Surrealism, held in place
Schiaparelli has never operated comfortably within fashion’s usual logic. Elsa Schiaparelli built the house by treating clothes as a medium for contradiction, illusion and collaboration with artists, and under Daniel Roseberry, that instinct has found a contemporary language of its own. For Fall/Winter 2026-2027, however, the surreal did not need to announce itself quite so loudly. It was woven into the construction of the clothes, appearing in details that seemed plausible at first glance before revealing something stranger.
The setting reinforced that shift. Roseberry brought Schiaparelli to the Carrousel du Louvre, once one of the defining venues of Paris Fashion Week, complete with an elevated runway recalling the fashion shows of the 1990s and early 2000s. Against that deliberately familiar backdrop, the collection explored a less stable idea of familiarity. Clothes appeared recognisable, sometimes almost conventional, until proportion, material or construction disrupted the image.
Familiar clothes, slightly disturbed
Tailoring provided the collection with its clearest foundation. Roseberry opened with a masculine three-piece suit, its pleated trousers falling loosely over ankle boots whose brass heels were sculpted into faces. Elsewhere, skirt suits and sharply constructed jackets offered recognisable wardrobe archetypes, but Schiaparelli’s vocabulary continually interfered with their apparent normality.
That tension between convention and disruption ran throughout the collection. Padding exaggerated shoulders, breasts and hips. A skirt extended unexpectedly into a tail supported by wire. Even garments that appeared comparatively straightforward carried some small displacement of proportion or detail, as though the familiar silhouette had been nudged just far enough away from reality to become unsettling.
Roseberry described the collection through contradiction, between fashion and commerce, dreammaking and practicality, between what a dress is expected to be and what it might become. It is a useful way of understanding these clothes. Their strangeness rarely exists independently from the garment. It grows out of something recognisable.
A convincing illusion
Trompe-l’œil has belonged to Schiaparelli since Elsa’s collaborations with the Surrealists, and Roseberry returned to it here without treating the archive as something to reproduce literally. Instead, illusion became a question of material.
Aran knits were fragmented across panels of transparent tulle, creating what Roseberry called an « impossible knit », where something visually heavy appeared almost suspended around the body. Glossy black surfaces that resembled leather were actually printed silk wool, while a pleated silk blend laminated with a transparent coating created a texture described as tree bark. Spiral cut-outs gave fluid garments the appearance of corseted structures without imposing the rigidity their construction seemed to suggest.
Other experiments pushed that ambiguity further. One top and skirt were constructed from unspooled cassette tapes and crushed CDs, while fur-like surfaces, painted crocodile scales and body prints repeatedly asked the eye to reconsider what it thought it was seeing. The effect was not illusion for its own sake. Material became part of the joke, but it was a joke built with considerable technical precision.
A question of anatomy
Schiaparelli’s relationship with the body has always been peculiar. Anatomy can become jewellery, clothing can imitate flesh, and familiar proportions can be displaced until the wearer seems caught somewhere between human figure and object.
Fall/Winter 2026 continued that conversation through distortion rather than exposure. Hosiery stuffed with wadding reshaped a skirt suit around the shoulders, breasts and hips, while prints reproduced fur or the curves of the female body across otherwise recognisable silhouettes. Roseberry connected this hybrid quality to Alberto Giacometti’s sphinx pin, an object combining human and animal forms that has become an important reference for his vision of the house.
There is something particularly Schiaparelli about that refusal to leave the body alone. It is neither hidden nor simply celebrated. It is stretched, imitated and occasionally made absurd, becoming another material through which the collection can test the limits of what appears normal.
Making the strange wearable
The accessories carried some of the collection’s most immediately surreal gestures. Shoes appeared with snarling cats or Doberman puppies at the toe, handbags balanced on chicken feet, and the house’s keyhole motif returned across garments and accessories. The latter reaches back to Elsa Schiaparelli’s own vocabulary, having first appeared on a handbag clasp in 1931.
Yet these details did not turn the collection into a catalogue of archival references. That distinction matters. Roseberry has spent several years developing a version of Schiaparelli in which surrealism can function as a recognisable house language rather than a historical quotation, and Fall/Winter 2026 showed how deeply that language can now enter ready-to-wear.
There was humour here, sometimes bordering on the grotesque, but it existed alongside clothes built with a serious understanding of construction. Draped and wrapped pieces with fine pleating drew inspiration from Alber Elbaz and the single-seam dresses created by his teams, introducing a different kind of technical complexity among the collection’s more visibly eccentric experiments.
Fluent in Schiaparelli
Perhaps the most convincing aspect of the collection was how little separation remained between the wearable and the surreal. Schiaparelli did not alternate between conventional clothes and extravagant statements. The contradiction often existed inside the same garment.
That marks an important stage in Roseberry’s development of the house. Surrealism no longer needs to arrive as an oversized anatomical ornament or an immediately recognisable visual trick. It can live in the fall of a trouser, a material pretending to be another material, a knit that seems to float or a handbag standing improbably on a pair of chicken feet.
With the V&A preparing to open an exhibition bringing Elsa Schiaparelli’s work into conversation with Roseberry’s own, Fall/Winter 2026 arrived at an interesting moment for the house. The collection acknowledged that history without allowing itself to become trapped by it.
Schiaparelli’s surrealism has not become quieter. It has become more fluent. And when a visual language is understood this well, it no longer needs to shout to make reality feel slightly unstable.
May