The Schiaparelli set was designed like a nightclub, with chairs set around little tables placed around a circuitous runway, and chandeliers above creating an after-dark atmosphere. To cue up the show, Barbara Streisand was on the loudspeakers ad-libbing during a 1962 performance of “Cry Me a River”: “This is my boyfriend’s suit. Ooh! The herringbone just bit me!”
It was a fitting arrangement for a collection that Daniel Roseberry built partly around the Schiap jacket. Coco Chanel, Schiaparelli’s rival, made her suit jackets as comfortable as a cardigan; they were often as understated too. Elsa Schiaparelli’s jackets, in contrast, were a canvas for surrealist art by pals like Jean Cocteau and Salvador Dali. Women of her era wore them to dinner, rather than a cocktail dress. “The bottoms were always plain because that was under the table, and everything above the table was meant to be attention-grabbing,” Roseberry explained. “That’s where the Schiap embroideries were sort of born.”
Roseberry’s interpretations came in rich velvets with scrolling black threadwork or shimmering pink satin that looked inset with gemstones. We’re in another evening jacket era, though women of today are just as likely to wear them with jeans as they are a plain skirt or trousers.
We shouldn’t expect anything as straightforward as five-pocket denim chez Schiap, but Roseberry is working to develop the more casual side of the ready-to-wear business. He said that was inspired by a post-mortem with Bella Hadid after she wore his internet-breaking interpretation of Jane Birkin’s famous back-to-front broderie anglaise dress at the Cannes Film Festival. “As we were recapping, she asked me if we could make her separates from it. Here, we did it in knit, because it’s so much easier, and we broke it down into tops and skirts.”
Roseberry is in training for the New York City marathon and he’s sporting a mohawk for the occasion. “I wanted something easy and aerodynamic,” he laughed. The same can be said for the stretch knit cocktail dresses inspired by the sleek lines of the American designer Geoffrey Beene’s evening wear. The trick, for Roseberry, is incorporating elements from his Schiap haute couture. “The client actually wants a distilled version of the couture, and not this completely different proposal,” he said. “So I just think of it as the same woman, just a different part of her life, a different corner of her brain.” The inset breastplates on a striped body-con dress and other pieces were lifted from his July couture show, specifically the silvery Marilyn Monroe dress that glowed from the inside. No light-up pyrotechnics here, but they’d still be the talk of any dinner party.
