When Emotion Leads
Review of Schiaparelli Spring 2026 Couture Fashion Show
By Mackenzie Richard Zuckerman
Sincerity is rare, as is true risk-taking. Schiaparelli’s Spring 2026 collection leaned into both, guided by instinct and emotional urgency rather than polish. Daniel Roseberry’s decision to lead with feeling gave the season a sense of exposure, reminding us that fashion, at its most compelling, still has the capacity to be personal and unresolved.
What that openness ultimately achieved is less straightforward. The ideas were abundant and visually charged, the execution often striking. How those elements came together, or resisted cohesion, is where the collection becomes more interesting, and more complicated.
THE COLLECTION
THE VIBE
Unfinished Mythology & Risk-Led Romanticism
Schiaparelli’s latest collection arrived with an unusually explicit emotional agenda. Daniel Roseberry framed the season as a turning point – a release from overthinking, a recalibration toward instinct, and a renewed belief in couture as a vehicle for awe rather than argument. Inspired by a revelatory encounter with Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel, the collection set out to privilege sensation over explanation, inviting viewers to respond viscerally, even irrationally, to what unfolded on the runway.
After several seasons marked by composure and restraint, this shift felt intentional. Color surged, silhouettes expanded, and surface treatments became more overtly expressive. Feathers, spikes, crystalline embellishments, and animalistic references crowded the collection, conjuring a world suspended between menace and beauty. Many of the looks worked powerfully in isolation – evidence of the atelier’s virtuosity and Roseberry’s enduring talent for provocation. Yet as the show progressed, cohesion proved a tad elusive. Ideas accumulated faster than they resolved, leaving the collection feeling more episodic than directional.
The tension recalled a literary parallel that felt close at hand. Dante’s Inferno and Paradiso offer agony and ecstasy through structure – emotional states shaped by progression, hierarchy, and consequence. Descent and ascent are earned through movement. Here, those extremes appeared side by side, often within the same look, without the narrative architecture that allows one to deepen the other. The sensation was immediate, even exhilarating at moments, but rarely cumulative.
An alternative framework hovered just beneath the surface. The collection’s fixation on flora, fauna, venom, and beauty under tension echoed something close to a Garden of Eden – a place of abundance shaped by restraint, where temptation and innocence coexist, and where every act carries consequence. Eden offers fantasy governed by balance: nature at its most seductive, and most dangerous, precisely because it is contained.
Through that lens, the collection’s strongest looks felt almost prelapsarian – exquisite, charged, and fragile. Yet without a clearly articulated fall, the narrative never fully crystallized. Serpents appeared without temptation, ecstasy without loss. The result was a world rich in symbolism, though hesitant to commit to its own mythology.
As couture continues to justify itself through clarity of intention and depth of meaning, Schiaparelli’s Spring 2026 collection prompts a broader question: when designers ask us to feel rather than think, what kind of structure is still required to make that feeling endure?
THE DIRECTION
THE QUOTE
The tension in not knowing was the point. This season wasn’t about working backwards toward a result, but about focusing less on how something looks and more on how it feels to make it. The pendulum swung away from control, and that uncertainty became central to the work.
– Daniel Roseberry
THE WRAP UP
Schiaparelli’s Spring couture collection ultimately carried weight because it was driven by emotion rather than optimization. In a season where many couture offerings arrived impeccably resolved, this one chose exposure instead – opening itself up to excess, uncertainty, and contradiction. That willingness to risk coherence in pursuit of feeling deserves recognition.
The collection’s shortcomings stemmed from structure rather than ambition. Its imagery – flora and fauna, seduction and danger, beauty threaded with threat – suggested a world akin to a Garden of Eden, rich with symbolism and consequence. Yet without a clearly defined narrative arc, the mythology remained impressionistic. The strongest looks hinted at innocence, temptation, and transformation, though the passage between them stayed unresolved.
Still, there is power in what Roseberry attempted. Emotional authorship is rare, particularly at this scale, and even rarer in couture, where perfection often outweighs vulnerability. This collection affirmed that risk-taking – especially when it is rooted in feeling – carries its own value. If the season stopped short of transcendence, it also signaled a designer willing to disrupt his own momentum in search of something more alive.
In that sense, Schiaparelli’s Spring 2026 couture was less a destination than a gesture – one that reminded us that couture, at its best, is allowed to be searching.
