From Bergdorf’s to Dover Street Market, Daniel Roseberry Reflects on His Stateside Schiaparelli Takeover

As annoying as I’m sure it is, having that forced separation and focus can be so beneficial to doing really bizarre, creative work.

Yes, it creates a space to explore that stuff. That’s what COVID was for me—and I’m very proud of our work during that initial period because we were making lemonade when everybody else was chasing their tail. We just cranked it out. The brand is so small and so it was easier to maneuver, and I felt we were able to have a big impact and hold our own in the couture weeks for sure.

Recently, I was talking to a friend of a friend who lives alone in Joshua Tree and has a pet snake: a python, I think. She was telling me about coldblooded animals and the way they can regulate their body temperature, which I always think about. So when she goes away for one month—do you know where I’m going with this?

Not one bit. I’m rapt.

When she goes away for one month, before she leaves, she takes a frozen mouse out of the freezer. She sets it on the radiator. It defrosts, she feeds it to the snake, and the snake can regulate its body temperature and its metabolism to be set for one month.

If she is gone for two months, she will give it two mice and it will regulate for two months. That’s what these trips to New York are for me. They are like coldblooded feeding sessions where I get to soak up some nutrition and then it sustains me for up to six weeks while I’m in Paris. Then I have to come back and see my heart friends, my soul friends, and the people that I love the most.

The travel regulations are getting better imminently; more loved ones will be able to come to Paris and feed you a little warmed up mouse very soon!

This is the goal!

In the same way we don’t like thinking about the past, I hate thinking about the future…but what are some of your goals for Schiaparelli?

Good design doesn’t really happen in a vacuum. The last couture, for example, was designed when I thought the world was really reemerging. We did Lacroix, we did Yves Saint Laurent, we did Jean Paul Gaultier—all of the designers who were inspired by Schiap, I want to be in conversation with them in a full circle moment. That collection was all based on this exuberant fashion with a capital F. Really nostalgic.

Now, I don’t feel like that. I think we know now that there is no going back. The reemergence is so much more complicated than we ever thought, and I’ve been approaching the next season from a completely different perspective, from a completely different head space.

I think that we are all going to be running to catch up for a long time. I want the house and the work to reflect that tension. To me, Schiaparelli is all about tension. It’s all about the tailoring with the flou, the drama with the everyday, the masculine and the feminine, the American pop culture with the Parisian savoir-faire. She was so high-low. It’s always going to be about the tension—that is an eternal formula. And you don’t get tension at Dior and you don’t get tension at Chanel. Schiaparelli is about good taste and bad taste. It’s vulgarity and charm. It’s all of those things together, and I want to continue to let that shine. And in the future, of course, I want Schiaparelli to still be the thing that everyone is talking about.