For Elsa, surrealism was at the core of her design language – with it, she disrupted reality, provoked thought and defined fashion beyond functionality. Six years ago, when Roseberry took the reins at legacy maison, the landscape had changed and the art movement was largely obsolete in the context of couture. This was until he took a leaflet out of Elsa’s playbook and converged their journeys with a similar approach. “We picked up the heritage and the DNA of Surrealism right where Elsa left off. André Breton, the French writer, theorist and key architect of the Surrealist movement, believed that Surrealism deals with the space between things: between the real and the unreal, being awake and dreaming, fantasy and reality,” Roseberry reflects. At Schiaparelli, if the past and the present were to meet at an intersection, surrealism will be the chosen language of fashion – just as it serves as the overarching theme of this exhibition.
The exhibition brings together two hundred objects spanning fashion, jewellery, art and furniture, placing a mammoth responsibility on Roseberry to cohesively curate a universe of multitudes. “What I love about Elsa is that she embodied one of the core tenets of Schiaparelli, which is contradiction. There was an inherent contradiction between her work and her world,” he elaborates. But for someone who has been designing for the Schiaparelli woman as long as he has, his insight into Elsa’s mind has created a blueprint of alignment that synthesises the narrative of this exhibition seamlessly. “She was a rigorous businesswoman by day and attended Surrealist cocktail parties dressed as a vegetable or a Greco-Roman statue by night. There was something so multidimensional and multifaceted about her,” Roseberry chimes in with excitement.
Photography: Philadelphia Museum of Art