“This collection is dedicated to (the) period when life and art were on the precipice: to the sunset of elegance and to the end of the world as we knew it.” Daniel Roseberry penned this ominous line in his couture press release. He was referring to the pre-World War II period in Paris, when Elsa Schiaparelli made her name as the queen of surrealist fashion—in retrospect, a kind of extreme, bonkers imaging of the febrile tension of the time.
A pinnacle of that moment was her 1938 Zodiac collection, made just before she fled Paris ahead of the Nazi invasion. Well, Roseberry has already done extreme and bonkers in his time, but in this collection his mood and curiosity to experiment seemed to be going somewhere else. He said he’d been studying Schaip’s work mainly through its depictions in the black-and-white photography of Man Ray and Horst. That starting point cast a darkness and shadow over the collection, but only in a good way.
It started and ended with replicas of Schiaparelli’s work—a black skirt suit with one of her famous embroidered jackets, and a rendering of her ‘Apollo’ cape at the finale. Only it was worn back to front. Things going on backwards is a widespread fashion trope of the moment, for reasons that seem pretty symbolic, politics being as they are, and everything. This notion did bring on one sensation-grabber: a red corseted satin dress constructed with a fake torso and breasts in the back, with a pulsating red rhinestone heart necklace hanging just below the nape of the model’s neck.
Still, save the black saddle that appeared, throwing things a bit in the middle of the show, Roseberry had mostly turned away from corseting. The appreciation of subtlety and technique is often quashed when there are sensational visual distractions bombarding your sight-line. That wasn’t the case this time as Roseberry conjured some incredible shaded optics from darkness: black tulle muting the surface of a dense Donegal tweed skirt suit, a black polka-dot tailored suit which, close up, was semi-sheer.
To replace corseting, he concentrated on flou and bias-cutting. Two superb bias trouser-suits with foulard neckties, fluted sleeves, and trousers hit a note between softness and strength Roseberry hasn’t accorded women so far. Further on, his shapes leaned more into the lean, lithe glamour of 1930s evening dresses: liquid, pieced satin, lit as if in a silvery spotlight.
Yes, there were things which didn’t make sense: matador suits, or the occurrence of red dresses in an avowedly black-and-white collection. But, hey, this is surrealism. Anything can happen, as we know these days. Roseberry had the right instinct to follow his pulsating heart in a new direction. It might seem insulting to someone who has put so much store by sculptural and theatrical design, but there was such a lot here that looked beautifully wearable, it was almost shocking.
