Haute Couture’s Heroes in Training

Just before the Standing Ground show on Monday, I asked a seasoned fashion insider why there was such a buzz around Michael Stewart’s Paris debut.

“Because we need a hero,” was his reply. The day had begun with Daniel Roseberry’s latest couture collection for Schiaparelli. Seven years ago, he was the hero-in-training. After his show, Roseberry mulled over the advantages of being a smaller business. He’d just taken what he considered to be a huge risk with the direction of his collection.

“Heading into the unknown,” he called it. “I feel so grateful to be at a house where you can do that. I realize too all of the fantasies I have about fashion were when houses were this size, not when they became whatever. I think there’s a huge luxury and privilege in being small right now because we can really maneuver and pivot.”

Would Michael Stewart agree? His business is fledgling in comparison to what Roseberry considers small, but he too was heading into the unknown with his first show in Paris (and only his second ever). “This is lovely to do, but I just wonder what I could do if I had some semblance of freedom, because I am over everything and it’s taxing. I can still manage to do this, but I just feel like, wow, can you imagine having some sort of security? I’m not saying I wouldn’t do this anymore, but I might do 12 looks every two years, and they’d be the most incredible things you’d ever seen in your life, each one more beautiful than the last.”

Which is, in fact, what his couture debut essentially was: 28 looks as opposed to 12, but an exercise in intense reduction to pure essence nonetheless. Stewart’s signature technique is the way in which the decoration becomes the construction. Seams are buried in runnels of beading. “It almost acts like boning would,” Stewart clarified before the show. “You’re making the seam such a feature that it actually removes it.” The closest visual analogy would probably be Azzedine Alaïa’s construction. The arduous beading process — all of it done in Stewart’s miniscule atelier in 180 The Strand in London — truly qualifies Standing Ground as couture.

“This bodice looks like the crystalline flex of koi fish scales,” he pointed out. “But these are real rock crystals.” There was a peculiar obsessive poetry in such a notion, as there was in the wedding dress made from Irish Carrickmacross lace. It took 26 women between the ages of 21 to 96 4,000 hours over nine months to make, which are the kind of stats haute couture loves as a testament to its bounden uniqueness. Stewart drew the motifs of dragonflies, shamrocks, rose hips, blackberry briars and thorns onto the patterns. “The mass tangles that protected a lot of the ancient sacred sites” he called them. “I’m not very romantic or folkloric in that way, but I love the creativity of it.” Kristen McMenamy, wild-eyed and barefoot, wore the dress to close the show.

Romantic or not, the language Stewart used to describe his process suggested the soul of an artist. “I love the tones of gray, and the different ways of making them feel alive and making them feel almost carved into. They feel like they’ve been hewn or sculpted into relief, which I love.” The similarly sculptural grandeur of a swag-backed opera coat in brown duchesse satin, or the massive swoop of coral duchesse skirt attached to a beaded corset defied the everyday. The seaming of a vermilion silk sheath reminded me of the genius manqué of American fashion Ralph Rucci’s “Frankenstein stitching.” He too found daywear a chore. “I showed a pair of trousers to prove I can do daywear,” declared unwitting kindred spirit Stewart. “I choose not to bother. Why come to me for something like that? I can do beautiful dresses, so that’s what my clientele primarily comes to buy.” Is he obsessive? “I just do things right,” Stewart insisted. “If I do something, I do it right.”

And maybe Daniel Roseberry would be a member of that fraternity too. He has been training for the New York City Marathon, which demands an extraordinary physical commitment. He brought it back to the atelier. Remember last season when he was lauding the show he titled “The Agony and the Ecstasy” as a reset for his studio? Rather than liberation, it led to a mental block. “The only solution was really to surrender to things that we had never done before, and things that the atelier had never done before,” Roseberry admitted. His shownotes, as provocative a read as ever, asked whether couture’s beauty resided in the material itself or in the imagination capable of reinventing it. His answer was obvious in the new use of silicon and latex, rather than silk and satin.

It was startling. The clammy quiver of latex, the gelatinous shiver of silicon were summoned to shape the silhouettes with which Roseberry has defined Schiaparelli. The artist reference (for what is a fashion collection these days without an art co-relative?) was Matthew Barney and his Cremaster cycle. “I saw ‘Cremaster 3’ in college,” said Roseberry, “and it’s always stuck with me. The blurring of garment and body, the prosthetics, the colour story.” Jeanne Cadieu walked in an eerie web of tendrils. She was followed by a model whose undulating black latex tentacles suggested Cthulhu in a sex club. Whoever imagined H.P.Lovecraft as an influence on haute couture?

Roseberry felt the collision of the natural and the artificial was very much now. He’s not wrong. Real flowers were set with sugar water to dry them but preserve their colour. They were then encrusted on a skirt. It’s no longer difficult to imagine a decadent end of days when that is the only way people will experience flowers. Or fish or fowl, or any of the other natural wonders we take for granted. Roseberry was typically thoughtful as he conceded, “It can never be a one-dimensional beauty here. There’s always a subversion, there’s always an edge, whether that’s coming from animalia or the body or this reference to silicone and latex. I think that’s the kind of beauty that inspires me, and it’s the kind of beauty that we all have to accept and embrace.” On the soundtrack, a male voice sonorously mused on “the sudden urge to turn the wheel and drive right off the cliff.”

It was actually Roseberry speaking. “I am so loving this frontier of what my body’s capable of, and how that works into a creative process.” He was talking about marathon training again. “I feel like it’s a real unknown for me. As a designer, you never connect with your own body, it’s always about other people’s. So to be given that chance, it feels like kind of a homecoming.”

Once more the hero-in-training.

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