MOSCHINO
Scott was flanked by designers and by Pablo Olea, his P.R. director, who wore a football jersey with a snarling black jaguar over a flannel shirt. The workroom was quiet. Scott was thinking. Before him stood a male model, wearing a look from Moschino’s 2016 spring men’s collection: a hot-pink suit with a yellow shirt and a light-pink tie. The clothes were in bright, supersaturated colors printed with trompel’oeil shadow effects, as if the model had stepped out of a Dick Tracy comic strip. Scott wasn’t looking at the clothes—they were finished. He was studying the shoes: a pair of black jackboots, with the pants tucked in. There was a silver plaque on the sole that said “Moschino.” “I don’t like the plaque,” he said. “Can we just pry them off ?” An employee handed him a pair of pliers, and he began to operate. Even those who dismiss Scott’s work agree that he is the perfect successor to Franco Moschino, who was sometimes called the court jester of Italian fashion. Moschino started as a painter, and found his way into fashion after working as an illustrator for designers like Gianni Versace. Being a fashion designer is “a superficial, stupid job,” he once said. “The social-psychological aspect is more interesting.” In the early eighties, when Moschino began designing, Italian fashion was in thrall to a glitzy decadence—Armani and Versace were ascendant—and Moschino was appalled by the industry’s selfseriousness and status obsession. Inspired by the Surrealists, he filled his shows with absurd elements—playing cards, cow prints, rubber pig noses, question marks—and parodies of the latest trends. He created a necklace made of pearls and Rolex watches, mocking the era’s conspicuous consumption; a dress made of bras, lampooning the underwear-as-outerwear craze started by Madonna; a shirt with the arms tied, so that it became a straitjacket. The back said “For Fashion Victims Only”—the well-placed slogan was one of Moschino’s favorite devices. At Moschino, Scott does many of these things, too. He even uses Franco Moschino’s favorite symbols: cow prints, question marks. “I play with Moschino codes now,” he told me, but, he added, a lot of it is just Jeremy Scott, with a bigger budget. “There are things I’ve done in my past that could have been Moschino things.” For all of Franco’s mockery of the fashion world, his designs appealed most to fashionistas. Scott’s designs appeal to people who merely like Looney Tunes. And, while Franco’s ad campaigns addressed issues ranging from animal cruelty to AIDS, Scott’s work isn’t overtly political, although he has ventured
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