April 2023

Art & The Surreal - Parsons School of Design

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This essay explores the influence of surrealism in contemporary haute couture, focusing on Daniel Roseberry's rise to prominence as Schiaparelli's creative director. Additionally, it examines how Daniel Roseberry has paid homage to Elsa Schiaparelli's use of surrealism as an inspiration for her designs by pointing out the parallels between her work and earlier surrealist pieces. 

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Introduction:

Daniel Roseberry was born in 1985 in Plano, Texas. He and his three siblings were raised in a deeply religious home by his priest father and artist mother, and he contemplated about going into the ministry. After completing high school, he traveled the world on Christian service excursions to places such as Hawaii, Jordan, Pakistan, and numerous regions of Israel. After arriving back home, he enrolled at the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York, which he left after two years to start working at the tailoring shop Thom Browne.1 Roseberry worked with Thom Browne for ten years, eventually rising to the position of head of design as the company expanded to include both men's and women's collections. Nevertheless, in 2019, he was appointed artistic director of the renowned Parisian couture label Schiaparelli. During the course of his tenure, Roseberry has established a reputation for reviving some of the Maison's most cherished and influential codes and iconography, paying homage to its founder Elsa Schiaparelli's love of surrealism, while also subverting many of those same codes, introducing a new aesthetic vocabulary with his frequent use of gold jewelry and hardware, recycled denim, and molded leather and metal breast plates and body parts.