Exploring the Abyss: Schiaparelli's haunting Haute Couture collection

It’s possible to be scared and appalled by Daniel Roseberry’s Schiaparelli, and wonderstruck by it at the same time. What were all those smooth, shiny, skin-like body-moulded pieces? Why did one model have black inflated tendrils growing from her? How was it that those women’s breastplates were strangely glowing from the inside?

That’s the made-you-look reaction Roseberry was clearly after with a collection he named The Abyss, a show that plumbed a slightly creepy fear of what lies in the ocean deeps as well as that of a not-so-distant future where, perhaps, humans will have merged with AI. It’s the kind of reaction he was looking for, the surrealist tension he believes Elsa Schiaparelli was always wanting to create. “It was a total surrender to an unknown creative process, even on the materialization,” he said backstage.

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The high art of technique is everything in the practice of haute couture. There are the tailoring, dress-making, hand-sewing, and embroidery skills that go back centuries—and then there are the experiments with new materials made possible by technological advancement. When he was looking for a material that resembles human skin, Roseberry found an “atelier outside of Paris that makes photo-realistic infants and babies for cinema,” he explained. “They’re silicone experts, and we started working building silicone as material and as objects. Lakes of silicone are poured out on tables, and it becomes like a satin, like a double-faced satin, basically.” After that, the material was manipulated to take the curviform shapes of boleros and hard corsets, and shiny, perfectly moulded body contours were achieved. You could imagine what it must be like to touch that, or wear it. One of the looks transformed a woman into a pale crustacean, a move Schiap herself would have surely liked.

Yet Roseberry said he wanted to contrast this future-couture with traditional skills. There were hours of labor in a pink explosion of hand-applied feathers, perhaps mimicking a sea urchin as well as in a strange abalone-like appendage stuck to someone’s belly and pretty micro-embroideries made from freeze-dried hydrangeas.

Vogue.com