Schiaparelli Gets Under the Skin
Silicone and body plates turned Daniel Roseberry’s Fall-Winter 2026 Schiaparelli haute couture show into a macabre study of artifice, anatomy and transformation. EE72 Fashion Critic Anders Christian Madsen reviews the show.
The body-enhancing, second-skin fabric constructions that opened the Schiaparelli haute couture show at the Petit Palais on Monday morning soon took a macabre turn. Slowly, Daniel Roseberry started replacing the materials with latex and silicone, slicing into them like they were fabric… or, indeed, skin. The collection had started with an outing to a company outside Paris that produces photorealistic silicone recreations of babies for French cinema, which doesn’t allow children under the age of three months to appear in films. “We started pouring the silicone onto sheets, using it as fabric and sculpting with it, and really reimagining the building blocks of the collection itself,” Roseberry said.
In tandem with his animatronic cutting – and use of moulded breastplates, one of which Zendaya wore to the premiere of The Odyssey in the evening – it quickly turned the collection into a very 2020s study of real vs. fake. Not only in the sense of illusion, but of handwork itself, and the notion of silicone not just as cinematic prosthetic but as artisanal craft. “It’s really been a story of surrendering to what’s happening today: surrendering to the unknown, the digital,” Roseberry said, explaining that the flowers used in surface work were real – dried in sugar water – along with elements like seashells. “It was a lot of artificial-and-natural happening at the same time.”
You could apply the same words to many of the characters who descend upon the Paris couture shows, from clients to models and everyone else. Sliced and tucked and tightened to unreal levels, our present-day approach to haute couture doesn’t stop at clothes. “I always think of that Cristóbal quote: ‘You don’t need a body when you come to me. I’ll give you a new one,’” Roseberry said, quoting Balenciaga. He was referring to the collection’s body plates, but his show really illustrated how the appearance industries have morphed today. Between custom-made clothes and plastic surgery, we’re all about body modification. Today, we’re just more occupied with turning illusions into reality.
It’s really been a story of surrendering to what’s happening today: surrendering to the unknown, the digital. It was a lot of artificial-and-natural happening at the same time
Daniel Roseberry
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