Backed up by the vaccine’s fragile promise of freedom come fall, there’s a certain poetry to the new Moschino collection. Released from a year-long period of domestic confinement in which everyone has taken up some sort of creative outlet, Jeremy Scott’s men emerge from their amateur art caves covered in paint. Appropriately for their big return to reality, they are dressed to the nines, but their formal endeavors bear evidence of the transformation we’ve all experienced during this strange time.
The past year had given Scott—a classic movie buff—an excuse to surrender to the silver screen. “You’ve been on CNN, I stay on TCM,” he quipped on a video call from Los Angeles, on the topic of current U.S. political affairs so inescapable on our collective radar that further reflections were unnecessary. Trying to stay zen in quarantine last year, Scott also took up leaf-painting, plucking his garden dry of elephant ears which he painted in various graphic motifs reflective of the cartoonish side of his aesthetic.
You could see his Moschino collection as a manifestation of those two influences: a meeting between the precision of Old Hollywood tailoring and the spontaneity of hand-painting. The lines of overcoats, tuxedos, and suiting with a 1940s persuasion were enhanced with Post-Impressionist brushstrokes, in some cases creating trompe l’oeil effects that Scott attributed to his passion for the study of painting.
If his patterns were a Post-Impressionist expression, as the collection notes suggested, the garments echoed for our moment in time the genre’s augmented view of life: that confinement feeling of creating your own world within the real world, something Scott also reflected in the fake-look city sets of the images he shot, inspired by film noir. The contemporary expression of his premise materialized in nylon tracksuits where the retro chevron graphics had been replaced with brushstrokes, taking the garment into unexplored territory.
Scott said he wanted to wear every piece of the collection. By the time it hits stores, he might even be able to wear it outside the house. “I’ve always had the volume a little more turned up, but I hope it’s something more people will have a hunger for,” he said, referring to the exuberance of his designs: “That there’s an explosion of creativity of expression when people feel the freedom of being together again.”
