View Gallery
21 Photos
Fashion’s pop provocateur flirted with fine art this season, taking inspiration from Pablo Picasso’s expansive oeuvre.
You gotta hand it to Jeremy Scott for just going for it. I mean, a picture-perfect model muse framed — literally — in gold leaf? Kaia Gerber as a guitar still-life, Bella Hadid as harlequin and Gigi Hadid as a Picasso bride? He did it all and more.
Fashion’s pop provocateur flirted with fine art this season, taking inspiration from Pablo Picasso’s expansive oeuvre — the Cubist guitar assemblage sculptures, the Spanish matadors, the doves of peace — all with a heavy dose of humor.
Sure, it was a bit of a costume party. (It’s not for nothing that both Scott’s namesake collection and Moschino pieces landed in the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s “Camp: Notes on Fashion” exhibition this year.)
But so was much of Franco Moschino’s own work, which pushed fashion conventions with riffs on Surrealism, such as the famous 1989 “Show Off” Couture collection “Dinner Jacket” dotted with real cutlery, long before the age of Instagram and Internet memes made it irresistible fashion candy.
In other words, Scott is in on the joke. And he found in Picasso someone who gave him permission to break the rules even more than he usually does, by experimenting with color, painting, and asymmetry, he said backstage.
“I wanted to play with the couture vibe…opera, Rosalia, vintage Almodovar,” he said, name-checking his trademark high-low mix of references.
And play he did — with childlike abandon — on a hand-painted blue-and-yellow pantsuit after a Picasso vase, a fully embroidered lady suit after a modernist nude, and a sequin dress after a painterly portrait such as “Les Demoiselles D’Avignon,” perhaps.
This wasn’t an official Picasso collaboration, so the collection was more in the spirit of the artist, who did plenty of sampling himself, from primitivism to matadors (represented on the runway with an embroidered catsuit) and minotaurs (as a horned handbag with the nose ring).
“Franco had a history of selling matador things well, and I did well with my Adidas matador tracksuits — so well, they asked me to do them for three seasons,” said Scott, as well versed in the commerce as the art of fashion.
Although he was wearing a T-shirt representing one of the more conventionally commercial pieces available back at the showroom, he contended that he actually sells Moschino runway pieces quite well, too, thank you very much. Future museum pieces, perhaps?
