In anticipation of the upcoming Costume Institute exhibition, “Camp: Notes on Fashion,” we’ve digitized collections from which pieces were selected for the show or catalog. This collection was presented on October 10, 1990, in Milan.
Franco Moschino’s joyous romp of a Spring 1991 show was chock-full of sight gags and disparate themes. “Too many designers do just one thing, one way. I like the big melting pot. The mess,” the designer said in a 1989 interview with Vogue.
What did Moschino throw into the pot for his collection? Well, Pat Cleveland sported a black-and-yellow jacket that was essentially an inflatable airplane flotation device with sleeves. Then there was a khaki military getup refashioned with pockets customized to hold a woman’s war paint—a compact, mascara, lipstick, etc.—rather than ammo. And no Moschino show would be complete without a riff on a Chanel-like cardigan ensemble; this season it was rendered in Missoni-like knit.
Elsewhere, the designer paid homage to his own country in various ways: a jacket with a postcard-from-Naples–style design on its back; cathedral-shaped appliqués; and a dress depicting “the boot” (that perhaps nodded to the cartographic art of Alighiero Boetti). Continuing the travel theme in a playful manner, and evoking the Tyrol, was a dirndl paired with a cow-embellished jacket. Not at all humorous to contemporary eyes are Moschino’s costume-y and stereotyping takes on the traditional kits of flamenco dancers and toreros.
Moschino liked his theater in the round, as it were, and it was necessary to see looks front and back to fully get their message. In this collection, for example, there was a tailored red pantsuit embroidered, in gold, with the word “waist” at the waistline. The punch line was provided when the model turned around to reveal the rest of the legend: “of money.”
Similarly pun-derful was a seemingly innocuous look, consisting of a button-down, check pants, and a suede belt that was selected for the Costume Institute show. It’s a look Isaac Mizrahi cheered in a memorial to Moschino, who died in 1994 of complications from AIDS. “I thought he was an amazing designer, the newest thing in Italy since the fifteenth century,” Mizrahi told Vogue. “He was so funny, true to himself, and very crazy. But he was very new; everything he did was very new. If there was one thing he designed that I would want, it was a big white shirt, a silly thing that had a big iron mark printed on the back as if someone had burned it—and it said, ‘Too much irony.’ Talk about reinventing the white shirt.”
