The signature playfulness was there, but Jeremy Scott, for his Moschino men’s wear debut in Milan, was in a reflective mood.
“It’s a global situation. Of course, my country’s in the toilet, but when my country’s in the toilet, the world’s in the toilet. We have to fight — for rights, for beauty, for everything we believe in because it’s being ripped away from us. That’s very much [what I wanted to convey] in the show. [On the clothes] frescoes have been covered over with black paint, arbitrarily, to hide them. That’s what I feel is going on. And trying to find any bits of beauty that you can and almost making emblems and totems of them,” said Scott, who to accessorize silhouettes loaded berets and gloves with metal military trinkets — Eighties-style — that clinked down the runway.
The designer for his set installed scaffolding in the gilded rooms of an ancient palazzo on Milan’s Corso Magenta that he rigged with tangles of colored cables and flashing tubes like some dystopian wasteland. Out stepped Scott’s warriors of a future humanity, dressed in metallic pants and gloves and suits in intergalactic prints splashed with spaceships and explosions.
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Weaving a tension, he mixed military codes with ever-kitsch, ultra feminine signs of love and redemption, such as Renaissance prints floating with angels that came splashed across a variety of looks including a puffer jacket of cosmonaut proportions. Jumpsuits in parachute silk and fatigue jackets in olive cotton drill cloth were daubed with black flower doodles.
“Within the fight we can find the beauty and part of the beauty is people feeling motivated and active, people taking command of their voice,” said Scott, who expressed hope through the likes of rainbow marabou coats — both for men and women — as well as army suits and springy tutu evening gowns in allover rose prints. “I’ve got my combat boots on,” declared Anna Cleveland, who delivered a runway salute in the latter look — offset with knitted khaki harnesses — as part of the women’s pre-fall collection also presented at the show. “You have to fight for your rights, and today, amongst other things, we’re fighting for the right to express ourselves through art.”