Creative Director Daniel Roseberry takes flight on the wings of myth and history, soaring toward the sun with all the ambition of Icarus—but never faltering
And there it was, as if the heavens themselves had opened and poured a golden flood of decadence onto the runway. Icarus—the Schiaparelli Haute Couture Spring/Summer 2025 collection—took flight without a single tremor, soaring higher than any myth ever dared. Daniel Roseberry crafted a collection that did what most dream of, but few ever achieve: it reached for the sun, kissed it, and never got burned.
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More than a mere nod to Greek myth, Icarus was a declaration of unbridled ambition. The wings didn’t melt; they glistened. The flight didn’t falter; it hovered majestically over a sky of possibility. Schiaparelli introduced a haute couture collection that was as mind-bending as it was carefully constructed, with the garments seemingly designed to defy the laws of fashion, or physics.
Roseberry didn’t just throw a few baroque flourishes and call it a day. He delved into history, resurrecting color palettes and silhouettes from the past and distorting them into something futuristic. The collection began with an exploration of color, not just for its aesthetic appeal, but for its historical resonance. “Toast” brown and “mink” grey were touches of lost artistry, dredged from the depths of time and resurrected with care. Roseberry sought to break free from the modernist obsession with simplicity, creating instead a collection that felt new because it was rich with the complexity of the past. He drew from the greats—Grès, Poiret, and Yves Saint Laurent—imbuing these colors with an almost sacred reverence.
Then came the shapes—sharp, sleek, and decidedly alien. The silks took liquid deco, pouring onto the body in curves that slinked and slithered like a seductive dance between past and present. These were the impossible, gravity-defying forms that could have only emerged from the mind of someone who truly believes they can reshape reality with fabric. The hip blades, the precise corsetry, the veils of feathers—these elements held weightlessness and structure, like a dream on the cusp of shattering into cosmic dust. It was all baroque opulence, but it felt fresh, unexpected, relevant.
We were served a banquet of references: the snaky, curvaceous silhouettes of the 1920s—liquid and flowing—juxtaposed with the angularity of prewar Schiaparelli jackets, twisted and elongated for 2025. There were the gilded aesthetics of 1950s couture, but reimagined, as though the very fabric had been plucked from another dimension. The A-line skirts are reproportioned to perfection, sweeping down the body like wings slicing through the air—an entirely new take on classicism. And then, there were those iconic Schiaparelli moments—the dove, the keyhole, the anatomy—etched into satin stitch and dripping with smoky quartz.
The textures flew with audacity. The feathers drenched in glycerin, brushed with keratin, giving them an unexpected weight. Satin cuir A-line dresses are constructed from “leather satin”, shimmering with an otherworldly sheen: soft as velvet yet as tough as a shield. The Icarus collection was an exploration of contrasts: lightness and weight, tradition and reinvention, mythology and reality—all flowing into one another.
The collection was crafted, embroidered, and perfected to a degree that had us wondering if they might be too beautiful to actually wear. Roseberry knows how to dress a woman: adorned her with the moon, the stars, and the sun itself.
It’s impossible to talk about this collection without acknowledging the level of ambition it demands. Daniel Roseberry drags couture with a fervor few have seen. Icarus, from the perspective of this collection, wasn’t about falling; it was about rising. To heights no one thought possible.
Photos: SCHIAPARELLI
