Schiaparelli’s Daniel Roseberry Receives Arts Honour From the Hirshhorn

The bridge between fashion and contemporary art was built once again in New York this week. On the evening of Monday 2 November 2026, the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, one of the Smithsonian institutions, presented its Leader in the Arts award to Schiaparelli creative director Daniel Roseberry at its annual New York gala, held at David Geffen Hall at Lincoln Center. The evening also honoured the museum’s former director Melissa Chiu and brought together numerous names from the international art world.

Who was honoured on the night?

According to the museum’s official gala page, the aim of the event is to fund free exhibitions and art education programmes in the US capital. Alongside Roseberry and Chiu, the evening’s artist honourees included Ai Weiwei, Huma Bhabha, Abigail DeVille, Elmgreen & Dragset, Mark Grotjahn, Raven Halfmoon, Ryoji Ikeda, JR, Izumi Kato, KAWS, Ragnar Kjartansson, Jeff Koons, Oscar Murillo, Shirin Neshat, Woody De Othello, Nicolas Party, Chatchai Puipia, Pedro Reyes, Arlene Shechet, Hiroshi Sugimoto and Charline von Heyl.

The gala is also one of the museum’s most important sources of donations. The official page shows that individual tickets start at 5,000 dollars, while tables for twelve go up to 250,000 dollars. Having one of the honoured artists seated as a guest at top-tier tables is among the privileges offered to donors. This structure also shows how decisive a funding tool galas that bring together famous names from the fashion and art worlds in the same room are for museums.

As Vogue reported from the evening, even many of the guests who were not wearing Schiaparelli chose gold-toned accessories as a nod to the designer. It was a clear reference to the gilded, sculptural jewellery and details that have become the house’s signature.

A brief history of the award

The Leader in the Arts award is fairly new. According to Galerie Magazine, the museum first presented it in 2024 to architect and collector Peter Marino at the gala held at The Shed in New York to mark its 50th anniversary. Fifty artists were honoured that night, and the gala went on record as the biggest evening in the museum’s history up to that point. That the award went to a fashion designer this year shows that the museum sees fashion as part of contemporary art too.

From Texas to Paris: who is Daniel Roseberry?

Born in 1985 in Plano, Texas, Roseberry studied at the Fashion Institute of Technology (FIT) in New York. In 2008 he left school to join Thom Browne’s team, working at the brand for more than a decade and rising to design director. In April 2019 he succeeded Bertrand Guyon at the helm of Schiaparelli, the storied Paris couture house; he is cited as the first American designer to lead a French couture house. He showed his first collection in July 2019, just a few months after taking up the post.

Roseberry’s Schiaparelli reinterprets the surrealist legacy of the house’s founder, Elsa Schiaparelli, in today’s language: gold jewellery, anatomical details and sculptural silhouettes quickly became a recognisable signature. The designer reached his widest audience in 2021 with the outfit — a red ball skirt and navy jacket — that Lady Gaga wore while singing the national anthem at the US presidential inauguration. In 2024 he received Neiman Marcus’s award for creative impact in fashion.

Why it matters

Roseberry’s award is another sign of the rapprochement between fashion and the museum world in recent years. Schiaparelli is particularly visible on the museum stage this year: “Schiaparelli: Fashion Becomes Art”, the house’s first major exhibition in the United Kingdom, which opened at the end of March at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, can be visited until 8 November 2026. The exhibition places Elsa Schiaparelli’s historic collaborations with artists such as Salvador Dalí side by side with designs from the Roseberry era.

An art museum giving its highest honour to a fashion designer confirms that couture is a subject not only for the red carpet but also for art history. Seen from Turkey, the picture is a reminder that local designers could open up more to the world of museums and exhibitions; Dice Kayek’s “Hagia Sophia” design in the V&A’s Istanbul exhibition was a recent example. Readers who want to follow the season’s major fashion gatherings can take a look at our 2026–2027 fashion week calendar.

Sources

Image: Exterior of the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington — NPS staff, Wikimedia Commons, Public domain