"It's a Schiaparelli baby," said those who witnessed couture magic at the designer's show held recently at the Paris Fashion Week. Though not an expectation, since nothing can be expected other than excellence from the chief designer at the legacy house, Daniel Roseberry, and yet the way he commands jaws to drop and hair to rise is not surprising, not even for his latest show. Shape and structure using fully embellished pieces with pre-2007 technology and Swarovski crystals were the talking points of this collection. The offspring of this collection was a literal robot baby, a faux baby covered fully with tech chips, crystals and wires carried by a "mother" model in a sleek white outfit holding the baby close, quite like a mother's real embrace. Does she qualify to be called a motherboard now then?
The show was a parade, celebrating structure and dimension, Schiaparelli's patent memo for all their shows. The show began with extra-terrestrial forms created with exaggerated shoulders, spikey alien spines, necklines and sleeves. It soon took form with wholly large buckle and leather outfits, maybe an ode to Roseberry's Texan lineage. Gilded-toe footwear, embellished statement earpieces and literal keyhole-shaped keyhole cutouts were some of the legacy house's signature-coded aesthetic in continuation to the show.
While the queen of couture, Cardi B, was absent from the celeb roll call of this stellar show, some of the house's loyal friends were headlining the front row. We didn't imagine Zendaya, Hunter Schafer and Jennifer Lopez to be captured in the same picture but we did. To show their support in formation, the trio were seen in all Schiaparelli, everything.
After last year's animal heads roaring in approval, Daniel Roseberry can take a bow yet again this year. Hunter Schafer's mouth-agape reaction after seeing the collection on the runway was so relatable that all of us at Swirlster went,
"Same Hunter, same."
