Cowboys And Aliens At Schiaparelli’s Spring/Summer 2024 Haute Couture Show

For Daniel Roseberry, the future isn't governed by development but forged by our connections to the past

When we look to the stars, we often think of the future. But space is much older than us, and its connection to the Schiaparelli house goes back far—something Daniel Roseberry illuminated with his Spring/Summer 2024 Haute Couture collection.

The niece of the famed astronomer Giovanni Schiaparelli, Elsa Schiaparelli grew up with a love of all things otherworldly. It’s a fascination many of us share and one that permeated her craft.

As we begin to reconcile with the rise of artificial intelligence and headlines of all the varied ways it’s going to eat up our humanity, Roseberry offers a different perspective. In an interview before the show, the creative director was inspired by this topic that has been plaguing the arts, pondering how we combat machine-learned creativity. But of course, there are influences we can tap into that they can’t.

“What differentiates us as humans is our memories. I think of this as in music—like in an album where you have all these different references being mixed together,” he said. “The composite is something that feels really original, a handwriting that feels unique to the house. But if you go inside the looks, it’s really like a treasure trove of personal references mixed with the past.”

Since his start at the helm of the house, Roseberry has always been praised for his reverence and care for its founder’s legacy and taste. His ability to channel her taste and reimagine her processes for a different world is inexplicable. But with his latest show at the Petite Palais in Paris, titled “SCHIAPARALIEN”, he fuses his and Elsa’s worlds together, weaving the threads of their inspirations to craft a collection that only humans could fashion.

There were signatures of keyhole motifs, anatomical shapes and dashes of astrological homages to Elsa’s work, but there were artful deviations and unmistakably fresh references that were, as it was to be revealed, referential to Roseberry’s Texan upbringing.

A suit spiked with horse dressing knots; exaggerated epaulettes peppered all over a towering bodice, and oversized Western buckles that adorned the sides of trousers, boots and jackets. Elsewhere, Elsa’s love of space merged with Roseberry’s obsession with the Alien movie franchise, with Look 6 a couture ode to Sigourney Weaver’s Ellen Ripley. In the same look, the millennial tech nostalgia hit with a baby perched on model Maggie Maurer‘s hip—only it wasn’t alive and made up entirely of defunct motherboards and other bits of electronic waste from a bygone era. The same treatment took shape in a mini dress that was adorned in these scraps, with loose wires and corpses of old mobile brick phones hanging off. A thinly veiled jab at the technology that once promised a brighter future? Maybe.

Roseberry’s affinity for curves took expansive forms on the design side, with models cocooned in structural pods and draped in ballooning skirts. Look 12 was comprised of a suit set with a shirt and tie—all made up of the same pearlescent fabric that glistened as it moved, while look 16 featured a dress that lingered over its wearer like a paper doll’s costume. Asymmetry, in general, seemed to be more present than in his past collections, suggesting that the designer is gearing up to be more experimental in his approach. And why not? He’s proven himself unquestionably and never ceases to observe Elsa’s vision. With SS24 Haute Couture, we see more of Roseberry, not just in what he can do but who he is, and I think we’re ready for more.