Schiaparelli’s New Artistic Collaboration : Venus Inspired Bronze Furniture

The Italian fashion designer Elsa Schiaparelli has always loved working with artists. She invited the likes of Jean Cocteau, Alberto Giacometti, Salvador Dalí, Christian Bérard and many others to create exclusive motifs and designs for her collections. Bringing their universe to the surrealist and enchanting world of the eponymous house, she launched in Paris in the 30s, she maintained close relationships to arts and design. She also imagined various collections of objects halfway between art and utility, challenging the distinctions among design, and high fashion.

Today, the American fashion designer, and creative director of Schiaparelli, Daniel Roseberry continues Elsa Schiaparelli’s legacy and interdisciplinary tradition by presenting a new artistic collaboration with the American designer F Taylor Colantonio. Together, Roseberry and Colantonio imagined a suite of sculptural bronze furniture, upholstered in silk embroideries. “I loved working with F Taylor Colantonio, whose work I have been admiring for years, to create something out of our common interests for mythology and a certain theatricality that still bears the Schiaparelli imprint,” explained the creative director.

Bringing Colantonio’s universe to the one of Schiaparelli, the pair created an ensemble inspired by the ‘Toilet of Venus’ motif— a neoclassical artistic theme showcasing the goddess Venus in her celestial bedchamber. The embroideries are designed by Daniel Roseberry himself and made by hand in corded silk with gilded leather appliqués at the Schiaparelli atelier in Paris. The pieces are made in raw bronze in Italy using the ancient lost-wax technique and are produced to order in a numbered edition of only 8 pieces.

The pieces can be viewed by appointment in Paris, in the salons of Schiaparelli, on the third floor of 21, Place Vendôme.