Paris, Texas

Daniel Roseberry, the creative director of the Surrealist-rooted Maison Schiaparelli, is the toast of the couture. Nathan Heller finds that his path from the Dallas suburbs to the Place Vendôme is equally out of the ordinary.

- Nathan Heller

Long before the summer showing of Schiaparelli’s couture collection, Daniel Roseberry, the house’s creative director, gathered his thoughts as he always did: by starting from the future that he hoped to reach. He imagined a review of the collection in the press, and wrote a version of it, line by line. He grew up in Texas and, on arriving in Paris to lead Schiaparelli toward a new phase of growth in 2019, worked to find a narrative order for the rangy span of his creative life. Roseberry loves reviews, their clarity and judgment—given the choice, he’d often rather read reviews of movies than see them. Imagining a critic approaching his fashion helps him find its big emotions, its broad sweep. “If I can identify and anticipate in my mind what people want to see, I can work backward,” he explained. “How do I make that review come to life?”

A few months later, Roseberry is assessing a brown felt coat with a swirling, cowl-like lapel being walked up and down the room before him by a model with neat auburn hair. This is Paris, early July, and the couture collection he imagined in the spring will travel down the runway in just two days’ time. At the moment, more than two dozen pieces, four tables of accessories, and a cast of models must be matched and gathered into a coherent whole. If he fails, his runway will seem scattershot and random. If he succeeds, the collection will achieve its own daring inevitability: the haunted rightness of a strange dream brought to life.

“Some of these could be good,” he murmurs, picking up bonelike gold-and-stone extensions, to be used as earrings.

“Separate?” one of the models asks.

Roseberry nods. “One, two,” he says, gesturing at his own ears.