Schiaparelli’s Haute Couture Show Had Gold, Faux Taxidermy and Naomi Campbell

Schiaparelli’s Spring 2023 Haute Couture collection is as ravishing as it’s whimsical, elegant and macabre.

A moto jacket reimagined as an oversized puffer. Fantastic boleros blown-up yet fitted in all the right places. A simple-looking blazer with an onyx snake trimming the collar, shining as if it were live or liquid.

Under Daniel Roseberry‘s creative direction, the house has proven to have a penchant for fashioning the “extra ordinary,” whether that’s in ready-to-wear or haute couture, while exploring some heavy themes. This time, Schiaparelli grapples with torment, beauty and bravery, taking inspiration from the still-arresting themes of Dante Alighieri’s “Divine Comedy” — specifically, “Inferno.”

“What appealed to me in the ‘Inferno’ wasn’t just the theatrics of Dante’s creation — it was how perfect a metaphor it provided for the torment that every artist or creative person experiences when we sit before the screen or the sketchpad or the dress form, when we have that moment in which we’re shaken by what we don’t know,” Roseberry wrote in the show notes.

In a successful attempt to fashion Alighieri’s “most arresting images,” the collection features faux taxidermy created entirely by hand. It propels any onlooker into a surrealist state: A leopard, lion and she-wolf (worn by none other than Naomi Campbell) force any viewer to revel in the Schiaparelli team’s mind-blowing craftsmanship and encourage a reflection on the duality of beauty and death.

Scroll to Continue

Not wasting any time, Kylie Jenner sat front row at the show wearing a customized version of one of these looks: a black velvet bustier dress featuring a lion head sculpted from foam, wool and silk faux fur and then hand-painted. Doja Cat was there, too, in her own fearless look. Tomato red from head to toe, the singer wore 30,000 Swarovski crystals hand-applied to her face and body, courtesy of Pat McGrath.

Kylie Jenner’s front row look mimicked what was on the runway itself.

Photo: Courtesy of Schiaparelli

Schiaparelli Spring 2023 Haute Couture is all about doubt as a creative — “the doubt of creation, and the doubt of intent,” Roseberry continued in the show notes. “With this collection, I wanted to step away from techniques I was comfortable with and understood, to choose instead that dark wood, where everything is scary but new, where I would be feeling my way through someplace I didn’t know and didn’t understand.”

See the full Schiaparelli Spring 2023 Haute Couture collection in the gallery below.