Spring 2023 Haute Couture: Schiaparelli's Inferno
For Schiaparelli, Daniel Roseberry reflected on Dante Alighieri's The Divine Comedy, more exactly his first book, Inferno, focusing not on the horror of hell that Dante conjured so vividly, but on the core of the story, which he sees as "an allegory of doubt."
"What appealed to me in the Inferno wasn’t just the theatrics of Dante’s creation—it was how perfect a metaphor it provided for the torment that every artist or creative person experiences when we sit before the screen or the sketchpad or the dress form, when we have that moment in which we’re shaken by what we don’t know. When I’m stuck, I often take some comfort in thinking of Elsa Schiaparelli: the codes she created, the risks she took, are now the stuff of history and legend, and yet she too must have been uncertain, even scared, when she was inventing them. Her fear enabled her bravery, which sounds counterintuitive but is key to the artistic process. Fear means you’re pushing yourself to make something shocking, something new," Roseberry wrote in the show note
"This collection is my homage to doubt. The doubt of creation, and the doubt of intent," he added.
Nothing is as it appears to be in these clothes. Along with a nod to Dante’s sense of organization (three looks for each of the nine circles of hell), the designer also took direct inspiration from some of his most arresting images.
The leopard, the lion, and the she-wolf—representing lust, pride, and avarice, respectively—find form here in spectacular faux-taxidermy creations, constructed entirely by hand, from foam, resin, and other manmade materials.
Other pieces are inspired by the slippery, house-of-mirrors quality of his Inferno: the paillettes that tremble from some of the dresses are actually made from leather-slicked slabs of tin, and the baubles that cover one skirt are made not from fabric but wooden beads. The velvet column dresses’ apparently iridescent shimmer is in fact hand-painted, in pigment that changes color depending on your perspective, like a butterfly’s wings.