In June of 1940, Elsa Schiaparelli left Paris, a city she loved and had grown to call home, and boarded a ship for New York. It marked the end of a decade, but also the end of a revolutionary period in fashion. Elsa had always been interested in what fashion could be, and how art could help us find the answer.

For fall 2025 couture, Daniel Roseberry dedicated the collection to that in-between moment for Elsa, the balance of Paris and New York, during a year of peak elegance, the beginning of the modern era of war, and when life and art was on the precipice.

“Conceived entirely in black-and-white, I wanted the collection to ask whether we can blur the line between past and future: if I deprived these pieces of color, or any notion of modernity, if I focused obsessively on the past, could I actually make a collection that looks as if it was born in the future?” said Roseberry in his collection notes. “I’m proposing a world without screens, without AI, without technology—an old world, yes, but a post-future one as well. Maybe they’re one and the same. If last season was about making something baroque look modern, this season is about inverting archives to make them look futuristic.”

And although Elsa would eventually find her way back to Paris despite the war, New York became her new home and place she would return to, rejoining her Surrealist friends and compatriots who sought shelter in our city of dreams.

In closing, the CFDA member said: “This collection reminds you that looking backwards is nothing if we can’t find something meaningful to bring into our future.”