There are creatures that do not seduce, they warn. Scorpaenids, with their dorsal fins raised like a row of sabres, elegant yet lethal, remind us that beauty is never innocent. A single sting and pain spreads like a narrative poison, invading the body, unsettling the mind, suspending time for hours. Nature here does not whisper, it threatens.

This is precisely the language Roseberry seems to have learned by heart. Haute couture, in his hands, is not a caress but a defensive strategy. The woman he dresses does not drift, she bristles in a shell dress, a white armor of duchesse satin. She knows how to protect herself.

In The Agony and the Ecstasy, that is the title, silhouettes advance like hybrid organisms. Scorpion tails burst from the backs of impeccably structured corsets, a reminder that danger often comes from behind, from the place we no longer watch. Elsewhere, bodies transform into birds mid-flight. Winged jackets, trompe-l’œil feathers, silks painted and then cut into vibrant bouquets. Nothing is decorative. Everything is intentional.

Materials converse like species forced into coexistence. Lace in bas-relief, almost geological. Layered tulle, saturated with color, creating a carnal sfumato. Feathers soaked in crystals of light. Mimosa embroideries in silk threads, fragile in appearance yet stubborn. Like those fish that suddenly inflate, diodons, spherical and untouchable when threat approaches. Haute couture, Roseberry tells us, is not a refuge. It is a territory of dream, certainly, but a lucid dream, aware of its predators. A space where imagination is not an escape, but a weapon of style to confront reality and, nonetheless, place in parentheses a thought we know well, that of Franck Sorbier.

FM