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When you work in fashion, the industry calendar—for us, four shows a year—becomes the metronome of your life. Every year, every day, time seems to accelerate faster and faster. It blows my mind to think about how different the world felt when I last sat down to write notes for a ready-to-wear collection. Those seven months—between March 2026 and now—represented some of the most transformative in recent human history. I’m writing on September 27, and by the time you read these words on October 1, there will be new medical breakthroughs, new perceptions of reality.
So that’s the backdrop for our $3 trillion industry. At its pinnacle is Paris Fashion Week. And so, in the center of Paris, in the basement of the Louvre, we meet again, exploring together the next chapter, and the next age, of one of the most consequential names in fashion.
When we started developing ready-to-wear a few years ago, the burden to differentiate it from haute couture felt urgent and essential. But if our couture identity was relatively easy to define, it was—I’ll admit—more challenging to determine who and what Schiaparelli stood for in an overcrowded ready-to-wear market. We get so hung up on these empty buzz phrases—“easy glamour,” for example—that we can forget what the real point and attraction of RTW is: distillation. Essence. The power of consistency in a world in which reliable, clear messages seem to be in short supply.
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Ironically, the evolution to distilling the essence of our couture began with an instinct to break it down. The emergence of separates has become a key theme of this season, as we took our signature silhouettes, gowns, necklines, and reimagined them as tops and bottoms. My instinct to juxtapose the Frenchness of the house with my Texas roots has been there from the start, but we’ve never really embraced the broader legacy of American sportswear and its choose-your-own-adventure dressing, one that gives ultimate freedom to the wearer…and places ultimate faith in her as well. Mix it, match it, make it your own. In order to make these choices easier and more fluid, we limited the color palette to Schiap black, bone and butter, with a few pops of color. What emerged was a modular “kit” of wardrobe-building that had all the punch and graphicness of the couture but with a spirit of ease that felt both more generous and empowering. In making it more about you, the wearer, it inadvertently became even more definitive for the house.
We also wanted to distinguish between precision and sharpness: How could something be rigorous but also soft? You’ll see that there are very few severe lines throughout the collection; instead, there are lettuce hems and asymmetrical openings. The ruffles rendered in leather and linen are inspired by the original curtains that lined the second-floor windows of the Place Vendôme atelier during Elsa’s time. Those ruffled curtains always felt out of place in that room, and I love that these ruffles feel a bit wrong as well.
We also wanted to honor Elsa’s devotion to playfulness, here expressed in new embroidery: intricate vegetable and feather motifs appear on sheer shirts, displacing embellishments from couture-level fabrics like silks and velvets onto something barely there and transparent. The veggie embroidery also appears on one of eight different versions of the classic Schiap jacket, reinterpreted in a new palette of colors drawn from the archives: kingfisher blue, moss green, and salmon pink. We also honored the maison’s foundation by emphasizing knitwear, really the star of this collection: a sheer viscose tree-bark knit references a fabric Elsa developed. The broderie anglaise technique made the journey from couture to ready-to-wear; here, the language of couture is allowed to breathe, stretch, and, yup, lace up. Finally, we developed what I think of as revenge dressing, which inspired our takes on the perfect little black cocktail dress. I kept thinking about Look 1 from our most recent couture collection, “The Abyss”: She was so simple, so sought-after, and so perfect.
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That combination—of play and rigor—continues in our new handbag collection. Our philosophy has always been to combine archetypal shapes (the hobo, the pocketbook) with artistic flourishes. This collection, with its jaunty details, such as a brass mouth that doubles as a handle, gets that union correct. Same with our shoes, which introduce a number of new, everyday low styles: a little babouche. A knit bootie alluding to a style Elsa wore in the late 30s. A mule with a ball on the toe, inspired by photos of American film starlets, including Monroe, from the 50s. A lower totem heel. Finally, there’s our jewelry, and here again, the idea is about choice—something made just for your own pleasure. We created a menagerie of “spirit animals”: earrings, cuffs, and brooches shaped like horses, dolphins, pigs, dogs, cats, and spiders. Which represents your essential nature? And throughout, you’ll see the house’s most beloved codes (the keyhole, the lips) making new and unexpected appearances: on the top of a shoe. Nestled in dense embroidery on a top-handle bag. At the backs of collars.
As fashion designers, we become so attached to our vision that we spend less time thinking about the person who’ll ultimately wear it. The beauty of making such extraordinary clothes for such a limited number of stores is that that gap doesn’t exist: what we show is what we produce is what is purchased is what is worn. We don’t have a “commercial” collection. These are the clothes. The vision is complete when you put them on your back.
And what about that title? What does “going clear” really mean? For me, it means stepping away from the fashion industry’s promise of status and approval—it means leaving gossip and social media behind. It means unsubscribing from the noise, so that what remains is a voice as clear as Barbra Streisand’s on opening night at the Bon Soir in 1962 singing “Cry Me a River”; something singular, epic, and intimate, a modern voice that in its immediacy remains utterly timeless. It’s a good lesson for any kind of art, including fashion: the goal is always to unite the immediate now…and the lasting forever.
Daniel Roseberry
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