A history lesson from Jeremy Scott at Moschino? It happened tonight. Backstage Scott was talking about “bonfires of the vanities,” in Italian, “il falò delle vanità,” but he wasn’t referring to the Brian De Palma film or even the Tom Wolfe book. Scott was riffing on the 15th-century Dominican monks who took on the Renaissance, leading a mob through the city of Florence, burning objects of beauty—art, books, furniture, and clothing. Of course, the Renaissance prevailed, but those monks left a trail of ruin along the way.
It was a great setup, one that allowed Scott to go deep with the visual puns he loves. Some evening dresses looked charred with burn marks circling ragged cutouts; others literally smoked as the models made their way around the runway, thanks to portable smoke machines. A little shimmy of the hips or a shake of the ball skirt, and fogs of vapor appeared. Brilliant! “That’s a first,” Scott announced backstage. Special props for milliner Stephen Jones’s singed net veils and the cigarette holder chapeau with glowing crystal embers. Scott also lifted Marlboro’s iconic red-and-white packaging, swapping that brand name for Moschino, and switching up the familiar health warning, “smoking kills,” for a more pointed one, “fashion kills.”
From there it wasn’t a stretch to think that the small-minded, fear-driven mob who, as the program notes put it, “declared war against virtues of self-expression,” were Scott’s persistent critics. And that the biker chicks in tank tops, taffeta, and rejiggered black leather jackets and caps with the word “warriors” scrawled across them were Scott’s girl gang, ready to take up arms with the designer and fight back. As one needlepoint purse put it: “Good girls go to heaven, bad girls go everywhere.” Be warned, naysayers: They’re coming for you! By this logic—my logic, not Scott’s, by the way, he would fess up to no deeper meanings backstage—the bikers are the Renaissance chicks, and they prevail.
