Schiaparelli’s Dante-Inspired Couture Show (Spring/Summer 2023)

“From divisive foam animal heads to Daniel Roseberry’s meditation on Dante’s Inferno, British Vogue’s fashion critic Anders Christian Madsen shares five things to know about Schiaparelli’s spring/summer 2023 couture show, which opened Couture Fashion Week this season.

“In his self-penned show notes, Roseberry cited Dante’s Inferno as the inspiration behind the collection, likening its protagonist’s uncertain journey into hell to the doubt that falls upon a designer like himself when he sits down to design. “This collection is my homage to doubt,” he wrote. ‘I wanted to step away from techniques I was comfortable with and understood, to choose instead that dark wood where everything is scary but new.’ The feeling of the inferno appeared more as a spiritual reference than a direct one, unless your idea of hell is being trapped inside a massive faux taxidermy wolf, Midsommar style. (Naomi Campbell, who was given the honour, seemed typically unfazed.) Along with the lion and the snow leopard, it represented the animals Dante equates to lust, pride and avarice. A reference to the friendly giants he encounters in hell, a hammered brass and patina handmade giant’s head hit the runway with equal theatrical effect.

“Roseberry’s show notes finished on a sentimental key: Inferno, Purgatorio, Paradiso,” he wrote, referring to the three books that make up The Divine Comedy. ‘One cannot exist without the others. It is a reminder that there is no such thing as heaven without hell; there is no joy without sorrow; there is no ecstasy of creation without the torture of doubt. My prayer for myself is that I remember that always – that, on my most difficult days, when inspiration just won’t come, I remember that no ascension to heaven is possible without first a trip to the fires, and the fear that comes with it. Let me embrace it always.’ As a wise lion once said: Hakuna matata.”    –Anders Christian Madsen, “5 Things to Know About Schiaparelli’s Dante-Inspired SS23 Couture Show”, Vogue, January 23, 2023

For more on the show (and the controversies it stirred), see the New York Times’ coverage here and here.

Contributed by Caleb Taylor (Florida State University ’26) and others. Thanks to all who sent links!