Daniel Roseberry’s Schiaparelli is haute couture for people who do not follow haute couture. That sounds harsh, but what I mean is that Roseberry’s work is refreshingly transparent. His work requires no fluency in obscure references, no trained eye for the significance of a seam, and very little patience for ambiguity. Cinched waists, power shoulders, natural imagery. Roseberry’s woman speaks the language of humans like you and me, but she is an alien, a sea creature, a goddess or any other unattainable siren from public imagination. The product is begging to be gawked at and the runway set a constant reminder that you are witnessing something elite.
Everyone gets this kind of haute couture. It’s glamorous. Elevated. Ostentatious. Technical. And most importantly: familiar.
Schiaparelli’s Fall/Winter 2026/27 couture collection may therefore be Roseberry’s clearest expression yet of fashion at its most digestible: traditional ingredients, prepared with extraordinary skill, then served on a mirrored runway beneath the spoken manifesto of its designer. Roseberry’s Schiaparelli is the polar opposite of ‘quiet luxury’ – it’s obvious luxury. You’re meant to stare. And you’re not meant to be left wondering if you can afford it or not – you can’t.
The collection opened with long, controlled silhouettes with forceful posture and proportion. Then the oceanic and posthuman creatures arrived: bodies molded in silicone, latex drawn into strange second skins, organic flowers, fish scales, shell-shaped jewelry, tentacles extending from impeccably composed gowns. One illuminated breast piece looked like something from a dystopian anime.
The technical ambition was genuine. Roseberry’s manifesto asked whether “beauty resides in the material itself” or in the imagination capable of reinventing it. Here, the atelier did more than decorate familiar fabrics. Paint was baked into sheets. Silicone was treated as a couture surface. Materials associated with prosthetics, industrial production and fetishwear were made to participate in the show, which took place at the Petit Palais.
Yet the silhouettes beneath this experimentation remained almost aggressively traditional. Hourglass corsets, columns, mermaid gowns, sculpted breasts, severe shoulders: Roseberry does not reject the established grammar of glamour. He makes it louder, harder and stranger. The future arrives with a snatched waist.
In fact, from a certain angle, Roseberry’s Schiaparelli reads as charmingly camp. Not because the work is unserious, but because it is so profoundly committed, even if it’s to ideas and tropes that audiences already understand well. The mirrored set reflected the audience back into the spectacle. The pacing was solemn. Most magnificently, Roseberry’s creative manifesto played over the show, transforming the runway into something between an artistic confession and a luxury sermon. It’s the kind of flagrant display that easily reads as pretentious – but the irony is that his self-importance is sincere rather than sardonic. Roseberry is fully committed to his version of the Schiaparelli woman. There is no irony. No ulterior motive other than offering exquisitely crafted mass-readable luxury: everyone is invited to indulge in the fantasy, while only a tiny clientele may possess it and live it.
It’s no surprise that in certain places Roseberry veers incredibly close to Thierry Mugler territory. He shares Mugler’s appetite for anatomic distortion and the female body as a surreal object. Armored hourglasses, synthetic surfaces and bodies engineered into insects, machines, predators and intergalactic divas. Both understand fashion as transformation. Femininity is not reshaped – it is augmented.
But where Mugler’s spectacle seemed more interested in worldbuilding, Roseberry’s is much more calculated and corporate. Mugler’s models seized the stage like characters in a play. His theater could feel erotic, aggressive, funny and dangerous. Roseberry’s creatures are more ceremonious. Even when covered in tentacles, they move with the stateliness of couture clients. Rather than worldbuilding, Roseberry is building boutiques, cultivating clients, dressing celebrities and translating couture visibility into a commercially coherent world. He operates exquisitely within the limits of the couture market.
That containment diminishes some of the danger, but it also clarifies Roseberry’s particular talent. He gives people exactly what they imagine high fashion ought to provide. He does not ask the public to decode restraint, irony or formal theory. He offers transformation in its most recognizable form and then uses the full resources of the legendary couture house to make that familiarity feel newly sumptuous.
By the end of his manifesto, Roseberry invited the audience into the “bliss of the abyss.” The phrase nearly summarizes the entire collection: familiar glamour archetypes inflated through technical virtuosity, philosophical language and a production determined to announce its own cultural significance. Yet the grandeur is not empty. The atelier really did accomplish astonishing things, and Roseberry’s belief in spectacle remains palpable.
When skeptics need an easy target for the pretensions of the fashion industry, Roseberry’s Schiaparelli is the house they will cite. They will not be entirely wrong. But neither will the millions who stare. Roseberry gives the public exactly what it imagines haute couture ought to be—and prepares those familiar ingredients with enough conviction, resources and technical brilliance to make obvious luxury feel genuinely transporting.
