Beauty and Horror as Schiaparelli Kicks off Couture Week With a Bang

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For his Fall 2026 Schiaparelli Couture collection, designer Daniel Roseberry did his best to follow the same tried and true creative process that served him so well last season and has so often inspired the designers who came before him: he took a trip somewhere beautiful — in this case, Barcelona to see the Gaudis — then returned to his atelier ready to create a collection based on his travels.

But this time, it didn’t work. “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,” he said in the show’s notes. “In trying to control the creative process, and ignoring what the French call l’appel du vide — the call of the void — I stifled not only myself, but the work. Formulas are antithetical to the magic of creation, which can be found only in total surrender to the unknown. Naming things, defining things, is comforting. But in doing so, you’re stripping something of its infinite power and magic — you’re making it less terrifying, but also less exhilarating.

“Only when I surrendered to the void did I truly start to enjoy making this collection.”

The collection was built around materials one might not usually associate with couture: latex, silicone, pools of paint baked into sheets and sculpted into dramatic silhouettes.

There were dresses with hyper-realistic, anatomical bustiers were scultped (as opposed to being made from a mold of the wearer’s body) before being cast in silicone: one in cornflower blue with a floral ombre skirt modeled by Karlie Kloss and one in white with a pearl-fringe ombre skirt, which walked the show on Alex Consani before appearing on Zendaya a few hours later as the London premiere of The Odyssey. Because the Devil might work hard, but Law Roach works harder.

There were dresses made with real flowers, hoisery flowers, and ribbon flowers. A dress bristling with weightless sculpted crinoline tubes, and a black latex tentacle top that looked like something out of a horror film, but impossibly beautiful. There was even a Scream ghost face murder mask or two hidden amidst the draperies.

“None of this experimentation would have been possible without the extraordinary artisans who work in our ateliers,” said Roseberry. “Their expertise is what gives us the freedom to venture into the unknown in the first place. They remind me that couture’s greatest luxury isn’t its materiality, but the hands that make it.”

Check out the full Schiaparelli Fall 2026 Couture collection below.