On a blindingly sunny April morning, Daniel Roseberry, the creative director of Schiaparelli, chooses a bench in the shade. It’s windy in Paris’s Tuileries Garden, the chalky gravel swirling into miniature sandstorms, and Roseberry’s brown suede boots and black parka windbreaker are lightly covered in the dust. At age 40, the designer is strikingly handsome, with dark brown eyes, olive skin, and a silvering close-cropped beard. Although he’s been living in Paris for the past seven years, he’s just bought his first apartment in the 7th arrondissement. “My walk to work goes right through here,” he says. “It’s hard not to stop and take a beat, just to prepare for the day.”
Roseberry hasn’t had many opportunities to stop and take a beat since his appointment to the house in 2019. Previously, he’d worked for over a decade at Thom Browne, and left his role as design director of the New York brand before knowing his next move. Roseberry isn’t one to play it safe: “My mom always said, ‘Leap, and the net will appear.’”
On paper, the Texas-born designer seemed an unlikely candidate to helm a couture house that was still finding its footing in the fashion ecosystem (the maison’s founder, Elsa Schiaparelli, closed her iconic brand in 1954; the current owner, Diego Della Valle, revived the label in the early 2010s after decades of dormancy; in 2013, Christian Lacroix designed a couture collection for the house). For one thing, Roseberry had zero training in the art of couture. For another, no American had ever been appointed to lead an established French couture house. Roseberry, however, was undeterred. “I knew it was mine to lose,” he says. “I could feel it in my bones.”
In hindsight, any industry doubt about the young designer’s bona fides now seems laughably myopic. Lacking the marketing muscle of most brands or even a meager advertising budget, Roseberry has managed to build one of the most cultishly adored labels in fashion while still managing to honor the spirit of its eccentric namesake. Consider the viral explosion of such Roseberry concoctions as the toxic-green Incredible Hulk leather bustier that Kim Kardashian donned in 2020. Or the Surrealist gold-leaf lung necklace that was designed to fetishize the respiratory system in the wake of the Covid lockdowns. Or runway showstoppers like the faux-fur lion head growing out of a gown like a phantasmagoric corsage, a sci-fi dress embroidered with cords and crushed circuit boards in an ode to Ridley Scott’s film Alien, and, for his most recent season, lace bustiers transformed into menacing scorpion tails. Celebrities like Lady Gaga, Beyoncé, and Cardi B have gone out of their way to wear Schiaparelli to milestone events like the Grammys or a presidential inauguration (for Biden’s, Gaga’s look was constructed out of bulletproof fabric).
“I never felt like Elsa was telling me to rehash the past. I think she would have been so fucking bored with that approach. She would have been more like, ‘Take it and run.’” —Daniel Roseberry
Certainly, Roseberry is a wizard at reading the public’s appetite for shock and shareability, although he tends to attribute the origin of his creations to sudden moods (several of his recent dresses were sketched in a moment of anger) or longtime fascinations. (“Ever since I was a kid, I’ve been drawing cats.”) What he doesn’t do is design with one enduring pop-culture muse in mind. “There’s no ideal Schiaparelli woman,” Roseberry says. “But everyone you see wearing ‘Schiap’ has chosen to do so. We’ve never paid anyone to wear it.”
In a cultural landscape overloaded with brand ambassadorships and lucrative pay-to-play red-carpet deals, it’s nearly unheard of to rely on a celebrity’s personal taste or affinity for a particular designer. In fact, the very notion of a celebrity’s personal taste hardly seems relevant to today’s conversation. But it’s easy to see why public figures are drawn to Roseberry’s work. His bravado in ignoring trends and celebrating spectacle ensures an attention-grabbing ensemble that, in our eyeball economy, pays a form of dividend to the wearer.
Such caution-free daring does have its costs. A few weeks after our meeting, Lauren Sánchez Bezos, a longtime client, wore a satin Schiaparelli dress with a plunging neckline to the Met Gala, which she and Jeff Bezos helped sponsor. The relatively demure design was inspired by a John Singer Sargent painting, Madame X, but because of the furor over the couple’s sponsorship, the dress became a symbol of class warfare and, for reasons other than the ones Roseberry might be accustomed to, the most contentious look on the red carpet. Roseberry drew a line between creativity and politics during our conversation. “I don’t think people are desperate to hear politics from fashion people,” he says. “I don’t think it’s my job to use fashion to politicize. I’d rather just say something.” (Schiaparelli’s PR declined to comment on Sánchez Bezos’s relationship to the brand.)
This past spring, the exhibition “Schiaparelli: Fashion Becomes Art” opened at the V&A Museum in London. The show, which runs through November, pays homage to Elsa Schiaparelli’s radical designs, from her 1920s trompe l’œil knitwear to Surrealist collaborations with Salvador Dalí, including her infamous Skeleton Dress. Roseberry played a large hand in putting the exhibition together. Of the 400-some pieces featured, 24 are from his own tenure at the house. Roseberry says that he never felt the pressure of following in Elsa’s footsteps. “I never felt like she was telling me to rehash the past,” he says. “I think she would have been so fucking bored with that approach. She would have been more like, ‘Take it and run.’” Still, this past March, when he toured the exhibition alongside Schiaparelli’s granddaughter, actor Marisa Berenson, “it was like some energetic loop had been closed,” he explains. “We had worked so hard to tell her story. Elsa was the first person to merge art and fashion. She was the inventor of the runway show. She was the first designer to set a show to music. And now that we told her story, I felt like she gave up the ghost a little bit.
Roseberry was born in the North Texas town of Plano, the son of an Anglican priest and an artist. “Growing up, it was art and church, art and church,” he says. Early on, he felt the repression of his Texan roots and, like many curious young gay men with a creative streak, he escaped the provinces for the big city as soon as he could. He moved to New York at age 20 to attend fashion school. While Roseberry doesn’t consider himself a practicing Christian anymore, the church did provide him with a sense of structure, and its traditions and iconography certainly shaped his aesthetic. “I think of our fashion shows as Sunday services,” he says. “People come together to see, hear, and feel something beautiful. Especially for couture. Ready-to-wear is like party hopping. Couture is a different experience. People come wanting to receive.”
If Roseberry’s own years in New York were also a lot like a nightclub, his time in Paris has been far more monkish. He doesn’t drink or go out at night. Most evenings he eats alone in his apartment. For exercise, he takes runs—5 to 10 kilometers—along the Seine, and he’s even considering training for the New York City Marathon in November. Most importantly, though, he’s sketching. His pen of choice is a black fine-tip Tradio that draws lines like a quill. Usually he listens to music while he sketches (his current soundtrack is the latest Robyn album). He balks at the idea of designing with A.I. or Photoshop. “My atelier won’t do anything unless I give them a drawing,” he explains. “My hand for the line will compel their hand. That exchange is the beauty of couture.”
In this very park last October, only a few feet from where we are sitting, Roseberry sketched the scorpion tails and bird plumage that defined his most recent collection. Those fantastical dresses dominated social media practically the second they appeared on the runway, but Roseberry maintains that he isn’t designing to stir controversy to appease investors or satisfy the marketplace. “I feel so blessed to be at an independent house,” he says. “I feel like we’re beating the system with our own creativity. We can gag the world with a fraction of the resources of the big houses. We’re not just making piles of stuff.”
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