For Schiaparelli’s Fall 2025 Couture collection, Daniel Roseberry takes us “Back to the Future”, executing his radical, forward vision by invoking the brand’s revolutionary past. 

“This collection is dedicated to [the] period when life and art were on the precipice: to the sunset of elegance and to the end of the world as we knew it.” These are Roseberry’s words in his couture press release, referencing the interwar era in which Elsa Schiaparelli first moved to Paris and began creating her own clothes. This liminal period, characterised by thrumming economic anxiety but also vibrant cultural experimentation, was indeed one on the precipice of irreversible change: the “sunset of elegance” also marked the dawn of modernity, of which Elsa Schiaparelli was a pioneer. Surrealism signified a new way of seeing—one that no longer aspired towards external, divine ideals, but instead sought to reveal the secularised, entropic sublimity of the individual subconscious. 

The look from Schiaparelli’s Fall 2025 Couture collection that has doubtlessly generated the most buzz is a corseted red satin dress, moulded to the shape of the female nude and worn backwards. The look featured a red rhinestone heart necklace, similarly fastened backwards, which was equipped with an internal mechanism that enabled it to pulse and throb like an anatomical heart. 

 

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Salvador Dalí’s “The Royal Heart” (1953)

The necklace borrows from Salvador Dalí’s “The Royal Heart” (1953), which is exhibited at the Dalí Theatre and Museum in Figueres, Spain. Dalí’s geometric heart shape was crafted from gold and dons a crown embellished with pearls and diamonds. At the center of the geometric heart is a cavity embedded with rubies and precious stones, pulsating rhythmically in imitation of the human heart. Suspended in a perpetual state of beating, Dalí’s Jewel is an unsettling spectacle that forces us to confront our mortality: the vulnerability of the exposed “organ” is juxtaposed with its lifeless mechanism and the longevity of its materials, which are unaffected by bodily decay. Roseberry’s necklace hearkens back to the surrealism of “The Royal Heart”, yet in our technological era of generative AI, these conflations of human and machine are no longer mere science-fiction fantasies, but have become disturbingly real. The pulsating heart of Schiaparelli’s boldly bejewelled necklace depicts the contradictory desires governing the modern-day artist, who is haunted by a prescient awareness of the dangers of hubristic innovation, yet nonetheless driven onwards by the persistent, insatiable desire to create.

It is no surprise that Salvador Dalí inspired some of the most sensational designs of the collection. Dalí was one of Elsa Schiaparelli’s frequent collaborators, for the two were somewhat kindred spirits: they shared in their provocative and erotically charged approach towards art, and their creations were often dominated by avant-garde applications of hallucinatory, trompe l’oeil effects that straddled the bounds between aesthetic pleasure and visual discomfort. Their first fashion collaboration was a series of navy-blue suits from Schiaparelli’s Winter 1936-37 Haute Couture collection, which featured drawer-shaped pockets with plastic knob buttons. The design was inspired by Dalí’s vision of an “anthropomorphic cabinet”, which gave rise to several artworks, including a painting of that name, a drawing, as well as his famous plaster sculpture, Venus de Milo with Drawers (1936). Roseberry has also since referenced this idea in a bag from his Spring 2022 Couture collection.

 

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Wool desk suits made by Elsa Schiaparelli and Salvador Dalí for the Schiaparelli Haute Couture 1936 Winter collection

Another reimagining of Dalí’s work in the collection comes in the form of a gown covered in embellished eye motifs. The dress draws inspiration from “The Eye of Time” (1949), an eye-shaped diamond and platinum brooch containing a ruby and a teardrop pendant dangling from the inner corner.