Paris couture opens with Schiaparelli and Iris van Herpen

Paris haute couture kicked off with a brilliant series of shows on a sunny Monday in the French capital, with notably organic twists in collections by Schiaparelli and Iris van Herpen.

Schiaparelli opened the Paris haute couture season with a playful evolution of the house’s codes and archives, staged inside the Decorative Arts Museum of the Louvre, where the house opened a major retrospective of the founder.
 
Designer Daniel Roseberry began the runway action with a razor-sharp back velvet blazer finished with black grape embroidery inspired by Elsa Schiaparelli’s original archives, even if from behind there was a pretty and perverse champagne-hued corset.

He did have the odd clanger – a baroque pearl cocktail from which black velvet pompons dangled dumbly like a drunken tarantula spider. But overall this was quite a triumph for Roseberry.  In just a couple of years, Daniel has put Schiaparelli at the center of the couture conversation, with an instantly recognizable look and a chicly suggestive style.
 
“We wanted the rigor and starkness of the past season but with more joy, fun and femininity. Inspired by Elsa, at such a momentous moment of the house,” he explained post show, attended by Pixie Lott and Emma Watson. 

Iris van Herpen: Post-human couture
Metaverse couture at Iris van Herpen, though remarkably not the cartoonish imagery of the nascent virtual world, but a mellifluous and magical moment of poetic fashion.

At a time, when giant fashion brands have been throwing buckets of money into the metaverse and Roblox. The net result is generally cartoonish, inelegant avatars that have as much to do with real luxury as sybarite has to Mother Theresa. Hence, it was refreshing to witness the latest couture conceptions of Iris van Herpen. True fashion luxury, like great sex, can only truly be appreciated live. 

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