At Paris Fashion Week 2025, Schiaparelli offered a poetic pause stripped of excess, rich in history, and entirely Daniel Roseberry.
By Dara Clariza Evangelista
At Paris Fashion Week 2025, Schiaparelli delivered a hauntingly elegant couture collection that blurred the lines between past and future.
Daniel Roseberry, the American designer at the helm of Schiaparelli since 2019, has become known for reviving the brand’s surrealist roots with bold, theatrical flair. Handpicked by house owner Diego Della Valle, Roseberry became the first American to lead a Parisian haute couture house.
His early collections drew viral attention for their dramatic silhouettes, gold anatomical pieces, sculptural bustiers, lion heads, and avant-garde references to Elsa Schiaparelli’s historic collaborations with Salvador Dalí and Jean Cocteau.
But for Fall-Winter 2025/26, Roseberry had a question. “If I focused obsessively on the past, could I actually make a collection that looks as if it was born in the future?” That tension shaped Schiaparelli’s latest haute couture show, which opened Paris Fashion Week 2025 at the historic Petit Palais.
Titled Back to the Future, the collection took inspiration from Elsa Schiaparelli’s 1940 departure from Paris during World War II, a moment that marked both an ending and a beginning for the iconic house. Roseberry used this historical lens not to recreate the past, but to build something eerily timeless.
Compared to his previous Schiaparelli collections, famous for gilded bustiers, surrealist showpieces, and viral celebrity moments, this one was pared down, introspective, and hauntingly beautiful. Gone were the extravagant golds and memeable designs. In their place: crisp black, white, and flashes of red. Bias cuts, structured tailoring, and symbolic restraint defined the silhouettes.
“This was definitely the most entrenched in the archives that I have ever been,” Roseberry shared. He leaned into Elsa Schiaparelli’s visual legacy with quiet confidence. “During the day, Elsa wore square?shouldered jackets like a toy soldier. Then at night, she would become a swan, a surrealist.”
One standout look featured a sheer tulle gown embroidered with silver seashells. Another paired a scarlet sculpted dress with a pulsing heart-shaped necklace, nodding to Schiaparelli’s historic collaboration with Salvador Dalí. A sheer black cape closed the show, stitched with the Apollo de Versailles motif and worn over velvet gloves and silver-heeled mules.
Even in its simplicity, the surrealist codes remained. Ceramic keyholes, tailored exaggerations, and symbolic detailing connected the past to a post-modern dreamscape. “Couture must remain a profoundly human act,” Roseberry said. “It’s intimate, artisanal, almost sacred. I don’t want to design for screens or algorithms—I want to create timeless experiences.”
That intention extended to the front row, where Dua Lipa arrived in a white gown with a bold keyhole cutout, Cardi B stunned in fringe and feathers with a crow perched on her hand, and Hunter Schafer wore mint stripes and vintage glamour. Each look echoed the collection’s theme: otherworldly, intimate, and suspended in time.
“I wanted it to feel like a bit of a farewell,” Roseberry added. “We’re going to be restructuring everything after this. I just don’t want anyone to know what to expect.”
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