Faulkner famously said, "The past isn't dead. It isn't even past." Today, in his own way, Jeremy Scott said it, too. He was thinking of the persistence of the past in the perma-present culture of the Internet, when anything and everything is just a Google search away. "Things don't ever go away now," he said backstage. "Deleting history isn't really possible."
The rainbow spectacle he staged today looked back to the nineties, and at moments it seemed to glance at the way the nineties looked to the seventies, and, well, if you took out your magnifying glass, you'd, like, find a little bit of whatever you happened to look for. That's the conceptual bit. More literally, there were sweat suits, stretch dresses, and leggings printed with computer screen shots and instant-message emoticons. "We use them to communicate our emotions," Scott explained. "I'm angry, I'm happy, I'm horny, I feel kind of flirty. That's now a legitimate answer." He sounded a little rueful, actually, as he mimed pressing a button. "Boop!"
Is Jeremy angry? Happy? Feeling kind of flirty? Though he mentioned the euphoria of all those rainbows, the collection didn't seem to show his hand. It was more of a skittering LOL through the way we live now. (Though there's luxe lurking beneath the candy-coated exterior. Scott's rainbow chubby was Saga Fur; the rainbow-wig coat, 100 percent human hair. As Faulkner's fellow Southern folklorist Dolly Parton once said, "It costs a lot of money to look this cheap.") It wasn't Scott's most wearable offering, but it did confirm him once again as a provocateur—and maybe a more thoughtful one than he sometimes gets credit for. He, in turn, paid homage, with a series of knits, to one who came before. The nineties' original bad boy: Bart Simpson.
