Jeremy Scott believes, devoutly, that "You should have fun with fashion." He said it after the show, wrinkling his nose at some of his overserious fellow designers. "It shouldn't be a church that you pray to," he added. This from the guy who two seasons ago made a return-to-New York splash with little black dresses bedecked with crystal crosses—probably about as close to an ecclesiastical habit as he's likely ever to get. And if fashion isn't a fabulous sort of church, what gives with the first look in his Fall collection that hit the runway today—a metal-mesh tank digitally printed with a twisted version of the Coke logo: "Enjoy God"?
Never mind that for the moment. A Jeremy Scott collection is often a grab bag of different ideas, and God was only one of those on display here. The more dominant one was the nineties. "I was thinking a lot about 1994: going to school, getting dressed up to go to parties, the enthusiasm I had," Scott continued. There was bombast to spare in his haute nineties—so joyfully vulgar you wanted to call it bas nineties—furry neon dresses in angora (a new material for the label), plastic jackets, and Manic Panic-ed pigtails. Scott mentioned Gregg Araki's Nowhere as a reference; Clueless was in the mix, too.
Those little dresses were silly but short enough to be sexy, which in Scott-land means they'll likely sell. Who knows whether the same is true of the superhero frocks that capped the show, emblazoned with lightning bolts, trailing capes. The final look was a floor-length, glittering evening take on Superman's famous outfit. Superman—there's a secular, spandex-clad deity if there ever was one. Scott, true believer that he is, hymns him in sequins. My God is an awesome God, dude!
