Jeremy Scott knows well the value of the two-dimensional. His Insta-fodder collections for Moschino have been a lightning rod for fashion in its current state of disruption, wherein clothes are immediately consumed through the lens of an iPhone, even by those who were there to view the runway in the flesh. Choosing the quaint 2-D prettiness of paper dolls as his spring ruse could be interpreted as a sly cultural commentary, although Scott would never cop to something so cynical. He celebrates the superficial with a smile, not a sneer.
“Actually I had been sitting on the idea for a few years,” said Scott, standing in front of a board of show looks, which looked convincingly tacked with photos of paper dolls. “I got so inspired by how to twist an evening dress. Then I was looking through my notebook and was, like, ‘Oh hey, that idea was good.’” He built from the undies up, opening with a long dress with a trompe l’oeil print of a body in a bra in panties, then adding on a skirt, and a polka dot blouse with paper tabs, creating a throwback wink at a Franco Moschino daytime wardrobe. What looked like a blouse and cardigan belted over a skirt with pearls was an optical illusion of a one-piece dress. A classic trench was an illustration printed with a belt, collar and creases.
The lineup amused, particularly a one-piece swimsuit printed to look like a bikini, complete with anatomical midriff accessorized with a paper-doll face-framing sunhat, beach towel and camera. Head-on, it truly tricked the eye. The eveningwear parade of cardboard-cutout, old-school pageant gowns with stiff skirts that jutted off the hips, their ruffles printed on, and jewels cut out of flat Neoprene, were festive and funny, but — no pun intended, really — felt a little flat. That’s the reality of life in a two-dimensional world.
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Midway through the show came a series of pill-themed outfits — dresses doctored up with pills; a handbag that looked like a prescription bottle that was part of Scott’s see-now-buy-now capsule (get it?) collection, which he conveniently filed under a “Valley of the Dolls” sidebar. The trend has taken hold in a major way this season, in part thanks to Scott, who was early to it, selling McDonald’s iPhone cases and Barbie T-shirts immediately after the show since his arrival at Moschino. Even he sometimes feels hemmed in by the appetite for the immediate he’s willfully stoked. The capsule collection and paper dolls were two different ideas happily and almost coincidentally united by the title of the famous Jacqueline Susann novel. “I was happy to find a link that made sense,” said Scott, noting that the buy-now capsule can’t cannibalize the full runway collection. “I’m straddling two worlds, so I have to protect one world as well as participate in the one that I basically created….It’s interesting. Sometimes it’s like, ‘Why did I do this? It’s my own fault’ and then you’re like, ‘Valley of the Dolls’ and you’re happy again.”