It was within the subterranean precinct of the Carrousel, where once fashion raised its altars beneath the vigilant gaze of Jacques Mouclier. The night itself seemed to await a few apparitions. Suspended lights, like stars held captive in an artificial vault, illuminated a black runway whose intermittent gleams suggested a sea of phosphorescent shadows. It was there that Daniel Roseberry unveiled his collection, which he named “The Sphinx,” a mysterious homage to a brooch once designed by Alberto Giacometti for the illustrious Elsa Schiaparelli, whose memory is revived this month by a retrospective at the Victoria and Albert Museum.

In these successive appearances there was something of the prodigious and the dreamlike. Trompe-l’œil reigned like a discreet enchanter. A fur seemed to run across a denim coat with massive shoulders, though it was only a printed mirage. A knitted dress, fitted like a whispered confidence, bore the sunlit shadow of a fantasized body. Elsewhere, fragments of tulle, so light they seemed to belong to the air itself, slipped into the twists of a gold dress, into the rigor of a tailored trouser, or onto the gravity of an evening gown beaded with shimmering tubes. The effect suggested that the fabric, freed of its weight, floated upon the skin like a memory.

Yet illusion was only an open door to a deeper metamorphosis. Roseberry seemed to wish to remind us that clothing is not merely an ornament: it is a theatrical armor, a fleeting transfiguration. Thus one saw the birth, for the span of a cocktail, of worldly warriors. Their hands carried bags bristling with golden bird claws, resting upon mules whose heels formed hissing kittens, sculpted in resin and felt with an almost unsettling realism.

“This chimera, half human, half animal,” said the designer, “evokes the contradiction that inhabits each of us and that remains at the very heart of the house.”

Ribbed knits opened into suggestive cutouts or ended in undulating hems, like the fringes of a docile sea. Shining materials, capturing the islands of light scattered across the stage, cast fleeting flashes, as if each silhouette carried away with it a fragment of a star.

I left the presentation with that singular vertigo certain collections inspire: the feeling of having witnessed less a fashion show than a materialized reverie. Perhaps it was simply that, but until now it has been the most beautiful apparition of this Paris fashion week. For a long while afterward my mind remained unsettled, as when one leaves a landscape whose beauty has silently moved you.

FM