Schiaparelli Fall/Winter 2026-2027 Haute Couture “The Call of the Void”

Schiaparelli Haute Couture Fall/Winter 2026-2027 Collection — Courtesy of Schiaparelli

For its Haute Couture Fall/Winter 2026-2027 collection, the storied Paris house Schiaparelli — founded by the Italian-born Surrealist Elsa Schiaparelli — turned the season into a meditation on a single, essential question: what is creation? Creative director Daniel Roseberry arrived at that question the hard way. After last season’s “The Agony and the Ecstasy” was hailed as a new benchmark for the house, he briefly believed he had cracked a winning formula. Yet the harder he tried to reproduce that success, the more his creativity drained away, and the fewer new ideas came forward.

What he reached instead was the sensation the French call l’appel du vide — the call of the void. Only when he surrendered to that whispering pull toward the unknown, and stopped trying to control the outcome, did the collection reveal what it was meant to be. That idea ran quietly through the entire show, expressed across material, silhouette, color, and craftsmanship.

Summary

The collection is titled “The Call of the Void,” after the French phrase l’appel du vide.
Haute couture techniques were applied to synthetic materials — latex, silicone, and paint baked into sheets.
The body was reimagined as an unfinished sculpture, including porcelain-like molded silicone bodices.
An organic, oceanic register closed the show: flowers, fish scales, tentacles, and sea-anemone jewelry.
Roseberry framed couture as a leap into uncertainty rather than the reproduction of success.

Beyond the “Winning Formula”

Roseberry has been candid about how last season’s triumph became, ironically, a constraint. He tried to follow a familiar ritual: travel, visit a work of architecture, absorb its inspiration, and return. This season he went to Barcelona to stand before the work of Antoni Gaudí. But the method refused to work. As he puts it:

“In seeking to recreate what I thought was a winning formula, I entered a possibility-denying, misery-making cycle where nothing new was given room to come forward.”

That confession is the key to reading the entire collection. Schiaparelli has never been a house of the predictable. The Surrealism of its founder, Elsa Schiaparelli, was never fantasy as escape, but a means of making visible the realities that words cannot explain. Roseberry inherits that spirit not as a vocabulary of symbols, but as the belief that impossibility itself can become a creative method.

The collection’s title, “The Call of the Void,” comes from the French l’appel du vide — literally, the call of the emptiness — the vertiginous pull one feels when standing somewhere high. For Roseberry, that pull was less destructive than generative.

Rewriting the Value of Materials Through Imagination

The season’s boldest statement was a reconsideration of material itself. Couture conjures silk, satin, and wool; Roseberry instead brought in latex, silicone, and pools of paint baked into sheets, then elevated them through the hands of the atelier. He asks whether couture is defined by “noble” materials, or by the imagination capable of reinventing them.

In the opening run of black looks, glossy latex clings to the body while pulling away from it into sculptural silhouettes. Sharply built shoulders, extreme cinched waists, deep plunging necklines — these are not clothes made to conceal the body, but to redefine it as an object. The gloss carries a fetishistic tension, yet the house’s gold ornamentation and architectural lines convert mere sensuality into the rigor of couture.

In ivory and ecru, the same latex reads entirely differently. Rawness gives way to the cool of wax and porcelain, so that a synthetic material takes on an almost classical stillness. The jacket, in particular, is often treated less as a garment than as a decorative structure — a frame to set off the curve of the body and the sway of a skirt.

Courtesy of Schiaparelli

The Body Is Not Something That Lies Inside the Clothes

Recurring throughout the season was a form that blurs the boundary between body and garment: silicone molded to suggest a chest or torso, flesh-adjacent tones, and cutting that emphasizes the human curve. Rather than hiding the body, the clothes present the body itself as part of the design.

The most striking of these is a silicone bodice with the finish of porcelain. According to the official look notes, LOOK 27 uses a milky, pale-pink porcelain-like molded silicone bodice, combined with fish scales, hand-painted ribbon, floral embroidery, a laced back, and a sculptural bow. The same look is paired with a mini Secret bag smothered in embroidered flowers and “Bubble” pumps fused with latex socks.

What is compelling is that the body is never treated as something natural. It is molded in silicone, covered in flowers and scales, and extended by metallic shoes and bags. The body, in other words, is not finished — it is an unfinished sculpture, endlessly transformed by couture.

Flowers, Fish Scales, Tentacles: Lifeforms Rising From the Void

As the collection unfolds, Schiaparelli’s world shifts from architectural tension to an organic, oceanic reverie. This season Roseberry looked to the colors of flora and sea fauna — lobster pink, violet, tangerine, saffron, and pale mint — set against high-gloss black, raw wax ecru, and the house’s signature gold.

The scheme reads like flowers and sea creatures surfacing from a black abyss, lending the whole collection a sense of life being generated and transformed. Fish scales, flowers, shells, tentacles, and jewelry that recalls sea anemones — these motifs update the Surrealism Elsa Schiaparelli loved into a contemporary, biomorphic register.

A sculptural jacket embroidered with fish scales, hand-painted ribbon, and flowers required more than 11,288 flowers and over 2,779 hours of work. Paired with a sheer, pale-lavender silicone skirt, the look held both the weight of artisanal labor and a transparency that seemed ready to vanish.

In his statement, Roseberry writes:

“couture’s greatest luxury isn’t its materiality, but the hands that make it.”

The line captures the essence of the season. Materials like silicone and latex are not, in themselves, couture. But once thousands of hours of handwork are added, their origins cease to matter — what remains is the imagination and the craft that reinvented them.

Refusing to Keep the House Codes Fixed

This season, Roseberry also kept a deliberate distance from the house’s own codes. The iconic Schiaparelli jacket is treated less as a lead garment than as an accessory — embellished and detailed, there to enhance the overall composition. In doing so, the jacket shifts from a fixed icon to a mutable object; codes, however beloved, are not meant to stand still.

It is an important stance for a house this symbol-heavy. The stronger a brand’s iconography, the greater the temptation to lean on it. Rather than simply repeating the eye, the keyhole, and the gold hardware, this collection excavates what is essentially Schiaparelli from a deeper place — through material, the body, and the forms of the natural world.

Gold, too, was more than ornament. Roseberry treats Schiaparelli gold not as a finish but as a sculptural material that turns the body into ornament, armor, and art. The shells, octopus tentacles, and sea-anemone shapes of the season’s jewelry make gold function not as a sign of luxury, but as a medium that transforms the body into another kind of creature.

Couture as a Method of Leaping Into the Void

On its surface, “The Call of the Void” is a collection that is fantastical, at times unsettling, at times sensual. Beneath that, though, is the posture of a designer who, having already succeeded, chooses uncertainty over the reproduction of success.

Roseberry reconsiders what it means to master couture. True mastery, he suggests, may not be about controlling everything, but about the courage to create in a place without answers — the faith that, once you take flight, a net will appear beneath you. His question is aimed at the institution of haute couture itself.

At the end of the show, Roseberry wrote:

“So here we go. Take my hand: and jump off with me into the bliss— of the abyss.”

This season’s Schiaparelli is not merely beautiful, nor merely easy to grasp. It finds the future of couture precisely in what cannot immediately be put into words, what resists definition, what spills beyond the familiar frame of beauty. The void is frightening. But without leaping into it, no new beauty is born. What Roseberry offered is couture made for exactly that moment.