PARIS (AP) — Paris couture week opened Monday not with sequins or red carpet pageantry, but with the surreal sight of Cardi B and a live crow.
Wrapped in a custom Schiaparelli gown of graphic fringe, the U.S. rapper stood beneath the gilded columns of the Petit Palais, holding the black bird on her arm. Her avian plus one squawked, glared and nearly lunged — setting the tone for a monochrome show that itself soared straight into the surreal.
It was perhaps a fitting image for Schiaparelli. Elsa Schiaparelli, the house’s founder, built her legend in the 1930s by weaving the unexpected — lobster dresses, shoe hats, and, yes, animals — into the heart of high fashion.
That legacy pulsed through Daniel Roseberry’s Fall 2025 collection, a spectacle in pure black and white, staged as if the city itself had been drained of color, leaving only stark contrast and raw emotion.
Inside, the mood was cinematic, and not just owing to the glitzy guest list, including Dua Lipa and Hunter Schafer. Gowns and jackets were defined by intensity and ease, with the waist and hips shaped through unexpected techniques. One sweeping gown undulated, conjuring the ghostly silhouette of a deep-sea medusa. Hints of disco sheen flickered like film across the runway.
But if the house has been criticized in the past for relying on extreme corsetry and body manipulation, this season marked a shift. Roseberry, perhaps heeding the critics, abandoned his signature corset silhouette. In its place: a freer, more elastic exploration of the body, echoing Schiaparelli’s own restless spirit.
Roseberry said the collection was inspired by the moment in 1940 when Elsa Schiaparelli fled Nazi-occupied Paris for New York — a period “when life and art was on the precipice: to the sunset of elegance, and to the end of the world as we knew it.”
Here, that tension was alive in every look: archival codes reimagined with a restless push toward the future. Silhouettes veered between sculptural and fluid, with foulards stitched from measuring tapes and Swiss dots in silk thread — a nod to Elsa’s era, crafted using century-old techniques.
Yet the show was more than spectacle. This was couture at its most essential — an ideas factory for the entire fashion industry, unfettered by trends.
“Chanel was interested in how clothes could be of practical use to women; Elsa was interested in what fashion could be,” Roseberry added.
It is this what-if energy, the transformation of memory, myth, and sheer technique into something never seen before, that keeps couture vital, even as the world rushes toward AI and disposable fast fashion.
The setting only heightened the effect. The Petit Palais is currently home to an exhibit on Charles Worth, the 19th-century Briton who invented haute couture by bringing artistry and handcraft to Paris.
The symmetry was irresistible: in these halls, Schiaparelli’s past collided with fashion’s future, reminding all why couture matters: not as museum piece, but as living laboratory for risk, reinvention, and radical beauty.
A decade after its relaunch, Schiaparelli has found commercial traction and become a fixture on the world’s red carpets, a rare feat in today’s luxury market. But above all, the brand’s power lies in its ability to surprise. On opening day, as Cardi B’s crow threatened to take flight, Schiaparelli proved that in Paris, fashion’s most potent magic is still the unexpected.
Cardi B holds a crow at Schiaparelli's Fall-Winter 2025/26 Haute Couture show in Paris, Monday, July 7, 2025. (AP Photo/Thomas Adamson)
NEW YORK (AP) — U.S. flu infections showed signs of a slight decline last week, but health officials say it is not clear that this severe flu season has peaked.
New government data posted Friday — for flu activity through last week — showed declines in medical office visits due to flu-like illness and in the number of states reporting high flu activity.
However, some measures show this season is already surpassing the flu epidemic of last winter, one of the harshest in recent history. And experts believe there is more suffering ahead.
“This is going to be a long, hard flu season,” New York State Health Commissioner Dr. James McDonald said, in a statement Friday.
One type of flu virus, called A H3N2, historically has caused the most hospitalizations and deaths in older people. So far this season, that is the type most frequently reported. Even more concerning, more than 91% of the H3N2 infections analyzed were a new version — known as the subclade K variant — that differs from the strain in this year’s flu shots.
The last flu season saw the highest overall flu hospitalization rate since the H1N1 flu pandemic 15 years ago. And child flu deaths reached 289, the worst recorded for any U.S. flu season this century — including that H1N1 “swine flu” pandemic of 2009-2010.
So far this season, there have been at least 15 million flu illnesses and 180,000 hospitalizations, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates. It also estimates there have been 7,400 deaths, including the deaths of at least 17 children.
Last week, 44 states reported high flu activity, down slightly from the week before. However, flu deaths and hospitalizations rose.
Determining exactly how flu season is going can be particularly tricky around the holidays. Schools are closed, and many people are traveling. Some people may be less likely to see a doctor, deciding to just suffer at home. Others may be more likely to go.
Also, some seasons see a surge in cases, then a decline, and then a second surge.
For years, federal health officials joined doctors' groups in recommending that everyone 6 months and older get an annual influenza vaccine. The shots may not prevent all symptoms but can prevent many infections from becoming severe, experts say.
But federal health officials on Monday announced they will no longer recommend flu vaccinations for U.S. children, saying it is a decision parents and patients should make in consultation with their doctors.
“I can’t begin to express how concerned we are about the future health of the children in this country, who already have been unnecessarily dying from the flu — a vaccine preventable disease,” said Michele Slafkosky, executive director of an advocacy organization called Families Fighting Flu.
“Now, with added confusion for parents and health care providers about childhood vaccines, I fear that flu seasons to come could be even more deadly for our youngest and most vulnerable," she said in a statement.
Flu is just one of a group of viruses that tend to strike more often in the winter. Hospitalizations from COVID-19 and RSV, or respiratory syncytial virus, also have been rising in recent weeks — though were not diagnosed nearly as often as flu infections, according to other federal data.
The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Department of Science Education and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. The AP is solely responsible for all content.
FILE - Pharmacy manager Aylen Amestoy administers a patient with a seasonal flu vaccine at a CVS Pharmacy in Miami, Tuesday, Sept. 9, 2025. (AP Photo/Rebecca Blackwell, File)
