How Schiaparelli’s couture collections inspire ‘Hunger Games’ frenzy

The surrealist Parisian brand has attracted fans from Lauren Sánchez Bezos to Beyoncé under Texan creative director Daniel Roseberry.

Schiaparelli creative director Daniel Roseberry has reinvigorated the stuffy craft of creating custom clothing for rich clients. Picture: Schiaparelli

‘What does it mean to show the most extraordinary clothes on planet Earth on Monday, July 7th, at 10am?” Daniel Roseberry asks in his Parisian atelier.

Roseberry answered that question at his Schiaparelli haute couture show earlier this month in Paris. The creative director says he inverted the 1920s and 30s archives of house founder Elsa Schiaparelli to make them look modern – sharp, embroidered black jackets, bias-cut chiffon dresses, matador pants and a sculpted, fetishistic saddle dress.

Since joining the historic brand in 2019, the 40-year-old Roseberry has reinvigorated the stuffy craft of creating custom clothing for rich clients. Rather than exist in a rarefied bubble, Roseberry’s couture brings in the whole circus of today, from reality stars to social media virality to the billionaire class. Fashion fans from Mumbai to Mississippi, most of whom will never order a six-figure gown, ogle photos of Kylie Jenner in a lion’s-head dress at a Schiaparelli show or Bella Hadid in a golden-lung necklace at Cannes.

Daniel Roseberry at Paris Fashion Week in Marc. Picture: 305pics/GC Images

More than clothing, Roseberry creates moments. Every weekday, he walks from his home in the 7th arrondissement to Schiaparelli’s Place Vendome headquarters. He says working there is a “Wes Anderson fantasy”. The labyrinth of little rooms filled with curiosities, once used by Elsa, was purchased by the Della Valle family of the Tod’s Group after acquiring the brand in 2006.

Schiaparelli has shops in Paris, Monaco and Dubai and at Harrods in London, Bergdorf Goodman in New York and Neiman Marcus in Los Angeles, and plans to open more in other cities.

This month the brand announced that the exhibition Schiaparelli: Fashion Becomes Art will open at London’s Victoria and Albert Museum in March 2026.

Roseberry, who cut his teeth working at Thom Browne, hadn’t set foot in a couture atelier when he arrived at Schiaparelli. The brand shows two couture and two ready-to-wear shows a year. Growing up in Plano, Texas, in the 1990s and early 2000s, Roseberry developed his fashion sense by watching Joan Rivers and Steve Kmetko host red-carpet shows – “when Bjork was hatching an egg in her swan dress”. He felt the potential to bring the pop-culture sizzle of the American red carpet to couture. “I didn’t have an understanding of how to tackle couture, but I knew I wanted to disrupt the red carpet,” he says.

Soon, celebrities including Beyonce, Lady Gaga and Kim Kardashian were wearing his pieces.

Schiaparelli’s Haute Couture Fall-Winter 2025/26. Picture: Schiaparelli

The surrealist Parisian brand has attracted fans from Lauren Sánchez Bezos to Beyoncé under Texan creative director Daniel Roseberry. Picture: Schiaparelli

Today, the celebrities are still present but are less central. At the spring 2023 couture show, Jenner wore the lion’s-head dress in the front row while the same style came down the runway. “Two years ago, the idea of treating the front row as an extension of the collection felt really revelatory to me, but it’s not what I think would be correct today,” Roseberry says.

The most viral moment of this month’s show came not from guests Dua Lipa or Cardi B, who posed with a live crow, but from a red dress with sculpted breasts on the back, cradling a Dali-inspired necklace that pulsed like a beating heart. Its red rhinestones are mounted on mesh around a mechanism that pumps 60 beats a minute, the same as a human heart at rest. It charges with an iPhone USB charger.

Paying attention to the back of a garment has an almost existential meaning for Roseberry. During lockdown he realised the front of his clothing was crucial since we were communicating via screens. But now he’s interested in emphasising the more hidden side of garments. He cringes when he sees all the people with their phones up during his shows and is tickled by these less capturable details.

Daniel Roseberry. Picture: Getty Images for The Met Museum/Vogue)

Which makes these pieces only more desirable for Schiaparelli’s rabid couture clients, such as Swedish creative director and philanthropist Fredrik Robertsson, who hoped to buy the beating-heart necklace as well as the breast dress made into a top.

During the show, the couture clients begin texting their salespeople with their orders, which are meted out according to a complex hierarchy. (No one knows quite where they sit in the pecking order of museums, royalty or, say, Katy Perry.) If they’re not at the show, they’re watching on a live stream and wiring a deposit in real time.

“It’s The Hunger Games,” Roseberry says of his clients’ fervour. While some brands have only a part-time couture atelier, Schiaparelli’s is fully booked year-round churning out orders. Clients are able to order not only current pieces but also archival pieces customised to their tastes.

Glamazon billionaire bride Lauren Sanchez Bezos brought the brand to an even bigger stage when she wore a gold strapless embroidered gown from Schiaparelli’s spring 2025 couture collection to her pre-wedding dinner in Venice in June.

“I really was not prepared at all for the amount of coverage that had,” Roseberry says.

“She bought that gown. And I think that speaks to the secret power of Schiap is that we’ve never paid anyone to wear the clothes. People wear the clothes because they want to.”

The Wall Street Journal