Fashion Faux-Paw: Did Kylie Jenner take it too far with her latest lion head dress?

It’s time for Paris Fashion Week and on the first day itself, makeup mogul Kylie Jenner, roared into controversy. Twenty-five-year-old Kylie, who is the youngest of the Kardashian-Jenner sisters, turned heads when she arrived for Schiaparelli’s couture show, wearing a black velvet bustier dress featuring a life-size lion’s head.

Unsurprisingly, her lion-dress grabbed the eyeballs of people, with some wondering if the couture garment actually glamorised hunting and killing of animals.

Wearing a lion head

Kylie Jenner, the name behind the multi-billion dollar makeup brand Kylie, on Monday arrived at Schiaparelli’s spring/summer 2023 couture show held in the Petit Palais in Paris in a black velvet strapless gown adorned with the life-size head of a lion.

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The head (complete with a manicured mane) covered the entirety of Jenner’s torso. She finished the outfit with a pair of black Schiaparelli sling-backs with golden embossed toes.

Jenner posted her look on Instagram, writing, “Beauty and the Beast. Thank you @danielroseberry and @schiaparelli for such a special morning. Wow i loved wearing this faux art creation constructed by hand using manmade materials. beautiful beautiful.”

The dress is pre-release of Schiaparelli’s Spring-Summer 2023 couture collection, with the surreal lion look also featuring on models walking down the runway.

Schiaparelli’s creative director Daniel Roseberry said the ensembles, featuring the lion’s head as well as a snow leopard a wolf, were based on the three beasts that appear in the 14-Century poem Dante’s Inferno and represented lust, pride and avarice”.

Besides Jenner with her lion look, supermodel Irina Shayk also donned the lion look on the runway. Naomi Campbell strutted a boxy, black faux fur coat with a wolf’s head emerging from the left shoulder, while Canadian model Shalom Harlow wore a strapless snow leopard tube dress with a roaring feline head bursting through the bust.

The animals coming to life

The head-turning pieces, according to the fashion house, were all hand-sculpted out of foam, hand-embroidered with wool and silk faux fur, and then hand painted to look as life-like as possible, and were not actual pieces of taxidermy.

Roseberry explaining his thought process on the garments said he wanted to celebrate “the glory of nature and guarding the woman who wears it,” adding, “In this collection, you’re never quite sure who made the piece you’re looking at—was it nature? Or was it man?”

Causing a furore

While some people praised Roseberry and Schiaparelli for the hyper-realistic designs, the clothes have stirred a row, with some questioning if the clothes support or glamourise hunting.

One user on Instagram wrote, “We have to stop showing animals as luxury ‘products’. They may be made from foam but these are endangered species that have historically been killed for their pelts to be turned into garments.”

Another wrote, “Animals are inspiring when they are ALIVE. Fake or not, this is such a wrong message to send when trophy hunting is still very much a thing. Just NO sorry.” A third user commented, “Irrelevant that no animals were harmed whilst making these clothes. The message you are putting out there glamorises trophy hunting endangered species during a biodiversity crisis. This is abhorrent. Do you not realise how dangerous this message is, or don’t you care? You’ve made an otherwise beautiful line hideous.”

But, People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) had a different take on the issue. The animal rights group’s president Ingrid Newkirk praised the looks, telling TMZ that the brand’s collection of three-dimensional animal heads was “fabulously innovative” and “may be a statement against trophy hunting, in which lion families are torn apart to satisfy human egotism”.

Perhaps, though, this ruckus was what Roseberry wanted. In his notes, he wrote, “It is a reminder that there is no such thing as heaven without hell; there is no joy without sorrow; there is no ecstasy of creation without the torture of doubt. My prayer for myself is that I remember that always — that, on my most difficult days, when inspiration just won’t come, I remember that no ascension to heaven is possible without first a trip to the fires, and the fear that comes with it. Let me embrace it always.”

With inputs from agencies

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