SCHIAPARELLI HAUTE COUTURE FALL WINTER 26: FIVE LOOKS THAT STOLE THE SHOW

Schiaparelli Opens Couture Week with Drama

Paris woke up to couture season on July 7, 2025, with Daniel Roseberry pulling the first card of the game: Schiaparelli. Under the soaring arches of the Petit Palais, celebrities, couture clients, and fashion insiders perched delicately on Napoleon chairs, awaiting the drama. And drama, naturally, arrived.

Cardi B, never one for subtlety, swept in wearing a past-season Schiaparelli gown with a collar the size of a Saturn ring, accessorized with… a raven. Yes, a raven. Somewhere between Edgar Allan Poe and haute couture absurdity, she stole the pre-show spotlight, proving once again that the front row is its own runway.

Front Row Royalty

Hunter Schafer, Karol G, Dua Lipa, and French cinema’s Philippine Leroy-Beaulieu lined the front row, draped in Roseberry’s black-and-white creations. Dua Lipa, dressed in a scale-embroidered gown, shimmered like a mermaid who had just signed a couture contract.

Nadia Lee Cohen, Josephine Japy, and the usual Schiaparelli disciples rounded out a guest list that was almost as theatrical as the show itself.

Past, Future, and the Ghost of Chanel

Roseberry’s own words set the tone: last season was about modernizing the baroque; this season is about flipping the archives forward into the future. With Elsa Schiaparelli’s 1940 exile to America as his historical anchor, he revisited that tense moment where fear sharpened creativity.

Inevitably, the old duel, Schiaparelli versus Chanel: resurfaced. Chanel’s little black dress haunts fashion like a ghost, but where Coco gave us billionaires in poverty chic, Elsa preferred surrealist drama. Roseberry leaned toward Elsa’s eccentricity, but he did not ignore Coco’s discipline.

The collection, designed entirely in black and white, was as much about absence as presence, and about craftsmanship as spectacle.

Look 14: Eyes Wide Open

If paranoia had a uniform, this would be it. A column bustier dress embroidered entirely with eyes each iris a hand-painted cabochon, stared back at the audience. No blinking, no respite, just couture watching you as much as you watched it.

Look 24: Red Illusion and the Human Heart

A satin gown worn backwards, breasts molded into its surface, was topped with a necklace that is more horror film than jewel: a mechanical, beating human heart in red rhinestones. Salvador Dalí once collaborated with Elsa on a similar piece, and Roseberry resurrected it, because nothing says couture like wearing your vital organ on your chest.

Look 26: The Saddle Bustier

Corsets may be gone, but Roseberry does not do absence without compensation. Enter the saddle bustier: velvet, satin, and lambskin sculpted into the shape of a horse’s saddle, cinching hips and waist with equestrian elegance. Practical for horseback riding? Not at all. But undeniably couture.

Look 29: Apollo Revisited

The Apollo Cape, a Schiaparelli relic from 1938–39, was reborn as a glittering gown. Sequins and rhinestones in silver danced with black horsehair trims, echoing Versailles’ Apollo fountain. It was the kind of garment that could easily upstage its wearer—and perhaps that was the point.

Look 30: The Exploding Necklace

For the finale, model Alex Consani wore a bustier gown suspended at an improbable angle, sheer tulle flashing hipbone, topped with what can only be described as a jewelry explosion. The Apollo motif reimagined as a three-layered burst of stars, metallic in shades of black, bronze, and silver. It was less a necklace than a firework frozen in midair, daring gravity to disagree.

Conclusion: Roseberry’s Surrealist Future

This was not nostalgia, nor was it futurism. It was Roseberry’s ongoing love affair with Elsa Schiaparelli’s surrealism, translated into a language that oscillates between sublime elegance and mischievous provocation.

Couture, stripped of color, stripped of artifice, became about construction and audacity. Five looks stood as monuments to his argument: that the past and future are not enemies but mirrors. And if a raven can sit front row, perhaps couture really is still the theatre of the absurd.

All the looks of the collection:

Video of the fashion show: