Fashion house SCHIAPARELLI presented the Fall Winter 2023 Collection, with a show held on March 2nd, during the ongoing Paris Fashion Week. This season marks the brand’s first ready-to-wear runway show: a long-planned and critical step in brand’s ongoing revival of Elsa’s house. The mission this season was straightforward—to present an entire wardrobe, complete with everything from crisp white poplin shirts to short velvet cocktail dress, and to infuse these classics with Schiaparelli’s trademark wit, irreverence, and drama.
FALL WINTER 2023.24 COLLECTIONS
Of all Elsa Schiaparelli’s legacies, her most enduring might have been her marriage of art and fashion. Elsa became famous for her couture, but her career debut was those then-groundbreaking trompe l’oeil knits. Pure sportswear, they were an aggressive rebuke of everything frilly and flouncy, knitwear that was easy to slip on—and off (you can think of them as the athleisure wear of their age). Those early sweaters were among the first of her many “viral” moments over the course of her brief but influential career. Even now, decades later, her work’s now-signature hallmarks—the codes, we’d call them today: the keyhole icon, the anatomical references, the measuring tape details—still feel eerily relevant. The house had always been renowned not only for its shapes or symbols, but because, above all, its clothes didn’t look like anything else out there. (As Elsa famously said, “No one knows how to say ‘Schiaparelli,’ but everyone knows what it means.”) One of the challenges of making clothes now, in an age of rampant branding, is honoring Elsa’s codes while, at the same time, not reducing them to logos. Like Elsa, our focus is on clothes: wardrobe staples that help a woman feel more like herself. In this, we look again to Elsa, whose most resplendent fantasies were always countered with simple, honest silhouettes. The result was a look whose chic rose not from gimmicks but from something heartfelt and sincere. – from Schiaparelli
So often in this town (and in this industry), the product becomes less creative the higher you go. But Elsa gives us permission – and a road map – to imagine what it means to be fearlessly chic, to trust our instincts. And so that’s what this collection is about – clothes and accessories that exist at that impossible crossroads, between what’s forever stylish…and what’s perfectly of its moment. – Daniel Roseberry
