Schiapar-alien! The pictures from Daniel Roseberry’s surrealist sci-fi Western spring haute couture collection—and the arrivals of Zendaya, Hunter Schafer, and Jennifer Lopez—were all over the internet before the show had finished. A robot baby, a dress swishing a (faux) horse’s tail, a bodice carapace sculpted almost like a space pod—all these threw further fuel on the runaway sensation he’s ignited around the brand.

Before liftoff, in a quiet-ish moment backstage, Roseberry shared some of the thoughts that have been propelling him. Essentially, they swirl around the big questions about what it means to be creative, and human, in the age of machine learning. “I’ve even seen, online, people taking my work and doing AI interpretations and asking, ‘Who did it better?’” he exclaimed. We know what likely triggered that: his fake lion’s head, as sported by Kylie Jenner and on the runway in his spring ’23 Dante’s Divine Comedy couture show. What’s been his reaction? “It’s just made me dig deeper into the parts of myself that feel like the most tender, the most childlike,” he replied. “Because what differentiates us as humans is our memories. I think of this as in music—like in an album where you have all these different references being mixed together. And then the composite is something that feels really original, a handwriting that feels unique to the house. But if you go inside the looks, it’s really like a treasure trove of personal references mixed with the past.”

It was a case of back to the future, then—a meld of retro technology, classic sci-fi movies, and references to the grand haute couturiers of the past and Roseberry’s Texan upbringing. There were exoskeleton dresses and an entire 3D spine inspired by both Elsa Schiaparelli’s radical 1938 skeleton dress and Giger aliens from the Alien movie series. Silver-tipped Western belt buckles formed a corset and bristled up over the arched sleeves of a biker jacket and along the flanks of a pair of jeans. A heavily embroidered, sculptural black velvet cape was paired with casually belted sandy suede pants. “Dressage braids” inspired the knots on a cream leather suit that nearly looked like it could have been a space uniform from NASA.

Maggie Maurer, nestling a robot baby on her hip, was wearing a white singlet and conceptual couture cargo pants—Roseberry’s tribute to Sigourney Weaver as Ripley. “I’ve watched the Alien series, like, six times,” he said. His robot-woman dress and the baby were glittering constructs of nostalgic tech elements like defunct electronic motherboards, CDs, flip phones, mirrors, and gems—“all things that I grew up with that now seem as antiquated as Charles James!” the designer said.

Haute couture is the last handmade bastion of fashion that still exists, the place where extreme fantasias can manifest because of human skills. Roseberry leaned strongly into that. An equal part of his couture research was looking at the wonders of Cristóbal Balenciaga (the capes, the volumes) and Yves Saint Laurent (the black cropped tribute jacket with white sequined lapels), which Azzedine Alaïa collected and are currently exhibited at the Palais Galliera. Roseberry didn’t neglect to design a segment of gowns with an eye to the awards season, a duchesse satin balloon dress outstanding among them. But maybe there was a final comment from him on the value of hands-on human creativity versus AI to be read in the most normal-looking outfit on the runway. It was a pencil threaded through the collar of a white shirt. “It’s from our studio,” he smiled.