Schiaparelli Street Style: The Bold and the Beautiful

The entrance to the Petit Palais gallery where the Schiaparelli couture now takes place each season is perfect for street style, celebrity arrivals, and a large crowd. With the sweeping gravel paths each side and the curving steps up to the huge ornate golden Art Nouveau doors it is the perfect place to pause, pose and play the star.

Words by Tony Glenville

Each season many of the invited audience wear previous season Schiaparelli, be it the limited edition pret a porter, the haute couture or merely the accessories from huge earrings to a simple keyhole handbag.

The steps provide an obstacle course for many to negotiate, and it takes time and care and often a walker, this is great for the street style snappers as they have more opportunities to capture each arrival. The old days back at the Schiaparelli headquarters in Place Vendome was never easy as guests rushed from car to entrance across the pavement.

In search of the street style outside each show, it is not only about the capture of the famous and the fantasies but also an indication of the truth of what sells and what the clients are looking for at the house. Schiaparelli does its recalls well with very stark and graphic black and white, they also clearly have a lot of clients who love the golden touch. Schiaparelli gold is rich, deep and often textured, it is not bright and yellow. Also, the surrealist touch, not too obvious, is part of the signatures of the house and in a variety of ways clients endorse this with their choices.

The house isn’t for the shy, it’s for the bold, it isn’t about discrete wearability it’s about graphic lines and a link to the artists Elsa Schiaparelli loved and worked with, so outside the show, even those not top to toe in Schiaparelli wear strong silhouettes, bold linear shapes and offer themselves for the street style story as it unfolds.

This season shimmering heat even early in the day greeted the arrivals, but that was no deterrent, better too hot than lashed by rain and sheltering under a huge Lucien Pages black umbrella, struggling to find one’s invitation. However, come rain or come shine no one misses a Schiaparelli show, especially since it is the first show on the official Haute Couture week schedule. It is a premiere in every sense