Fashion

For Fall 2027, Schiaparelli Pushes Couture Into the Unknown

BYKhaoula Ghanem

July 13, 2026

Daniel Roseberry has reached an unusual point in his career where the greatest challenge facing each new Schiaparelli couture collection is outperforming the one that came before it. Since taking the helm of the house in 2019, the American designer has steadily transformed Italian maison into one of Couture Week’s most anticipated ticket—the front row included Bad Bunny, Emma Corrin, and Michelle Yeoh, among other A-listers and industry insiders— and with every increasingly ambitious collection comes an equally impossible expectation that lightning will somehow strike twice. It is the sort of pressure that usually produces repetition. Instead, Roseberry continues to surprise.

That makes the Schiaparelli Fall 2026 Couture collection, dubbed The Call of the Void, feel particularly significant. In the collection notes, Roseberry openly admits that he began the season by attempting to recreate the process behind last season’s critically acclaimed The Agony and the Ecstasy, believing he had finally unlocked the formula. He returned to Barcelona, immersed himself in Antoni Gaudí’s architecture, and waited for inspiration to arrive on cue, only to discover that creativity doesn’t work like that. It was only after abandoning the search for certainty and embracing what the French call l’appel du vide, or “the call of the void,” that the collection finally revealed itself.

The Gaudí references were immediately apparent, although not in the superficial way one might expect. Rather than reproducing the architect’s buildings through prints or motifs, Roseberry borrowed the principles that made them extraordinary in the first place. Gaudí’s work rarely appears designed so much as grown, with façades resembling coral reefs, columns branching like trees, and stone that seems softened by centuries beneath water. That same organic logic shaped almost every silhouette on Roseberry’s runway, where garments appeared less constructed than cultivated, as though they had emerged naturally from some unfamiliar ecosystem.

A cropped jacket densely embroidered with thousands of clustered floral elements instantly recalled the fractured ceramic skin of Casa Batlló, its saturated greens, violets, yellows, and blues echoing the building’s iridescent surface without ever slipping into imitation. Elsewhere, glossy black latex unfurled into curling tentacles that wrapped themselves around shoulders and backs with an unsettling sense of movement, while transparent tulle disappeared beneath hundreds of looping crinoline tendrils that seemed suspended somewhere between marine life and Art Nouveau ironwork.

What ultimately separates Roseberry from many of his contemporaries, however, is that his collections are rarely driven by silhouette alone. Increasingly, his greatest contribution lies in expanding the material vocabulary of couture itself. For generations, haute couture has been defined by the elevation of already precious materials through extraordinary craftsmanship. Roseberry turns that equation inside out by asking whether luxury resides in silk, satin, and lace, or whether it exists in the imagination capable of transforming something entirely unexpected into couture. It is an idea that runs throughout the entire collection, where silicone, latex, fish scales, preserved flowers, and even baked pools of paint occupy the same space once reserved exclusively for duchesse satin and gazar.

The collection’s most arresting looks embodied that philosophy with astonishing confidence. A sculptural bustier, painstakingly carved before being cast in silicone and painted an ethereal shade of milky blue, rose seamlessly from a translucent skirt embroidered with hundreds of delicate floral forms that gradually dissolved into the wearer’s skin. Another look paired a liquid lavender silicone skirt with a densely textured cropped jacket whose clustered surface appeared almost geological, while a lacquered black bodice melted into cascading feathered panels that shimmered somewhere between raven plumage and polished obsidian. Even the most overtly surreal looks retained an undeniable elegance, including a sharply tailored latex jacket whose exaggerated curling forms extended around the body like living calligraphy.

It also feels impossible to discuss this collection without acknowledging how faithfully it channels Elsa Schiaparelli herself. The founder famously believed that fashion should make the familiar unfamiliar, using Surrealism not as escapism but as a means of exposing realities that ordinary clothing could never express. Roseberry has resisted the temptation to simply reproduce her visual codes, choosing instead to inherit her way of thinking. London’s Victoria and Albert Museum may currently be celebrating Elsa Schiaparelli’s remarkable legacy through a major retrospective, but Roseberry continues proving that her greatest contribution was never a vocabulary of motifs. It was a philosophy built on curiosity, contradiction, and the willingness to venture somewhere entirely unknown.