On Jan. 27, the sun was covered by dense, gray clouds outside the Petit Palais in Paris, where the Italian haute couture house Schiaparelli brightened up the celestial palace with their spring/summer 2025 (SS25) haute couture collection titled “Icarus.”
Maison Schiaparelli artistic director Daniel Roseberry’s whimsical “Icarus” show prepared the world for the next steps toward the modernization of haute couture while still maintaining the extravagant and unique artistry of the fashion genre for the upcoming sunny seasons.
First created by Elsa Schiaparelli in the 1920s, this fashion house possesses the pivotal status of contributing to the innovation and popularity of haute couture. One of the earliest avant-garde dresses that popularized haute couture was Elsa Schiaparelli and Salvador Dali’s lobster dress.
As fall and winter looks are presented every July, the fashion world excitedly starts every new year with a bright outlook of the upcoming warmer, sunnier season. Though fashion houses add a unique flair to their signature concepts during this season, they share one thing in common — the warmer seasons are embellished with vivid colors and dramatic high fashion that embody a universal theme of beautiful, blooming nature.
Roseberry and his Maison Schiaparelli team portrayed Icarus — the Greek myth of a divine boy who flew so close to the sun that he fell from the sky — as a fallen star. The designers embodied the story of Icarus in their dressmaking by embellishing jeweled droplets, representing gold armor melting off a noble warrior inching too close to the scorching sun.
The team designed such a captivating effect of blazing sparks and an illusion of flames and streaks of fire through an innovative construction of fabrics, like faux ostrich feather fringe, illuminating satins and sharp metallics. Some models were covered in pounds of ostrich feathers, which defied the limitations of the grounded human body to encapsulate the powers and freedoms of a bird that could reach the great heights of the sun.
Maison Schiaparelli captured the sublime feeling of reaching to the sun as Icarus did through the craftsmanship of the dresses, a crucial factor that makes haute couture such an eccentric medium of art. Designers experimented with texture for the ostrich feathers and reproportioned silhouettes that accentuated hips for the embodiment of the divine feminine.
The fashion house lived up to its everlasting legacy of exaggerated, sharp silhouettes around the hips and the shoulders. Designers modernized their signature concept of the human body as a canvas for surrealism and eccentricity by focusing on the metallic sheen of satins and silks.
In this show, Roseberry also challenged the current trend of modern fashion and the simplistic essence it has taken by pushing for the riveting intersection of modernity and extravaganza. Additionally, he still honored Schiaparelli’s timeless aesthetic by incorporating classic tulle with silk fabrics, a staple in past SS haute couture shows.
Maison Schiaparelli’s evolution in crafting irreplicable art through dedicated dressmaking while upholding their traditional themes of surrealism and eccentricity has shaped haute couture into the breathtaking grandeur known in fashion today.
Cameryn Nguyen is an Arts & Entertainment Staff Writer. She can be reached at camerynn@uci.edu.