The Surreal Life

Daniel Roseberry is remixing house codes at Schiaparelli, to dazzling effect.

- Chantel Tattoli

If Daniel Roseberry’s designs came with a recipe, it would boil down to this: seasoning luxury with Surrealism. A few years ago, when the Plano, Texas–raised pastor’s son was at Thom Browne and pitching himself for the role of artistic director of the house of Schiaparelli, he’d taken a measure of what was happening on its runway and the red carpet. He tells me now that it was “all beautiful,” but “way too tasteful.” Where was the next-level conversation in the mode of Elsa Schiaparelli, the house founder who made the first wraparound dresses and power suits, and who produced weird wearables with Salvador Dalí and Jean Cocteau? “I felt like Schiap,” as Elsa called herself, “was more like, ‘What’s beyond beautiful?’” he says.

Roseberry, wearing a thin gray sweater and his ever-present aura of Southern hospitality, is sitting behind his glossy white desk on the Place Vendôme. To his left—against a wall, obscured by a potted tree—the proverbial drawing board rests: Each ready-to-wear and couture collection begins on it, initially as a manifesto. “I get really verbal,” he explains.