Last night, Daniel Roseberry, the American designer who has reinvigorated Schiaparelli since taking over as creative director in 2019, was honored with the CFDA International Designer of the Year Award. The Texas born-and-raised designer joined Vogue’s Nicole Phelps a few days earlier for a refreshingly frank, wide-ranging conversation about his journey from Texas, where he grew up, to Paris where he now resides full time.
“There’s some kismet that happens [when] merging American iconography and recontextualizing it in this very unreachable, unattainable, Place Vendôme, Parisian gilded world that feels very true to me as a person and true to my story here,” the designer explained, describing his creative approach. “And to bring it back to Elsa [Schiaparelli], as an Italian woman who founded her business in Paris, she also benefited from this outsider’s perspective.”
That duality between the Parisian and the American figures heavily in the designer’s day-to-day, as he shares that in Paris his life is completely devoted to his work, while his friends and loved ones remain back in his home country. “Two years ago I was having this conversation with this girl from Germany who was living in Joshua Tree alone and she was preparing to go home and she had a pet snake,” he recalls. “I was like, ‘well, what do you do with the snake?’ and she said ‘It’s actually really easy because snakes are cold blooded, so I can take a frozen mouse out of my freezer, defrost it on the radiator and feed it to my snake when I leave, and he’ll regulate his metabolism for the month that I’m gone.’ And so it became this running joke with my friends that when I go back I’m ‘mice feeding’ because I’m basically storing up on love and community and taking that with me back to [Paris].”
The designer also reveals an unexpected source of inspiration each season. “I think of pop music all the time when I’m working on collections,” Roseberry explains. “That’s sort of my dirty little secret when I’m working on the couture collection, I am imagining every single exit to be a pop banger song that you will remember.” Listen to their conversation below.
Read the full article here
