Does reality ever make you just want to scream? That’s how Daniel Roseberry, the creative director of Schiaparelli, felt when he started designing his most recent couture collection.
“I was feeling so upset and so angry,” he said backstage before the show this week. He was talking about all the news and pressure that seemed entirely out of his control. “And I grabbed my notebook and my headphones and went to the Tuileries and just started sketching, playing with this idea of how to use anger and turn it into something joyful.”
Not merely joyful — also crazy, wild, and extreme, at least judging by the clothes that emerged from his imagination and in his atelier and ultimately made it onto the runway.
Lace was hand-cut into quills that swirled up the neck and around the face like some sort of poison-tipped Elizabethan ruff, over a dégradé tulle sheath tinted like a gathering of storm clouds. A scorpion tail covered in Chantilly lace curved up from a cutaway. Rhinoceros horns jutted from the breasts of a sharp-shoulder skirt suit covered in mother-of-pearl scales. And beaks poked out from the hand-painted feathers that covered a tuxedo.
It was as if the Petit Palais, the Beaux-Arts museum, had been transformed into a royal court staffed by preening, exotically dressed predators.
“We’ve never had so much fun making something,” Mr. Roseberry said, grinning. In the audience, Teyana Taylor cheered, wearing a transparent Schiaparelli lace sheath and reproductions of the jewels stolen in the Louvre heist, including a crown.
Designers tie themselves up in all sorts of knots trying to justify the continued existence of couture. It’s art! It’s employment! It’s escapism!
Sure, it’s all of the above, but most of all it has become entertainment. Of the blockbuster, fantasy kind. Sometimes everyone just needs something jaw-dropping and completely improbable to look at. Whether you can buy it or not, or wear it or not, is immaterial; just seeing it restores faith in possibility.
That’s why Alessandro Michele’s decision to open his Valentino show with a voice-over from the founder, Valentino Garavani, who died the week before couture began, was so apropos. “My mom said, ‘You are a dreamer; you always dream, dream, dream, dream’,” Mr. Valentino intoned.
Mr. Michele had built 26 separate kaiserpanoramas: reproductions of the 19th-century curved structures that were the predecessors of movies, allowing groups of people to sit around the outer perimeters and ogle photographs inside through viewfinders, the two-dimensional pictures appearing to come to life. All the Valentino guests, instead of facing a runway, faced windows of their own, through which they could see the models entering and exiting the compartments.
There were maximal silk robes embroidered in stars atop bias-cut silver halter gowns trimmed in ostrich feathers. A 1940s-style emerald velvet look dripping in silver fringe. Lots and lots of gold lamé. There were feathered headdresses fit for the Folies Bergère, stockings and lace-trimmed teddies, poet blouses with billowing sleeves and Statue of Liberty metallic shifts.
It was like watching a parade of chorus girls from Mr. Michele’s own private Cinecittà, or memories of Ziegfeld extravaganzas past.
And while it was fun, it also reeked of elaborate cosplay and nostalgia for what was, as opposed to offering any sense of what could be. Which was also the issue, albeit in a different way, with Silvana Armani’s debut Privè show.
The first since her uncle Giorgio died, and the first she designed on her own, the collection was a tasteful, obedient ode in celadon green and baby pink to the way things used to be (think sparkly dresses with Chinese lantern embroidery; easy satin pantsuits with organza shirting), rather than an opportunity to leap into the unknown. Although Ms. Armani’s decision to lose the decorative hats her uncle favored was a step forward, the ethos seemed stuck in place.
Unlike Viktor & Rolf’s — not show, exactly. Eye-popping feat of performance art, perhaps. Whatever it was, it was incredibly appealing.
Using a model in a short white dress like a pupa, they transformed her into a butterfly by repurposing the frills and frippery that had decorated 15 otherwise austerely elegant black evening gowns. So a fuchsia collar from one became one set of forewings; the chartreuse overlay from another, the hindwings; the pink from a third, accents. Then, in turn, an orange train morphed into a kite at her back.
And then she rose: up, up and away. Exactly where our imaginations are supposed to go.
Vanessa Friedman has been the fashion director and chief fashion critic for The Times since 2014.
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