Nothing conveys fierceness like a brooch of an apex predator. Kylie Jenner stole the show on Monday at Schiaparelli’s couture catwalk in Paris when she showed up wearing a pre-release from the brand’s Spring-Summer 2023 couture collection embellished with a life-size lion’s head made of black velvet. The entire body of Jenner was covered by the incredibly lifelike fake head, which included a perfectly coiffed mane. She completed her look with a pair of black slingbacks by Schiaparelli that had golden embellishments on the toes.
Jenner’s bizarre lion costume reappeared on the runway shortly after she took her seat, along with several other animalistic outfits. The nine circles of hell and Dante’s “Inferno,” according to the show notes, served as a metaphor for the insecurity and suffering that all artists go through, according to creative director Daniel Roseberry.
Roseberry reinvented the leopard, the lion, and the she-wolf in the collection, “expressing lust, pride, and avarice accordingly,” by physically taking inspiration from the three monsters that occur in the poetry from the fourteenth century. While Canadian model Shalom Harlow wore a strapless snow leopard tube dress with a furious feline head bursting from the front, Naomi Campbell donned a boxy, black faux fur coat with a wolf’s head protruding from the left shoulder.
The eye-catching items were fully handmade using foam resin and other synthetic materials. Nevertheless, despite Schiaparelli’s clarification that the pieces are “faux-taxidermy,” some social media users find the collection challenging to enjoy because to the visual allusion to trophy hunting.
Roseberry, however, believes that if the clothing causes dread, it is doing its goal. He ended in the performance notes, “Inferno, Purgatorio, Paradiso: One cannot exist without the other.” It serves as a reminder that there is no such thing as heaven without hell, joy without suffering, or the ecstasy of creation without suffering from doubt.
