From Texas to Place Vendôme, Daniel Roseberry has turned Schiaparelli into one of fashion’s most powerful factories for spectacle, craft and cultural images.
From the photorealistic lion head worn by Kylie Jenner atop a black velvet Schiaparelli gown to the gilded lung necklace Bella Hadid wore at Cannes, Daniel Roseberry has been behind some of fashion’s most indelible images of the past several years.
Under his direction, Schiaparelli has once again become a factory for objects of desire: garments that sit somewhere between clothing, sculpture, spectacle and cultural artifact. They are pieces designed not simply to be worn, but to be seen. So how did a designer from Plano, Texas, become one of the most influential forces working in fashion today?
From Texas to Place Vendôme
Born in Plano, Texas, in 1985, Roseberry has never tried to disguise his Americanness beneath the traditions of Parisian couture. Instead, he has made the tension between the two central to his Schiaparelli. American pop culture, childhood memories and music enter the atelier and come back out through Parisian savoir-faire: familiar images made strange, then sharpened by couture-level technique.
Fashion was not always the plan. The son of a minister and an artist, Roseberry grew up in a deeply religious household and briefly considered a life in ministry. After high school, he spent time on Christian missions before returning to the United States and enrolling at New York’s Fashion Institute of Technology. The pivot would eventually take him from Texas to the center of Parisian couture.
The Thom Browne Years
Before Schiaparelli, Roseberry spent roughly a decade at Thom Browne, eventually rising to head of design. It was a formative education in how a house can build an entire universe from proportion, tailoring and repetition. Browne’s gray suit could be stretched, flattened, exaggerated and theatricalized without losing its identity.
That lesson still echoes in Roseberry’s work: technical rigor can carry an absurd idea, and a recognizable code becomes more powerful when it is pushed rather than merely repeated. In 2019, he was appointed artistic director of Schiaparelli, an American designer without traditional couture training taking over one of Paris fashion’s most surreal houses. Rather than reproducing Elsa Schiaparelli’s past, he began translating its spirit.
Designing Through Movement
Roseberry’s process is strikingly instinctive. Movement matters. In Vogue’s A Day in the Life, he describes walking through Paris as a space for “freeform associations,” with inspiration often arriving while he is “in movement” — walking, flying, or sitting on a train.
One of the clearest examples sits along his commute. In the Tuileries Garden, he repeatedly passed sculptor Gaston Lachaise’s Standing Woman, a voluptuous bronze figure he said had been “haunting” him. The figure became one of the references surrounding Schiaparelli’s Spring 2023 Haute Couture collection, the same show that would explode online for its hyperrealistic lion, leopard and wolf heads.
It reveals something essential about Roseberry: his references do not have to begin as fashion. A sculpture can become a bodice. A childhood memory can become couture. Pop culture can meet Place Vendôme.
Fashion Like a Pop Song
Then there is music. Roseberry has called it one of his most important creative influences, telling System Magazine that it eventually replaced cinema as his “number-one inspiration.” In his Vogue documentary, he puts it more simply: “I would be nowhere without my soundtracks and my pop music.”
That relationship offers a useful way to understand his runways. The best pop songs are immediate without being simple. They have a hook — something that grabs you before you have processed everything underneath it. Roseberry’s Schiaparelli works the same way.
There is almost always a hook: a lion emerging from black velvet, gilded lungs turned into jewelry, a body transformed into sculpture, or an accessory enlarged until it becomes almost absurd. The image catches you first. The craftsmanship reveals itself afterward.
American Spectacle, French Savoir-Faire
That balance is where Roseberry’s identity as an American working inside a French couture house becomes most compelling. The American side brings celebrity, entertainment, pop culture and spectacle. Paris brings history, technique and the extraordinary capabilities of the atelier.
Roseberry has described being interested in the experience of being “an American living in Paris”, and that outsider position lets him approach couture tradition without treating it as untouchable. Importantly, the atelier never disappears behind the viral image. Molding, embroidery, metalwork, sculpting, and hand-painted surfaces become part of the spectacle itself.
The outrageousness draws you toward the garment. The craftsmanship gives you a reason to stay.
From Runway to Cultural Image
Few moments demonstrate Roseberry’s command of the fashion image better than Zendaya’s appearance at the London premiere of The Odyssey in July 2026. Hours earlier, the sculptural look had closed Schiaparelli’s Fall 2026 Haute Couture show in Paris. Then it was on Zendaya.
Styled by Law Roach, the look centered on a porcelain-effect sculpted bodice modeled like an idealized marble torso before dissolving into a shimmering fringed skirt. The turnaround was almost instantaneous: runway, celebrity, image, culture.
That speed matters. Roseberry’s couture survives the intimacy of the atelier and the scrutiny of the runway, but it is also immediately legible to millions of people encountering it first through a screen.
Creating Objects of Desire
That may be what separates Roseberry from many of his contemporaries. He is not simply creating clothes that respond to what is popular. He creates objects people want to see, touch, discuss and remember.
Kylie Jenner’s lion. Bella Hadid’s gilded lungs. Lady Gaga’s enormous golden dove brooch at President Joe Biden’sinauguration. The anatomical breastplates, surreal jewelry and sculpted bodies that have become signatures of Roseberry’s Schiaparelli. Each functions as clothing, but each can also survive independently as an image.
Roseberry has used the word “iconography” when considering Schiaparelli’s place among fashion’s great houses, an especially potent idea in a period when so much fashion is consumed through photographs and video. After Lady Gaga wore his Schiaparelli design to the 2021 inauguration, he described his celebrity-dressing philosophy as an attempt “to nail the zeitgeist.”
He has done exactly that, repeatedly.
His success comes from understanding that couture’s oldest proposition — making something extraordinary by hand — can coexist with fashion’s newest reality: a garment may now meet millions of people first as an image. Texas and Paris. Pop culture and couture. Spectacle and technique. Instinct and precision.
Roseberry is still relatively early in the timeline of designers who become historically synonymous with a house. Yet in only a few years at Schiaparelli, he has already created images likely to define how this period in fashion is remembered. He is not merely dressing the moment. Increasingly, he is helping create it.
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