Fashion Week is back in full force, and there’s a lot to see. Blink (or scroll too fast on Instagram) and you’ll miss the details: tiny bags, tall shoes, feathered hats, leather capes and diamond dog collars. So as part of a new series, Wow Moment, we’ll spotlight things we saw on the runways that delighted or mystified us.
Neither breastplate nor dickey really captures the spirit of a new necklace — and that isn’t quite the right word either — presented by Schiaparelli on Monday. It’s both. It’s neither.
Here are the facts: The neck piece consists of a thick golden metal chain that rests on the collarbones. At the center is a true-to-size ear pendant. The ear is pierced with various crystal rhinestones on its upper cartilage (twice), inside the ear and on the lobe.
A long rectangular plate in golden resin extends from just behind the ear to just below the navel. Curves and carvings on the plate mimic the body parts that are covered when the plate is worn. So a little cleavage, a hint of abs, a pierced belly button. (Navel piercings, like every other look from the turn of the millennium, have appeared on multiple runways this month. This is a trend warning.)
There is no prescribed way to style the necklace plate, but Schiaparelli’s approach is to wear it as a dickey, creating the illusion of partial nudity, if you happen to be a saucy relative of C-3PO.
“We’ve been putting the breastplate under all the jackets this week,” said Daniel Roseberry, the artistic director of Schiaparelli, during a preview of the spring collection.
Since his appointment in 2019, Mr. Roseberry has gradually added to his collection of Surrealist anatomical jewelry and accessories. There are eyeball earrings, a necklace resembling lungs, trompe l’oeil shoes with carved-out painted toes and rings that look like haute couture versions of Halloween witches’ fingers. (Last Christmas he made a dress for Kim Kardashian with a sculpted six-pack bodice in Hulk green.)
And now his latest offering, in what he refers to as the house’s “psycho chic” style: a breastplate-dickey-necklace-hybrid thing, for the eccentric who wants to reveal everything by revealing nothing.
