Schiaparelli jewellery box Daniel Roseberry’s SS22 couture

By Jessica Bumpus

Since Daniel Roseberry’s appointment at the French couture maison Schiaparelli, jewellery has become his thing. The American designer has embraced the house’s famous surreal heritage and interpreted it via jewels, from sculpted to embroidered, to being parts of the clothing themselves.

It’s made for the most compelling collections and a turnaround from the label that, prior to his arrival, was another flailing heritage brand. In the past year alone, highlights for Roseberry have included Lady Gaga, Adele and Cardi B wearing his wares and jewels. The designer’s latest spring/summer 2022 couture collection – which took place at the Le Petit Palais, the first IRL show for Schiap since the pandemic – once again played to this strength: jewellery orbiting the models.

Looks included a collar embroidered with a Trompe l’oeil jewellery necklace created from hand-moulded leather, embossed with ornaments covered in gold leaf and re-embroidered with cabochons, vintage jewels, rhinestones, and anatomical elements in resin. A sheer bodysuit in tulle with long sleeves and finished with a pair of gloves embroidered with cabochons, vintage rhinestone jewels, anatomical elements in resin, and hand-moulded leather ornaments covered with gold leaf. A jewelled cage dress constructed from embossed ornaments composed of hand-moulded leather and adorned with gold leaf, re-embroidered with cabochons, vintage jewels, rhinestones, and anatomical resin elements. A headdress on a metal structure was constructed from hand-moulded leather with relief ornaments covered in gold leaf and embroidered with cabochons, vintage jewels, rhinestones, and anatomical resin elements.

“Throughout the 23 fittings for this collection, I realised that what felt exciting in this moment was something different,” wrote Roseberry in a press release, “something restrained. Suddenly, colour felt wrong to me. So, did volume. All of the tricks that couture designers (including me) use to communicate grandeur and craftsmanship—big silhouettes, glorious poufs of fabric, huge volume—felt hollow. Instead, I wanted to see if we could achieve the same kind of drama and otherworldliness without relying on those tropes. All we needed, I realised, was black, white, and gold—yet it wasn’t so much a return to basics as it was a move towards the elemental.” 

He explained that having looked at the surreal for the past two years, he was now interested in the “empyreal” – “the heavens as a place to escape from the chaos of our planet, but also the home of a mythical priestess, at once goddess and alien, who might walk among us,” he explained. And went on to detail what she would wear. “After the rigour of tailoring and exhausting a new, sharper silhouette, she would embrace her inner Folly – giving way to fountains of gold, black plumage, creepy crawlies in cabochons, and a crystal cocktail dress like the inside of a jewellery box.”

The team had worked on achieving just the right gold, a Schiaparelli gold – including pieces with 24k gold leaf. Roseberry explained: “We’ve executed it in two ways, both engineered by the extraordinary artisans we collaborate with. In the first treatment, we created naive sculptures representing the codes of the Maison, in clay and foam. From here, the eyes and padlocks, the Lobster, the Dove, and a litany of body parts, become moulds for tissue-weight leather.” 

Next: “The weightless sculptures are then gilded in 24k gold leaf and embroidered with vintage cabochons and crystals sourced from the late 1930s. The effect is childlike and a little raw. The second you see in pieces like a columnar black silk jersey dress, its bodice over-spilling with long, shivering strands of metal, as if a corset had over-spilled its confines, comes from metal sheets and has been hammered, polished, and left to swoosh about like a jellyfish in water.” Quite magical. And a blurring the lines of what’s jewellery and what’s clothes. Here, we pick some of these most striking hybrid pieces…