A Leap Into The Abyss
Daniel Roseberry’s latest haute couture collection for Schiaparelli begins, as all healthy creative rabbit holes should, with a trip to Barcelona and a mild existential crisis.
After last season’s celebrated The Agony and the Ecstasy, Roseberry admits he thought he had cracked the code. The plan sounded simple enough: travel somewhere architecturally fabulous, be struck by genius, return to the atelier and produce another couture revelation. This time, the pilgrimage was to Antoni Gaudí’s Barcelona, where buildings seem more grown than designed, curving and swelling like coral, bone, shell and a trippy fever dream. Which somehow Roseberry has translated into Schiaparelli’s Fall/Winter 2026–2027 Haute Couture collection, The Call of the Void.
Schiaparelli has never been a house for polite frocks and sensible hemlines. Its DNA has always involved a bit of surrealism. Gaudí’s architecture rejected rigid symmetry in favour of organic structure, strange surfaces and materials doing unexpected things. Roseberry takes that spirit and runs it straight into the couture salon. Traditional silks, satins and wools are pushed aside for latex, silicone and sheets of baked paint sculpted into silhouettes.
The result is fashion that feels part garment and part organism. A hyper-realistic bustier is sculpted, cast in silicone and painted milky blue. Floral forms are made from hosiery stretched over metal wires and pearls. Jackets and leggings are encrusted with real flowers, fish scales and ribbon flowers, while latex tentacles curl from shoulders.
Nature appears everywhere, but not in a soft-focus, botanical-print way. This is nature as creature, armour and beautiful threat. Lobster pink, violet, tangerine, saffron and pale mint sit against gloss black, raw wax ecru and Schiaparelli gold. Accessories follow suit, with shell earrings lined in blush porcelain, octopus-inspired jewellery and silicone pieces that recall sea anemones.
It is strange, sensual, occasionally alarming and exactly the point. Roseberry has not just borrowed from Gaudí’s buildings. He has borrowed from their beautiful insanity.
