Schiaparelli’s Spring/Summer 2027 ready-to-wear collection, designed by Daniel Roseberry, takes us in the basement of the Louvre. Titled Going Clear, this season sees the creative director brillinatly turn down the volume, presenting a wardrobe that feels more understated and wearable, without even hinting at abandoning the Maison’s unmistakable surrealist imagination.
At the heart of the collection lies Roseberry’s desire to distance himself from the pursuit of approval, the obsession with status, and the constant noise that permeates today’s fashion system, in search of a creative voice that feels purer, clearer, and more distinctive. This is precisely where the meaning of Going Clear lies: stripping away the superfluous to arrive at the essence.
Establishing Schiaparelli within an increasingly crowded ready-to-wear market has not been an easy task, as Roseberry himself acknowledges. The risk was twofold: on the one hand, creating ready-to-wear that felt like little more than a simplified version of Haute Couture; on the other, moving so far away from the House’s codes that the collection would no longer feel recognizably Schiaparelli.
With SS27, Roseberry seems to have found a point of equilibrium. Rather than simply simplifying couture, the collection distills its essence, taking the defining elements of the Schiaparelli universe — Surrealism, trompe-l’œil, gold, and the constant dialogue between body and ornament — and breaking them down before reconstructing them within a wardrobe of jackets, skirts, trousers, and tops.
Roseberry himself describes the process as “the evolution to distilling the essence of our couture.”
This gives rise to separates: pieces designed to be freely combined, allowing greater autonomy to the wearer. The Maison’s signature silhouettes are fragmented into interchangeable elements, creating a modular wardrobe that retains the visual impact of couture while acquiring a newfound sense of ease.
Lines become less rigid: lettuce hems, asymmetrical openings and necklines, sheer fabrics, draping, knots, and ruffles appear alongside the inevitable maximalist gold accessories. Jewelry becomes another playground for Roseberry, who imagines an entire menagerie of “spirit animals,” with earrings, cuffs, and brooches shaped like horses, dolphins, pigs, dogs, cats, and spiders. Ironic and surreal objects that invite the wearer to choose the symbol that best reflects their personality.
Roseberry also continues his dialogue between the Frenchness of the Maison and his own Texan roots, introducing a broader reference to the tradition of American sportswear. From this comes the idea of a mix-and-match wardrobe, one that does not impose a single interpretation but instead gives the wearer the freedom to combine its different elements and make them their own.
The color palette follows the same pursuit of essentiality. Three shades dominate: Schiap black, bone, and butter (black, ivory, and a delicate butter yellow). This restraint is punctuated by flashes of color drawn directly from the House archives, including blue, moss green, and salmon pink.
The relationship with the archives becomes even more evident in the details. The leather and linen ruffles, for instance, are inspired by the original curtains that once framed the second-floor windows of the Place Vendôme atelier during Elsa Schiaparelli’s time. Roseberry recalls always feeling that those ruffled curtains looked slightly out of place in the room, and he transfers that same sensation into the collection: an intentionally “wrong” detail that introduces the subtle strangeness that has always belonged to Schiaparelli’s vocabulary.
Among the recurring pieces is the classic Schiap jacket, reinterpreted in eight different versions. The tribute to the House’s founder continues in the footwear, where a knitted bootie references a style worn by Elsa in the late 1930s. Once again, however, Roseberry does not simply quote the archive: he treats it as living material, something to be transformed and projected into the present.
The same approach applies to some of the Maison’s most iconic codes, including the keyhole and the lips, which appear throughout the collection in unexpected places: on the upper of a shoe, hidden within the dense embroidery of a top-handle bag, or at the back of a collar. They are no longer simply recognizable symbols, but small moments of surprise that reveal themselves only upon closer inspection.
And perhaps it is precisely in these details that Going Clear reveals its most authentically Schiaparelli character. The beauty of the collection lies not only in its silhouettes or its newfound wearability, but in its ability to preserve the memory of the extraordinary woman who founded the House without turning that memory into nostalgia. Elsa Schiaparelli remains present in the atelier curtains transformed into ruffles, in fabrics revisited from the archives, in the lips, the keyholes, the embroideries, and in that enduring desire to introduce something unexpected, ironic, and ever so slightly “wrong.”
Roseberry takes these fragments of history and, through his singular vision, moves them beyond mere quotation, making them contemporary once again. It is within this balance between memory and transformation that the authenticity of the Maison emerges: respect for the radical, surrealist universe created by Elsa coexists with Roseberry’s ability to reinterpret it through a language that feels personal, contemporary, and instantly recognizable.
Going Clear, then, does not erase the past in search of something new. Instead, it looks at that past more closely, distills its essence, and demonstrates that, almost a century later, it is still the smallest and most unexpected details that make Schiaparelli unmistakably Schiaparelli.
