The door the bone dress opened

This essay was first published in NGV Triennial 2023, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne.

In Paris, the City of Light, there is a historic square situated between the Palais Garnier and the Tuileries Garden, known as the Place Vendôme. It is pierced by a spiralling column forged from the smelted canons of the armies of Europe at the turn of the nineteenth century. Topped by a statue of Napoleon Bonaparte in a Grecian robe, the column surveys every corner of the Place Vendôme, a veritable cradle of luxury, home to the Ritz hotel, many of the world’s most prestigious jewellery workshops and their boutiques, and the haute couture salons of the fabled fashion house Schiaparelli. Magic – of the tangible, earthly variety – is everywhere, from the shop windows displaying spectacular necklaces and watches sparkling with diamonds and precious gemstones, transformed in the ateliers high above street level, to the flurry of fans and paparazzi so often camped outside the Ritz hoping for a glimpse of their favourite celebrity.

At No. 21 Place Vendôme, the name Schiaparelli has remained scrawled across the awning of the Hôtel de Fontpertuis since the mid 1930s, when the designer Elsa Schiaparelli combined her ateliers, haute couture salons and ground-floor boutique at a single address, conceived in a fresh and eclectic style by the celebrated French architect Jean-Michel Frank with their friend, the Swiss sculptor Alberto Giacometti. Schiaparelli was a Roman aristocrat who as a young girl studied the stars with her father Celestino, a scholar, and her uncle Giovanni, a prominent astronomer. She left the shelter of the family home, Palazzo Corsini, and the advances of an unwanted suitor for London and New York before being coaxed back to Europe by her friend Gaby Buffet-Picabia, who introduced her to the aristocratic and avantgarde elite of Paris between the world wars. There, Schiaparelli met painters and great thinkers, musicians and writers – people who nourished her visual and interior world. They were the Surrealists: people like Leonora Fini, Salvador Dalí, Marcel Vertès, Jean Cocteau and Christian Bérard, whose dreamlike artistic universes pushed at the boundaries of classicism and reality, and who would all collaborate with Schiaparelli on commercially creative endeavours, from perfume bottles to advertising, to fabric prints and outlandish embroideries.

Once settled in Paris, Schiaparelli made her first foray into fashion, a quietly radical act that would become one of the most fundamental building blocks of twentieth-century fashion design: the trompe l’oeil – ‘trick of the eye’ – bow knitted in contrast to the collar of a hand-knitted black-and-white sweater she herself wore to a ladies’ luncheon. This symbolic anti-embellishment, almost pixelated in its effect, was the talk of the town, and was followed shortly after by further experiments with similar two-dimensional motifs such as a sailor’s bib, a bleeding heart and a man’s tie. Later, she produced dresses printed with illustrations of her perfume bottles, buttons in the shape of beetles, and, in a sculptural exercise with her friend Salvador Dalí, an elegant black felt hat in the shape of a woman’s high-heeled shoe. Schiaparelli’s penchant for clothes imbued with symbols and stories would culminate in some of the twentieth century’s most dazzling haute couture garments embroidered by the venerated embroidery house of Lesage, including a series of ‘zodiac’ jackets, dresses embroidered with Baroque drawers, and the gilded Phoebus cape from 1938, cut in shocking pink silk velvet and embellished with a lyrical sun. Elsewhere, grapes, coral, sheaves of wheat, roses, butterflies, parrots and lobsters were all common decorative elements in her garments and accessories, treated with a bombastic flair that far surpassed the prettiness of the work of other couturiers of the time.

Though the strange beauty of the natural world was a key conceit in her creations, it was Schiaparelli’s treatment of humanistic elements that would truly imbue her oeuvre with a mysticism all its own. In particular, her collaborations with Cocteau and Dalí pushed the Surrealism and figuration in her work to new heights, with human profiles traced out in delicate bugle beadwork on jackets and coats, red python ‘fingernails’ applied to black suede gloves, and brooches featuring bejewelled ‘crying’ eyes and ruby-red mouths revealing pearl teeth. Inspired by a sketch by Dalí, Schiaparelli’s black silk crepe Skeleton dress traced with trapunto quilted bones from the 1938 Le Cirque collection was a truly modern gesture, cut with the fluidity of her earlier sportswear innovations imbued with an almost sinister anatomical representation, bringing the inside out.

After the designer’s death in 1973 her fashion house lay dormant for decades, revived only in the 2010s by the Italian fashion mogul Diego Della Valle and helmed first by the Swedish-Italian designer Marco Zanini, who was followed shortly after by the French designer Bertrand Guyon. Both names revitalised curiosity and intrigue around the Schiaparelli name, but it was not until the American designer Daniel Roseberry arrived in 2019 that momentum truly shifted. Moving to Paris after a decade spent in the studio of the American designer Thom Browne in New York, the Texan-born talent took the sense of narrative showmanship he had honed with Browne and projected it into Schiaparelli’s universe. For his first show in July 2019, Roseberry himself appeared centrestage, sketching at a drafting table in the middle of the runway, evoking the concept of tabula rasa – a blank page – as his first creations paraded around him. Of those first attempts at capturing Schiaparelli’s surreal spirit, it was a pair of nebulous, gravity-defying confections in swathes of silk faille that crystallised his trajectory, upsizing Schiaparelli’s codes and marrying them with his own sense of metafictional fashion, American realism and contemporary showmanship. ‘When I think about magic, I think about childhood’, says Roseberry, reflecting on one of the themes of the NGV Triennial 2023. ‘And I think about the suspension of disbelief. Every season you have to claw your way back to a space of creative innocence, where you feel like magical things are possible once again.’¹

Respecting the legacy of a legend while moving forward with one’s own agenda is a challenging task for a fashion designer, who is constantly caught in a tug of war between past, present and future. In that sense, Roseberry’s journey has been twofold: at first, a case of reluctantly embracing touches of Schiaparelli’s more textbook references, opting rather to riff on her spirit more so than her signature motifs, before plunging headfirst into larger-than-life caricatures of those very tropes. ‘I feel like she was the first person to address the concept of displacement in fashion’, he reflects, adding:

That didn’t really exist before her, but that exists everywhere now. It seems there’s no limit to the amount of Surrealism in fashion now. But I think it’s always been a key part of this brand. It’s that contradiction, that displacement and that chic strangeness that defines her work and that doesn’t define Dior’s work. It doesn’t define Chanel’s work. You would never say Chanel’s legacy was strangeness. And I think that the fact that Elsa was able to do it in a way that always felt like she was still reaching up and still reaching for something that was disciplined and refined and chosen, as opposed to just a collage or something that felt too intentional. I think that the Surrealism and the artistry feels interchangeable here.

By stepping up to the plate and approaching the founder’s ideas with such gusto, Roseberry unlocked a new universality in the work that was previously lacking, moving the conversation away from the subtle romance so often associated with the rarefied world of haute couture towards a bolder vision. In doing so, he successfully provoked the sense of wonderment that comes from, say, a shocking pink velvet gown that hangs not from the wearer’s shoulders, but from a pair of gold doorknocker earrings, or a denim jacket bedazzled with filigree embroideries of eyes and ears, replete with a mismatched pair of perky gilded breasts. ‘The Matador collection was designed with a child’s viewpoint in mind’, says Roseberry, referring to the autumn–winter 2021–22 haute couture collection that also included a black dress with a circular sleeve pattern festooned with 3D silk roses, inspired by an evening coat Schiaparelli designed with Cocteau. He elaborates:

I was imagining if a child walked through the Schiaparelli couture salons, which would be the pieces that he or she would like to reach out and grab? And that’s why the flower dress was really meant to be this bombastic, first degree (in the best possible way) thing. We’re not going into the finery, the subtlety, the nuance. And that’s all very Schiaparelli to me as well, because I find her work intentionally first degree, especially in her embellishment and embroidery.

Roseberry has pushed said embellishment to extraordinary places, with his ambitious designs surpassing the capabilities and expertise of traditional fashion and accessories ateliers. In their stead he’s employed metalworkers, sculptors, jewellers and technicians, who have helped him realise anthropomorphic pieces such as bustiers in mother of pearl, Ceylan lemon tree wood marquetry, a bronze face cast of his muse Maggie Joy Maurer, gowns with moulded leather abs, and headdresses blooming with brass flowers or swirling sunrays covered in gilded leather. ‘It’s interesting to look at the moment when the anatomy and the references to the human body started coming really strongly into the collections’, says Roseberry, acknowledging the psychological effect of his creations:

That’s turned into sort of a code of the house and a staple. It’s as if a legacy of my work here has been to walk through the door that the bone dress opened and exploit that in infinite variations. I feel like the human body is the one thing we all have that we can agree on, and they all look different, but it’s the common ground. Even a soul, or whatever consciousness is, feels subjective, but the physical form feels like the link that, as an outsider in Paris, I feel I’m always looking for.

DAN THAWLEY is an Australian journalist and editor based in Paris. From 2009 until 2023 he was Editor-in-Chief of the Belgian fashion title A Magazine Curated By, editing issues with acclaimed fashion designers. He has contributed reviews, essays and interviews to Vogue, The Business of Fashion, Wallpaper*, Architectural Digest and System Magazine.

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