Nothing is more fierce than using an apex predator as a brooch. On Monday, Kylie Jenner stole the show on Schiaparelli’s Paris couture catwalk when she arrived in a black velvet strapless gown adorned with a life-size lion’s head — a pre-release of the label’s Spring-Summer 2023 couture collection that debuted moments later.
Naomi Campbell walks the runway at the Spring-Summer 2023 Schiaparelli Haute Couture. Credit: Estrop/Getty Images
Kylie Jenner attends the Schiaparelli Haute Couture Spring-Summer 2023 show on Monday wearing a striking accessory. Credit: Jacopo Raule/Getty Images
Drawing verbatim from the three beasts featured in the 14th-century poem, Roseberry redesigned the leopard, the lion, and the she-wolf in the collection; “representing lust, pride, and greed, respectively.” Naomi Campbell modeled a square, black faux fur coat with a wolf’s head emerging from the left shoulder, while Canadian model Shalom Harlow wore a snow leopard strapless pencil dress with a roaring feline head bursting through the bust.
The Texan designer heads a historic couture house
The eye-catching pieces are completely handcrafted from foam resin and other man-made materials. But despite Schiaparelli specifying that the pieces are “faux taxidermy,” the visual parallel to trophy hunting means some social media users find the collection hard to appreciate.
But for Roseberry, if the clothes inspire fear, they’re doing their job. “Inferno, Purgatorio, Paradiso: one cannot do without the other,” he concluded in the show notes. “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 agony of doubt.”
