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Decoding Adele's glamorous and grown-up new look

The singer looked gorgeous in a form-fitting black column gown featured a sweetheart neckline - Instagram / adele
The singer looked gorgeous in a form-fitting black column gown featured a sweetheart neckline - Instagram / adele

If fashion were a video game, then it would feature levels of devotion: from the avatar that follows trends, to the one that studiously replicates runway looks, to the couture obsessive who isn’t afraid to try the most experimental designs.

On Saturday night, Adele levelled up. The singer attended a wedding in a Schiaparelli custom haute couture gown designed by Daniel Roseberry. The form-fitting black column gown featured a sweetheart neckline and dramatically draped ‘rosette’ sleeves in white silk taffeta that created a cream-puff effect around her shoulders. She finished the look with tooth earrings: giant gold molars with gobstopper pearls clasped in their roots.

Fitted rather than floaty... Adele's stunning Schiaparelli gown
Fitted rather than floaty... Adele's stunning Schiaparelli gown

The look was one of Adele’s most daring yet. And among her most elegant. But the most striking aspect of the look was what a step-change it represented from the singer’s former dress-up formula, of long-sleeved, nipped-in-at-the-waist, long-skirted dresses with boho spirit.

Adele’s Schiaparelli gown (Schiapadelli, surely) was more rigorous. Fitted rather than floaty (the better to show her figure, something the 33-year-old megastar has enjoyed since her weight loss). It bore little resemblance to the Seventies-inspired beaded Chloe gown she wore to headline Glastonbury in 2016, or the crystal-strewn, full-skirted Zuhair Murad gown that sparkled under the Wembley lights in 2017.

Although she’s reworn the Chloe gown at least once, while watching her re-broadcasted Glasto headline set last summer, Adele’s style has taken a turn away from the timeless, ladylike dresses she gravitated to in the past and toward the runway.

In May, she shared images of herself celebrating her birthday in Altuzarra’s £2,156 ‘Shibuya’ dress: a body-conscious tie-dyed silk maxi style. That followed her October 2020 guest-hosting slot on Saturday Night Live, for which she wore at least 13 designer looks (Bethan Holt called it “the real ‘hello’ to her fashion reawakening”).

Daniel Roseberry’s Schiaparelli is not for the faint of heart. His avant-garde designs -- incorporating six-pack moulded bustiers, pearl-embellished fish and even a gold model of a suckling infant -- have won a slew of high-profile fans. Lady Gaga wore his black and red gown with a gold dove brooch to perform at President Joseph Biden’s inauguration, and Bella Hadid showed the sultrier side of the fashion house in the nearly topless gold ‘lungs’ dress she wore on the Cannes red carpet.

Bella Hadid in Schiaparelli on Cannes red carpet - CHRISTOPHE SIMON
Bella Hadid in Schiaparelli on Cannes red carpet - CHRISTOPHE SIMON

Adele’s latest look is another surefire sign that the singer has fully stepped into her own sense of style. The best part? Seeing serious fashion, worn unseriously -- as photos from the wedding made clear, Adele didn’t let her dramatic sleeves get in the way of a good dance, or a photobooth clinch with new beau Rich Paul. Even under all the major fashion, she’s still Adele.