At the premiere of the new prequel film “The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes” in Berlin, Hunter Schafer she appeared in a dress that consisted of hand-painted elements.

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Consisting of dozens of hand-cut and organically shaped pieces attached to an elasticated crochet petticoat, the dress was designed and created by Schiaparelli creative director Daniel Roseberry. Although up close, attention was drawn to the thick brushstrokes on each piece of the “puzzle”, from a distance, the fragments of the dress came to form an expressionist-style nude female figure. Each piece of the puzzle was embellished with rhinestones, ensuring that the dress shimmered from any angle. In an interview with British Vogue, Roseberry hinted that a source of inspiration for the dress was Lucian Freud’s impasto technique.

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Many in the art world may scoff at bridging high art with high fashion, but the house of Schiaparelli has something of a tradition of this, experimenting with surrealist and avant-garde fashion before the Second World War. Elsa Schiaparelli herself was deeply immersed in the Surrealist and Dada art scenes while living in New York in the early 1920s, enmeshed in the circle of Man Ray, Marcel Duchamp and Alfred Stieglitz. When she first opened her atelier in 1927, she made a name for herself with her trompe l’oeil images starting with knitted blouses that mimicked the look of lavallière blouses and progressing to a collaboration with Salvador Dalí that produced the iconic shoe-shaped Hat and Lobster Skirt (both creations, in 1937).

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The house continues the tradition as seen in the premiere of “The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes”.