It kind of panned out just the way you imagined it would. Jeremy Scott is fashion's most evolved connoisseur of junk culture, and, in his heyday, Franco Moschino loved nothing more than poking the bear of fashion orthodoxy with flagrant infusions of trash. So when Scott paraded his mutant hybrid of Ronald McDonald and Coco Chanel, and his Budweiser and Frito-Lay couture, all in the name of the late, great Franco, there was a friskily superficial compatibility. But—chalk it up to the gulf of time separating the two careers—there was in fact a difference in tone between Scott's revision of the Moschino legacy and Franco's original template. Today's Moschino presentation was a crowd-pleaser. Katy Perry and her friends in the front row were eating it up. Franco, on the other hand, was more satirical by nature and made a habit of biting the fashion hand that fed him.
But that was then, this is now. Scott's embrace of consumer culture in the name of Moschino was bright, brash, and ingenious. McDonald's golden arches were reconfigured as the label's iconic heart design. Franco's wordplay was resurrected in "Fur Real" on the back of a pretend-mink coat (read it as a play on surreal for maxi-Moschino impact). Any single piece of Chanel iconography you could imagine was twisted every which way but barely legal. Way back when, Franco was sued by Chanel for his irreverence. How times have changed!
If the show ran too long (the SpongeBob stuff erred toward the way too obvious), that was a natural result of Scott's kid-in-a-candy-store overdrive. He just couldn't help his sugar rush with his "couture" finale. Lindsey Wixson, twirling in a gossamer cloud of food additives, provided giddy closure to Scott's supermarket sweep. What next?
