H&M x Moschino Spring 2019 Ready-to-Wear Fashion Show

That jibes with the ethos of the late house founder Franco Moschino; his sub-line was named Cheap & Chic, remember. With apologies to the Swedish fast fashion mega-chain H&M—and its decade-spanning list of big-name partners—what took so long? Backstage before the show, Ann-Sofie Johansson, H&M’s Creative Advisor, allowed that this is indeed a collaboration whose time has come. “He’s been on our list for so long,” she began.

At this moment, “we need something as fun and fierce and playful and glamorous as Jeremy Scott for Moschino.” Scott, an old hand at collaborations via a longtime but now discontinued Adidas partnership—maybe that was the hold up?—proclaimed, “This is for my fans, they’re the reason that I’m here. I want them to get every ounce out of it. I didn’t hold one thing back.” Not that he ever really does, of course. The documentary about his life is subtitled “The People’s Designer.”

After months of build up—H&M breaks its collab news in April at Coachella—tonight’s big reveal was staged at Pier 36, amidst LED displays and giant screens designed to conjure a miniature Times Square. Unusually, this collection was dubbed Moschino TV H&M. “We needed a global symbol, and everybody knows what TV means,” Scott explained. “Plus, it resonates with a lot of my motifs.” Over the years at Moschino, he’s put SpongeBob and McDonald’s logos on sweatshirts, and he’s turned candy packages and cereal boxes and pill bottles—the pop culture flotsam of commercials—into dresses. In a sense, you could call Scott’s Moschino approach low-high.

Here at H&M, he’s produced a capsule Disney collection in celebration of Mickey’s 90th birthday. “Cartoon couture,” as Scott calls it, is just one element in a show that served up oodles of his Moschino-isms, from blingy chain link embroideries on black leather, for only the most diehard, to shapely stonewashed denim pieces, easy sweats that mash up the MTV and Moschino logos, and puffers in Crayola brights or metallic sequins with broader appeal. Where his most recent Moschino show in Milan leaned haute with its vintage YSL-ish shapes, this looked street. Sensibly so—on November 8th, it goes wide to H&M’s globe-spanning battery of stores. High and low, haute and street, boy and girl, even… Scott’s minor coup here was pointing up once and for all the old timey-ness of those distinctions. The major coup might be the spangly down jackets, those will sell by the truckload.