I consider myself a FromSoftware fashion girlie in the purest sense; I know my gravekeeper cloaks from my crimson hoods, and a Dior saddle bag from the Fendi baguette. This crossover knowledge is rarely practical, but is occasionally useful for declaratives. Like, I’m sure that Schiaparelli is pioneering FromSoftware haute couture, and creative director Daniel Roseberry proved that with the French fashion house’s latest spring/summer collection.
Maison Schiaparelli, which has pink history in avant garde, has been particularly gold and fantastic since Roseberry took over in 2019. He’s good at mining Schiaparelli’s surreal design history to help him turn women’s bodies into pure, complicated metal — her lungs into trees, her ears an accessory. In the past year, the year of FromSoftware’s epic poem of an open world game Elden Ring, Schiaparelli has been particularly gilded, structured, and strange. It’s hard not to see the resemblance. Schiaparelli and Elden Ring are both putting forward austere art that is as doused in a daydream as it is in cold mystery, like a cloud of unrecognizable perfume you get caught in in the street. You can’t stop thinking about it. Neither can I.
Why don’t we take a closer look at Schiaparelli and Elden Ring’s fashion similarities?
Doja Cat, Invader
Pop star Doja Cat has been doing some incredible things with her personal style within the last year, embodying the concept of the female gaze with high-fashion outfits and incredibly ornate makeup that often incorporates her recently shaved head.
When she arrived at the latest Schiaparelli fashion show, you could hear the sound of everyone’s jaw collectively hitting the floor. Doja donned head-to-toe red, including 30,000 ruby red Swarovski crystals that were methodically placed all over her upper body (EVEN IN HER EARS) by celebrity makeup artist Pat McGrath. Doja’s look expands upon Schiaparelli’s creative director Daniel Roseberry’s concept of using bodies as live sculpture, according to Vogue.
For us Elden Ring fans, however, Doja also looks exactly like a shimmering, high fashion invader. Invaders are always a bright, ominous red to remind players that they are, in fact, enemies. If she jumped into my game in the middle of one of my many attempts to best Malenia, I’d almost certainly get waxed within seconds. This look is everything. -Alyssa Mercante
Spring/Summer ‘22, Preceptor Seluvis
I mean, you know what they say about a big hat. Big, big tears to hide. Schiaparelli’s 2022 spring-summer collection was meant to signal glamorous, tight despair, Roseberry explains in the season’s description on the Schiaparelli website.
“I found myself […] thinking about the empyreal: The heavens as a place to escape from the chaos of our planet, but also the home of a mythical high priestess, at once goddess and alien, who might in fact walk among us,” he writes. “I imagined a being whose very clothes defied rules of gravity.”
That includes this big arse hat, paired here with gloves covered in vintage rhinestones, hands made from resin, and gold leaf. Its grandiosity and coldness matches Elden Ring’s Preceptor Seluvis, an obnoxious, insincere sorcerer whose gold mask might hide his own pain. Or perhaps just pimples. He’s useful for a magic build, though.
Spring/Summer ‘22, Goldmask
Schiaparelli’s black embroidered hoops use the house’s “Apollo of Versailles” motif, sprouting rays of sun first introduced by founder Elsa Schiaparelli in the 1930’s. The threads, sequins, pearls and Swarovski crystals that highlight the model’s face here in Madonna-like solemnity remind me of monastic Goldmask’s, well, gold mask.
The malnourished NPC doesn’t speak — his overflowing faith speaks for itself, and he was instrumental in helping me perform cool miracles. Schiaparelli’s version might be too decadent for him. But I sometimes prefer to walk not by sight, but by Swarovski.
Spring/Summer ‘23, Teardrop Scarab
Roseberry writes on the Schiaparelli website that the house’s spring-summer 2023 collection was influenced by La Divina Commedia, Dante Alighieri’s narrative poem navigating the levels of hell, purgatory, and heaven’s celestial spheres.
“What appealed to me in the Inferno wasn’t just the theatrics of Dante’s creation,” Roseberry says. “it was how perfect a metaphor it provided for the torment that every artist or creative person experiences when we sit before the screen or the sketchpad or the dress form, when we have that moment in which we’re shaken by what we don’t know.”
I am, at this moment, shaken by how Schiaparelli’s cocoon-like bodice — a delicate pearl shell made hardy by elaborately arranged, gold leaf-topped leather — looks a lot like the Teardrop Scarab’s stinky ball of stuff. Hitting the Teardrop Scarab until it dies makes it give up its stuff, either topping off your flasks, or giving you an upgrade item. Do you think you can level up in hell?
Spring/Summer ‘23, Sorceress Sellen
Even if you can’t level up in Schiaparelli’s vision of hell, it seems like you can at least get half-body replacement surgery, and that feels like an important improvement to our existing face-lift and lip filler technology. I’ll take a little win.
Versions of Schiaparelli’s hammered brass head appear both on prisoners in Elden Ring and on sorceresses like Sellen, who opts for a stone woman’s face over her own.
“I want glintstone sorceries that open our minds, unbound by terrestrial taboos,” Sellen says about herself if you ask. “No matter what we give in return.” Stone is kind of inherently terrestrial in nature, but I’ll engage in a metaphor for you, Sellen. And, like her sartorial decisions, her ethos mirrors Roseberry’s embrace of the unknown.
“Fear means you’re pushing yourself to make something shocking, something new,” he writes on the Schiaparelli website. “This collection is my homage to doubt. The doubt of creation, and the doubt of intent. The twinned, sometimes contradictory impulses to please one’s audience and to impress oneself.”
Spring/Summer ‘23, Blaidd
Oh poor Blaidd. The half-man, half-wolf was created by Ranni’s two fingers to act as a vassal to her, one incapable of treachery. Sadly, however, progressing along Ranni’s questline and causing her to rebel against the Greater Will drives Blaidd mad, and at one point you’ll have to fight him to the death. If you do this, you’ll get his armour and a chance to look a bit like Naomi Campbell did during the Schiaparelli SS23 runway show.
Cambpell, herself a legend much like the characters in Elden Ring, closed the show with a look meant to represent the she-wolf and “foam, resin, and other manmade materials,” Schiaparelli’s website assures us.
If Blaidd was by my side during the Malenia fight, I would have felt a lot less petrified, but sadly the beautiful wolfman is yet another victim of the cruelty of the Lands Between. -AM
Spring/Summer ‘23, Godfrey
Irina Shayk walked down the Schiaparelli runway looking like a whole arse lion head was grafted onto her breast, and that’s pretty metal. It is, thankfully, “faux-taxidermy” that is constructed by hand from a variety of materials, meant to reference the sin of pride as depicted in Dante’s Inferno, but it’s hard not to immediately think of Godfrey when looking at this striking image.
Godfrey was the first ever Elden Lord, the consort to Queen Marika and a former bloodthirsty warrior known as Hoarah Loux. Godfrey is a mandatory Elden Ring boss, appearing near the end of the main campaign.
After whittling down his health, the Beast Regent Serosh (a giant lion) will appear, just for Godfrey to brutally slay the beast and shed his own armour. The ghostly specter of Serosh lingers over his shoulder as he fights you as Hoarah Loux, and this Irina Shayk look is giving all of that energy. -AM
Spring/Summer ‘22, Fall/Winter ‘21, Malenia
Every runway needs a showstopping last look, and though she isn’t technically Elden Ring’s finale, Malenia, Blade of Miquella is the game’s rotten, double-take beauty. Formidable as she is sick, bare as she is made of metal.
She, like Roseberry’s Schiaparelli, has a glinting vision for women, one where clothing, anatomy, and dedication is enough to wear as armour against the world. Schiaparelli’s winding, hand-moulded leather dress (pressed with gold leaf) and gold toe heels are what I imagine Malenia putting on after she kicks my arse again. And again.
What do you think, what are some of your favourite instances of Elden Bling in real life?
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