“All those people who were, like, crying about being bored [during lockdown]? I was like ‘Oh my God, they’re so obnoxious.’ ” So reported Jeremy Scott from L.A., where he’s been working, working, working to keep his hand on the Moschino tiller from afar and keep his own label up and running: designing and doing. However, had he had a lockdown of leisure, Scott said he wouldn’t have wasted it moaning about being bored: “I would watch all these movies that I’ve never got to watch. I’d read all the books I want to but never have. I would study all the stuff that I never got to study. What is wrong with people?”
Not that Scott wishes he’d spent his limbo any other way: “I’m lucky because I had stuff that I love to do.” This menswear collection’s creation pre-dates the emergence of the coronavirus—“it’s from the great Before! The old world”—and references stuff that Scott has studied and is passionate about. “I love Memphis. And I love Sottsass. He’s my favorite designer of all time, for sure, hands down. My favorite designer of any kind.”
Ettore Sottsass named his famous design collective after a Bob Dylan lyric that played during the meeting that led to the group’s formation. Here Scott used a similarly fleeting associative starting point—the thoughts of Memphis playing in his mind—then applied modernized elements of its highly geometric aesthetic to the formation of a fresh Moschino/Scott template. From Memphis he zoomed off both sportily and suit-ily to other territories: spacescapes, zodiacal prints, antique sculpture, polka dots. And he deliciously collided the Dad with the Rad in some powerfully toned chenille cardigans.
“I like to bring some humor, joy, color, and playfulness,” said Scott: “something that might help put a smile on your face.” So said a designer who’s most definitely not bored about a collection that’s most definitely not boring.
