MFW – Moschino S/S2020

Jeremy Scott is currently our favourite mad scientist of fashion.  Fact.  The creative director of Moschino obviously has an ongoing mission to keep us all on our toes.  We can never be sure what each new collection will bring and that’s what makes him so exciting to watch.  For S/S2020 Scott channeled his inner surrealist and invoked artists like Dali, Picasso and Magritte with his brave new collection.  If there was one thing you left the show feeling sure about it was the understanding that this was not a collection for the colourblind among us.

Here abstraction was the name of the game.  If you’ve ever had the fantasy of feeling like you were a piece of living art then this was definitely the collection for you.  The silhouettes were unconventional bordering on exaggerated and you were dared to wear all the colours for your outfits, not just one or two.  Everything was designed to test your sense of perception and push you outside of your usual artistic or creative comfort zones.  These weren’t ensembles made to fit in with or complement other design aesthetics.  You’re either wearing Moschino next summer or you’re not, there’s no middle ground.

It’s such a bold play for the market it has to be admired.

Everything was a canvas.  Literally.  Colours and designs were applied to those canvases with the kind of carefree brush strokes reminiscent of the surrealist artists who turned the Paris scene upside down at the beginning of the last century.  Even Frida Kahlo’s presence could be felt with the black Dia de Muertos wedding dress and the flamenco style gowns that surprised on the catwalk.  There were even nods to regality with Napoleon style hats topping wide-sleeved bolero jackets with giant shoulder epaulettes or extraordinary long gowns with printed jewellery and pleating graphics that – again – tested your perceptions at a distance before revealing their true nature, like the resolution to a cliffhanger you didn’t even know was coming.

Even in the more restrained moments on the catwalk – like the amazing electric orange knee-length coat or the enticingly short blue and white shirt-dress – the smaller details still marked them out as uniquely Moschino creations.  Beyond that there were harlequin motifs, reoccurring guitar abstractions and a wonderfully offbeat horizontally striped suit coupled with with a giant six-fingered hand.  This is what mad scientists do.  They experiment with the norms you know and are comfortable with and challenge you to see a new world through their eyes.

There are few better than Jeremy Scott at convincing you that the journey into unfamiliar territory with him will be richly rewarded at the other end.

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