It could be five years before we take the escalators up to the top of the Pompidou Centre again. The museum is closing for a massive renovation and Schiaparelli’s show last night was among the last events before work begins. It was here a year-and-a-half ago that Daniel Roseberry saw a Brancusi exhibit that was the genesis of his new collection.
“Early on,” Roseberry said, “there was a lot of internal discussion here that ready-to-wear looked too much like couture, but now the tables have turned. What once felt like a liability feels like a superpower when it comes to how the clothes are performing with the clients.” Though the set was as dark as night, it was easy to clock the house loyalists in the crowd, their surreal gold baubles glinting in the spotlights. “I didn’t want to dumb down the ready-to-wear at all,” Roseberry noted.
Cue an opening pair of neatly tailored skirt suits with the padding excised from inside the shoulders and the hips and placed eccentrically on the outside; clingy ribbed knit sweaters with extroverted ruffles at the collars, cuffs, and peplums; and little dresses with polka dotted broderie anglaise cutouts. Even the pencil skirts had their idiosyncrasies, with the waistline dipping below just one hip. The tops he showed them with followed the same curving lines, yielding an artful swipe of exposed midriff.
Speaking of curves—elsewhere Roseberry took on the challenge of bias-cutting. “It’s a completely new world for me,” he said, though the final results betrayed no newbie jitters. Many of the dresses were designed with “rips,” an homage to an archival dress made by Elsa Schiaparelli and the artist Salvador Dali. The original 1938 number was painted silk. Roseberry’s were actual cutouts on jersey, crystal mesh, mousseline, and metal mesh—a serious level up.
The show’s most surrealistic touch was another little skirt suit that looked like fur but was actually little paintbrushes, thousands of them by the looks of it. “There’s all these things meant to delight and surprise,” he said. Alternatively, his Schiap gals can have a second-skin knit dress jacquarded with his drawing of a nude female form. And to cap it all off, salt lamp jewelry lit up by LED batteries, a clever idea. Roseberry said, “I was really happy with that.”
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