Sharp beaks and scorpion tails: Daniel Roseberry’s Schiaparelli couture collection had sting
Daniel Roseberry drew from the natural world at Schiaparelli, with bird’s beaks and scorpion tails shaping a couture collection attuned to the darker emotional undercurrent of now. Anders Christian Madsen reports…
Last season, Daniel Roseberry talked about “restructuring” his work at Schiaparelli. If that premise produced a much subtler expression than his usual approach to haute couture, this season felt like a reaction to those constrictions, whether self-imposed or prescribed. In the Petit Palais, to a Sunday Service Choir soundtrack so thunderous it vibrated in the ear, he presented a collection of menacing animal and insect shapes interpreted either in silhouette (winged skirts or lapels and clothes that protruded into scorpion tails) or in literal adornment (faux birds’ heads and beaks). Subtlety, it seems, had not agreed with Roseberry.
“I feel like the last few seasons have been more and more rigorous and controlled. This one swung the pendulum in the opposite direction,” he explained after the show, “I wanted to focus less on the way something looked and more on the way we felt while we were making it.” Roseberry had been inspired by what he felt when he visited the Sistine Chapel in October last year, citing the artworks’ “agony and ecstasy” and the way Michelangelo’s religious depictions “didn’t tell us what happened, but instead gave his audience permission for how to feel when they looked at art.”
The last few seasons have been more and more rigorous and controlled. This collection swung the pendulum in the opposite direction. I wanted to focus less on the way something looked and more on the way we felt while we were making it.
Daniel Roseberry
While birds and bugs can be portrayed with poetic and romantic impact, it didn’t feel like that was the intention on this Monday morning. Rather, there was an aggression to Roseberry’s animalistic expressions that made you feel unnerved and a bit squeamish, the way you would when, well, confronted with any kind of dead, beaky bird’s head or a scorpion’s tail arching along a woman’s back. Backstage, he likened some of the insect elements to Ridley Scott’s Alien. In terms of impact, that connotation was spot on.
“Normally, we associate anger with aggression, but this was something different. This was anger giving permission to experience and create something that was joyful in the process,” Roseberry said. He didn’t elaborate on where the anger came from, but perhaps that part was self-explanatory. As the laboratory of fashion—not just of technique but feeling, too—haute couture should be a raw expression of the emotion du jour. So far, 2026 has been so anxiety-inducing that you’re afraid to turn on CNN in the morning, so perhaps it’s not so strange that—given free flow—the creative mind produces menacing imagery.
Normally, we associate anger with aggression, but this is something different. This is anger giving permission to experience and create something that was joyful in the process.
Daniel Roseberry
Against the backdrop of the Schiaparelli spectacle—Demi Moore and Teyana Taylor on the front row, a slew of influencers clad in Roseberry’s theatrical silhouettes, and the soundtrack transitioning into a trippy remix of Robyn’s new banger Dopamine—the show easily portrayed the madness a lot of us are feeling now. With sharp beaks and poisonous tails in tow, it just made the whole thing that more perverse; that more felt.
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