Schiaparelli's Spring Haute Couture 2023

Shocking has been integral to Schiaparelli’s DNA since Elsa’s day, but unlike Roseberry, she didn’t live in an age when people will draw distressing colonial inferences from big game imagery, a moment in which environmentalists and animal activists hate fashion for depicting dead animals, even when it’s known that they were constructs of foam and faux fur.

It’s an irony that Roseberry’s mind was in fact focused on a different hell—the Inferno of Dante’s Divine Comedy—and not looking to stoke the fires of social media, or rather, inadvertently reap unforeseen negative reactions to his haute couture stunt. “The animals are one of the four literal references that I took from Dante’s Inferno,” he’d explained while preparing the collection. “In the first cycle of Dante’s journey, he faces terrors. He confronts a lion, a leopard, and a she-wolf. They each represent different things. But the lion and the animals are there as a photorealistic approaching of surrealism and trompe l’oeil in a different way.”

Images courtesy of Armando Grillo.