In a world of mega brands, the house of Schiaparelli is small but perfectly formed. There are only 10 points of sale worldwide where Schiaparelli clothes can be bought. The size of the business has risen from $6m in 2020 to around $100m today, but Schiaparelli is still small fry compared with other names on the Paris catwalks.
However, the Schiaparelli name punches above its weight. An exhibition at London's V&A museum this year made a strong case for its founder, Elsa Schiaparelli, who collaborated with Salvador Dali and Jean Cocteau, as a creative force in the surrealism movement of the 1930s.
Kylie Jenner in a dress adorned with a fake lion's head and Bella Hadid on the Cannes red carpet with an elaborate gold necklace covering her breasts have put the brand name all over TikTok. "It's an amazing time at Schiap," designer Daniel Roseberry said after his Paris show. "It's a smaller house, but I feel like the voice is so big. It's exclusive, but it's real, because what we show on the catwalk is exactly what we sell."
Schiap – Elsa's nickname has become a nickname for her house – is strong meat. In his haute couture collections, Roseberry has leaned into Schiaparelli's visual signature of anatomical detail parlayed into glamour. A tight dress might have a padded spine, gloves embroidered with glossy red fingernails, a jacket buttoned with a row of tiny gold ears or noses.
Roseberry is training for the New York City Marathon, and there was a sportiness and, by Schiap standards, a simplicity to the stretch cocktail frocks that opened the show. ("I'm in my aerodynamic era, I guess.") Still plenty of gold-foiled nipples and peekaboo fabrics, however, and a finale of dinner jackets, snug and haughty with embroidery taken from the house archives.
As an American in Paris, Roseberry was joined last year on the fashion week schedule by Jack McCollough and Lazaro Hernandez, both appointed to lead Loewe after Jonathan Anderson's elevation to Dior.
They have brought an American levity to the brand, bringing a more playful tone to the high-concept artiness and inside-joke wit with which Anderson turned a Spanish craft house into a fashion power player. The backwards baseball cap made perhaps its first Paris fashion week appearance in living memory.
The distinctive silhouette of a basketball vest, with its longline hem, low scooped neck and piped hems, was the template for delicious slip dresses in sorbet colours, fringed at the edges with tiny beads in contrasting shades. Capri pants came with a kick at the knee, like bullfighter breeches. McCollough and Hernandez called it "the ease of American pragmatism, and nods to Spanish drama, ritual, history".