After a season many considered impossible to top, Daniel Roseberry made the boldest move a designer can make: he stopped trying to repeat himself.
If The Agony and the Ecstasy was about reaching a creative summit,
The Abyss begins where certainty ends. Rather than presenting another parade of couture spectacle,
Roseberry turned his latest Schiaparelli collection into something more uncomfortable, and ultimately more convincing: a meditation on creative failure, doubt, and the seductive danger of searching for a formula.
His accompanying show notes read less like a press release than a confession. The revelation isn’t that inspiration came from Gaudí, the ocean floor, or Surrealism. It’s that none of those references were enough. The real turning point arrived only when the designer abandoned the illusion of control and accepted what the French call l’appel du vide, the pull of the unknown.
That surrender echoes throughout the collection. Latex replaces silk. Silicone mimics flesh. Paint hardens into couture. Tentacles, shells, flowers and anatomically sculpted forms blur the line between organism and object, beauty and mutation. The result isn’t “under the sea” fantasy; it’s couture stripped of its comfort zone.
More importantly, Roseberry quietly challenges one of luxury’s oldest assumptions: if craftsmanship can transform silicone with the same precision once reserved for satin, then perhaps couture has never really been about precious materials at all. Perhaps its greatest luxury has always been the hands behind them.
Even Schiaparelli’s own visual language is put under pressure. House signatures are displaced, distorted and demoted from icons to details, proving that heritage survives only when it refuses to fossilise.
In a season where fashion continues to chase familiarity disguised as novelty, The Abyss argues for the opposite. That originality doesn’t arrive through better formulas, louder gestures or sharper references. It appears only after certainty disappears.
For all its theatrical silhouettes and alien glamour, this may be Roseberry’s least performative couture collection to date. Not because it holds back, but because it trusts the audience to sit with ambiguity instead of spectacle.
Sometimes the most radical thing a designer can do isn’t invent a new language.
It’s admitting they no longer know where the sentence is going.
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