Schiaparelli FW25: The Shape of What’s Missing

At the Petit Palais, Daniel Roseberry presented a collection that peeled back the layers of couture rather than adding more. Gone were the viral stunts and costume theatrics. What remained was something quieter, stranger, and far more intimate.

The show opened with a stark black-and-white palette — a contrast not just visual, but emotional. These were garments as memory, as provocation, as breath held in. Corsets no longer cinched or shaped; they outlined, revealed, questioned. Ribcage-like structures hovered over the body, framing not flesh, but absence. What if couture didn’t perform? What if it whispered?

Each silhouette was drawn with restraint but rarely resolved. Coats crumpled mid-motion, seams curved then fell apart, drapes were unfinished sentences. The tension wasn’t between tradition and innovation — it was between surface and depth. Schiaparelli’s surrealism lived on, not in bombast, but in eerie grace. Feathers jutted where symmetry should’ve been. Velvet faked neoprene. Gloves mimicked skeletal wings. Nothing landed quite where expected.

There were no lions this time, no viral accessories engineered for the internet. But there was still armor — quieter, psychic, slow-burning. A twisted ribbon, a displaced rosette, a shoulder that refused to sit politely. Every detail demanded a second look. Maybe even a third.

Roseberry wasn’t referencing Elsa Schiaparelli directly — but she lingered. Not as a quote, but as an energy. A mood. That disorienting push-and-pull between elegance and oddity, presence and absence.

FW25–26 wasn’t about nostalgia or provocation. It was about control — and the power of letting go of it. In an age of algorithms and overload, this was couture as negative space. It didn’t ask to be liked. It asked to be interpreted.

And in doing so, it reminded us that the most radical act in fashion today might simply be restraint.