schiaparelli

Cate Blanchett in Schiaparelli haute couture. Credit: Schiaparelli

Schiaparelli, fashion’s leading house of surrealism, is having a major moment. The house, originally founded in the 1930s, shut down in 1954, and then revived in 2014, is now having a full-blown renaissance under the creative leadership of Daniel Roseberry.

schiaparelli
Credit:Schiaparelli

Lady Gaga wore a custom Schiaparelli haute couture design at the presidential inauguration of Joe Biden.

You might remember the historic moment when Lady Gaga wore the brand to sing the national anthem at the American inauguration earlier this year. Or at the recent Grammy awards with Beyonce and Noah Cyrus in Schiaparelli haute couture.

Or even more recently: the very fashion-forward Tracee Ellis Ross wearinga look from Schiaparelli’s Fall/Winter 2021 collection (peep the gargantuan platform shoes) to the NAACP Image Awards.

But that’s not all. In the past year alone, Schiaparelli has dressed a whole slate of celebrities: Kim Kardashian, Cate Blanchett, Gillian Anderson, Cynthia Erivo, Emma Corrin, Hunter Schafer, Anne Hathaway and Carey Mulligan among them.

It’s a very impressive list for an haute couture house that – while certainly full of history and heritage – has been up and running in modern times for less than a decade.

schiaparelli
Credit:Schiaparelli

Beyonce wore custom Schiaparelli haute couture to this year’s Grammy Awards, where she became the most-awarded female artist in the award’s history.

Part of the appeal is surely the glorious way that Roseberry is having fun with the codes of the house. He’s doing so without being beholden to recreating the past, a disruption that Roseberry has likened to what Karl Lagerfeld did for Chanel in the ‘80s.

See the delectable jewellery and hardware of body parts and creatures from the Zodiac drawn from Elsa Schiaparelli’s own collections and collaborations with Salvador Dali. There’s a historicism to it, but Roseberry avoids being weighed down with history by toying with scale and proportion. Instead, the effect is daring and exciting.

schiaparelli
Credit:Schiaparelli
Hunter Schafer in Schiaparelli S/S21 ready-to-wear.

Daring and exciting also sums up the clothes that Roseberry is making. There’s volume, there’s big shapes, and more often than not, big gops of amusing detail and jewellery. The last year, so marked by dreariness, has provided the most fertile ground possible for dramatic, statement-making outfits. It makes the case for fashion worth getting excited for.

And it seems that’s the mood these days for celebrities attending major events. It’s not just about showing up these days, it’s just as much about showing out in clothes that elicit a smile or a chuckle. It’s not just that trompe-l’oeil buttons in the shape of nipples are fun, it’s that it makes us dream about having fun again.

That’s a moment worth treasuring.