(Web Desk) - When normal people think of couture garments — the extravagant custom designs using all but extinct techniques, materials, and craftsmanship — they probably dream of pieces made with luxurious silks, supple leathers, crystals, and tulle. Daniel Roseberry thinks of your old flip phone.
Roseberry, the creative director of French fashion house Schiaparelli, showed the brand’s 2024 couture show in Paris.
Under Roseberry, Schiaparelli shows have become a buzzy event among fashion fans — not just for the A-list front row filled with celebrity clients but also for the unforgettable wearable sculptures that are reposted endlessly in each show’s wake.
This season’s standout pieces from the Schiaparelli show are as symbolic as they are visually captivating: a life-size robot baby doll and a short cocktail dress, both completely covered in tech waste.
Old phones, calculators, wires, motherboards, and CDs are used as embellishments the way sequins or beads might adorn a less ambitious garment.
Roseberry said the toddler was a reference to the Alien movies and told WWD that he mined his memories for inspiration in an age of AI-generated remixing of his collections.
The baby — and the dress, nicknamed “The Mother” — are part human and part object, rising from the past and haunting the future.
Assembled using materials from a pre-iPhone era, the pieces seem to warn of an inhuman robot-powered existence. At the same time, they recontextualize the tech waste of a simpler time.
“Now, the technology I grew up with is so antiquated that it’s almost as difficult to source as certain vintage fabrics and embellishments,” Roseberry wrote in the show notes.
Old junk becoming suddenly valuable and sought after is nothing new. In fact, Roseberry’s work comes at a time when the Y2K nostalgia hype cycle is in full swing.
The trend isn’t just for fashion, either. Young people are buying old digital cameras, drawn to the Myspace digicam aesthetic they didn’t get to live through.
In a truly delightful TikTok video, one user takes two iPod Nanos and clips them into her hair. There’s that other person who has a wall covered in old keyboards.
A Schiaparelli dress that looks like an early 2000s I Spy page is just the trend’s natural progression.
Every time there’s a renewed interest in — and market for — something previously forgotten and discarded, I think about what we’ll be trying to claw back in 20 years’ time.