: Fashion Becomes Art, which opens in London on 28 March. “Elsa was the first one who really questioned whether art and fashion could commingle in a way that felt natural and elevated. She raised fashion to the realm of art.”
Elsa Schiaparelli in Vogue, 1933 © George Hoyningen-Huene/Condé Nast via Getty Images
Seated in his “war room”, a fourth-floor studio on Paris’s rue de la Paix, Roseberry is deep in preparation for his forthcoming couture and ready-to-wear collections when we meet in December. Since he took the reins in 2019 after 10 years at Thom Browne, Schiaparelli shows have become some of the most anticipated on the Paris Fashion Week calendar thanks to internet-breaking looks (think of Kim Kardashian’s “Iron Man” leather breastplate, and neckties that look as if they are made out of human hair). Jill Biden, Lady Gaga and Beyoncé have worn his designs and customers have fallen hard for the Face bag (£7,100), with its printed-resin eyes and three-dimensional gold nose and lips. “I love collaborating with the people who are creating culture: that’s what the red carpet is for me,” he notes.
