Hunter Schafer is fluent in the language of alternative fashion, so it came as no surprise that the Euphoria star approached her look for The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes Berlin premiere with the same exacting attitude as her growing original red-carpet archive. (This is, of course, the young actor who didn’t flinch when covering her chest with a single white feather – courtesy of new avant-garde plumage pro Ludovic de Saint Sernin – at the Vanity Fair Oscars party this year.)
Hunter Schafer is the perfect match for the surrealist tour de force Schiaparelli and its risk-taking creative director, Daniel Roseberry. Standing alongside her The Hunger Games co-star Rachel Zegler, it was Schafer who looked like the leading lady of the dystopian adventure franchise thanks to her abstract painterly Schiaparelli fall-winter 2023 couture.
The skin-tight mosaic-style dress with its raw hemline is emblematic of Roseberry’s “free, spontaneous, painterly” approach to fashion this season after the brand was hit by the controversy surrounding a faux taxidermy lion’s head modeled by Kylie Jenner for couture spring-summer 2023.
If that bombastic statement showed the Texan designer’s inner desire to shake up the rigid inner workings of couture, then his latest offering showed a softer side to the couturier that doubled down on technique. (See the bump-revealing red-carpet look a pregnant Sienna Miller wore to Vogue World: London for further proof of the romance at the heart of his dreamlike craft).
On Hunter Schafer, a former model and current Prada ambassador known for her boundary-pushing approach to beauty, the deconstructed spray-on dress looked as at home as the twisted black Schiaparelli tank (complete with trompe l’œil buttons in the shape of nipples) she wore on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon back in 2021, and the heeled black pumps sprouting gold talons she tottered into the brand’s fall-winter 2022 couture show wearing. Schafer might be a Miuccia girl at heart, but when a brand is adjacent to her gothic-tinged image, she pounces. It’s that attitude that makes her stand out in the fashion wilderness.
This story first appeared in British Vogue.
