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October 10, 2023 at 9:00 a.m. EDT

American fashion designer Daniel Roseberry, the creative director of the French haute couture house Schiaparelli. (Alejandra Loaiza/for The Washington Post)

Designer Daniel Roseberry, creative director of the Parisian couture house Schiaparelli, is a simple man behind some of the strangest clothes anyone is making today.

Plain-spoken and cinema-star handsome, his fashion fantasy world is sweeping, uncomplicated and bubblegum. The clothes that come out of it are irresistible to anyone who learned about fashion not by attending fashion shows or reading magazines or wearing extraordinary garments, but by inhaling images of ridiculous and extravagant runways of the 1990s and 80s online.

His designs rise to the wildest dreams of his stans. In his Spring 2024 collection, for example, there was a black fringe top that fanned out at the neck like overly mascaraed lashes, a column skirt ruched down the center with a white life-size lobster at its crotch and Kendall Jenner in a bouffant with her hands on her hips. (The looks were so rich that the stans seem to find Jenner a letdown: its not serving, went the general consensus.)

Such outrageous clothes have made him the internets favorite fashion designer. Search his name on X, the platform formerly known as Twitter, and youll find countless posts singing his praises: daniel roseberry can do no wrong, bro daniel roseberrys MIND! he does it again!!! and, most frequently, some variation of the following: he is genius and a daddy.

Fashion fans pore over images of his new shows like the Beyhive pines for visuals and Swifties hunt for Easter eggs an affinity he embraces.

What I am trying to do is to create the fashion equivalent of pop music, Roseberry says, perched on a creamy sofa in the salon of Schiaparellis Paris couture house on the Place Vendome, the day after his ready-to-wear show last month. My mantra recently has been, What is the hook? If this look was a song, how do I get it to be as visually captivating or catchy or universally appealing as a Taylor Swift song?

He calls young fashion fans absolutely like, my number one priority. Nine times out of 10, whenever I get stopped on the street, its a student. Any theyre the ones who Im thinking about. Like, what would they love to see? Because their love of fashion is so pure.

Roseberry, 38, says he wants his fashion to be universal. What he doesnt mean is palatable but ridiculous, opulent, triumphant, fantastical. Like the hit songs he venerates, his clothes are ubiquitous despite the fact that his primary output, his handmade couture clothes, are made for just a handful of clients and even if youve never heard his name or that of the brand he designs for, youve almost certainly seen his work, and probably been perplexed, repulsed, seduced, delighted or all of the above. In an era defined by a beguiling abundance of fashion, his clothes may be the only ones that embody both the self-seriousness and hilarity of high fashion.

At President Bidens January 2021 inauguration, Lady Gaga performed in a fitted navy cashmere jacket and voluminous red skirt with a comically huge gold dove pin, a custom Schiaparelli look.

In January of this year, at the couture show in Paris, musician Doja Cat had her entire body covered in red paint and tens of thousands of crystals. The idea was, well hed run out of money. Halfway through designing the collection, whose theme was Dantes Inferno, he realized he didnt have the budget to design a devil.

Really, I started to strategically say, Okay, actually the front row is an extension of the show now. Our press budget is a different budget. He reached out to Dojas team and in an hour, he said, they were like, Done. Were doing this. Doja arrived nearly six hours before the show began to have herself covered in crystals by makeup artist Pat McGrath.

On a viewership level and an engagement level, he says, that was insane.

Most infamously, at that same show, he dressed Kylie Jenner in a fitted black gown with a life-size (and frighteningly lifelike) lions head on the bust. Naomi Campbell and Irina Shayk walked in the show in similar ensembles depicting a wolf and snow leopard, respectively.

The looks went viral, with a number of outlets questioning whether they were in poor taste. Some critics read them as goofy satires of fashions obsession with fur and other unethical materials; others denounced them as horrifying or just ugly. The hysteria continued for days, with several outlets claiming that the dresses promoted trophy hunting.

Roseberry anticipated shock and surprise, but not the vitriol: T.B.Q.H not at all, he says. Though some couture customers placed orders for the pieces, the owners of the house Italian fashion magnate Diego Della Valles Tods Group, which acquired the brand in 2007 had them placed in storage, and declined to fill the orders. They didnt want to reignite the drama, Roseberry says.

He thinks the controversy stemmed from their realism that if theyd been five percent more cartoonish or had been covered in diamonds, they would not have been a problem. It was the fact that they were so f---ing perfect.

I am so proud of them, he continues. Because in my mind, we touched on something that was truly taboo. Remember that meme that was like, a gold dress or a blue dress? It was like that. It wasnt about gender. It wasnt about race. It wasnt about class. It was literally there was nothing there. Nothing! But still, it was so appalling to certain people, and other people were so sensationalized. They loved that we caused a harmless scandal.

The dresses encapsulate Roseberrys brilliance: He has somehow combined two of the lowest common denominators in fashion memes and celebrity into a fabulous art form.

Roseberry emerged at a moment when high fashion and celebrity converged, and haute couture went pop. Designers spent much of the 1990s and 2000s politely courting actors and musicians, working with stylists to carefully reduce their runway creations to something more obvious and flattering.

But Roseberry had a prescience that couture, even if it caters to just a handful of clients, could speak to the masses, by creating viral runway spectacles and convincing celebrities to partake. These days, the ideal, especially for anyone famous under 40, is not to look sober, slim and tasteful in your Armani column gown, but to wink at and bait the online audience that is eager to mint memes from a designers output.

It was on the top of my list when I started to bring some sense of awe back to the red carpet, he says. I really wanted to install something that felt a bit reckless.

More recently, Roseberry has cultivated a ready-to-wear business that capitalizes on the mania around his couture. (His show in September, as a part of Paris Fashion Week, was ready-to-wear; couture is shown during a separate set of fashion weeks in January and July.)

Those clothes sell on Schiaparellis site and at a shop-in-shop at Bergdorfs and Neiman Marcus, the luxury stores parent department store.

Theres been an incredible, incredible response to it, says Linda Fargo, the snow-haired fashion director of Bergdorf Goodman. His bags and jewelry sell as reliably as his dresses and evening jackets.

I dont think in my career Ive seen this kind of appetite and excitement over something thats very unique. This is not wallflower clothing were talking about, Fargo says. These are statement pieces. And theyre statements that are not for everyone.

What makes Schiaparelli stand out is not merely its shock value but the exceptional quality, Fargo says. It is one of the rare lines that merges the technique and feeling of couture with ready-to-wear, she explains. Its rather scarce. You dont see these pieces everywhere.

Because his clothing is so crazy grotesque, shocking, freakish but also just plain beautiful observers have a tendency to project big ideas onto Roseberrys work where there arent any. Perhaps that is a source of its power and appeal that it stands up to any level of intellectual scrutiny you want to apply to it.

Natasha Lyonne began wearing Roseberrys clothes around the time of the release of Russian Doll, her explosive, boundary-melting artwork about a woman who dies over and over again that plunked the ambition of a Louis Buuel film into a streaming Netflix series.

Really what youre talking about is world-building, Lyonne says. How do you break space-time and how do you do it in a way that is comedic, but that sort of transcends that, so that people can meet you at whatever level youre at? There are jokes and existential inquisitions for viewers versed in quantum physics and a beautiful relationship for those who arent.

I see what Daniel does as very similar, she says. If you want a gorgeous, incredibly crafted garment that will make a womans body look incredible, then there is the perfect outfit for you. But if you want to wear that garment a level deeper and be in the mind of Andr Breton as youre walking around, then by golly, youre welcome to do that.

On the surface, at least, Roseberrys madness goes back to the houses founder, Elsa Schiaparelli. Fashion designers are often judged within their industry by the degree to which they reinterpret the codes of their founder: Does the current head of Saint Laurent capture Yves Saint Laurents androgynous cool? How does Hedi Slimane modernize the bourgeois tastefulness of Celines original designs? Yet Roseberry has a much different relationship to the woman behind the house he oversees, which she founded in 1927 and ran in the very space on the Place Vendome where Roseberry now works.

Ive never read her memoir, he says, referring to her 1954 book, Shocking Life.

I know very little about her isms. I cannot quote her except for one, which I love. She said, No one knows how to say Schiaparelli, but everyone knows what it means. That really stuck with me.

Their origin myths couldnt be more different. He grew up in an evangelical Christian family in Plano, Tex., and joined the house from Thom Browne, where he was design director.

Schiaparelli was an Italian aristocrat who palled around with Surrealists and Dadaists. Schiaparelli was considered a rival and foil to Coco Chanel; while Chanel was radically reducing womens fashion to align it with the modernist movement sweeping art and literature, she was more interested in how fashion could subvert the very conceits of tastefulness, flattery and glamour.

If Roseberrys clothes are surrealist, it is in their unexpected jumble of imagery an effect that seems more a reflection of the way images are transmitted in the 21st century than genuine avant-garde design.

Roseberry is more innocent even intent on protecting a naivet that allows him to produce his works of gleeful madness.

I dont go to fashion parties because I know that the cool crowd, they would be so disappointed if they met me. Because I am not I am, I am so not cool like that. And Elsa strikes me as a person who was like that. She was quotable. She was fabulous, he says. She was like, intimidating. And I dont really emotionally connect with people like that. I connect with the tender side.

He still seems to design from the place of a young person sitting in their room, music blasting, posters on the walls, bathed in their influences, their imagination running wild. When the output is shaped primarily not by the pursuit of originality but by enthusiasm. If he likes something he sees from another designers archive Jean Paul Gaultiers cone bras, say, or Christian Lacroixs operatic volumes hell simply use it in his own collections, like a pop star covering her idols hits. If runway gags feel cynical from other designers, Roseberrys read like mischief and play. I think it comes from a really tender place in me, and thats the hardest place to access and the hardest place to preserve.

Im always thinking what would a little kid want to reach out and touch? he continues. And that just feels so deep to me. So deep. So much deeper than the highbrow over-intellectualized fashion that other people do. Its also something that feels like a uniquely American kid culture experience. And when you recontextualize those things like Janet [Jackson], Michael [Jackson], Jurassic Park, Taylor [Swift] in the context of couture, theres a chemical reaction. And I think its very similar to Elsa being some wackadoo Italian coming in and taking a p--- all over the au courant Chanel-isms of the day.

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How Daniel Roseberry became the internet's favorite fashion designer - The Washington Post