Moschino at Milan Fashion Week: 'No Strings Attached'

Oct 5

Oct 5 Moschino at Milan Fashion Week: 'No Strings Attached'

Heading into the six-month mark since the start of the pandemic, creative directors across the industry have been pushing creativity in whole new directions with the arrival of fashion weeks. Current constraints have taken runway shows and fashion week events fully online, prodding designers to come up with innovative ways to showcase their Spring 2021 collections. At the headline, Moschino’s Jeremy Scott opted for an unconventional online streaming of his ready-to-wear line, starring a puppet-only model repertoire and guestlist.

Scott enlisted Jim Henson Creative Shop to curate, tailor, and scale down each of the 40 designs to fit the marionettes. Recognizable in the first row sat an Anna Wintour puppet, accessorised with the fashion mogul’s signature sunglasses, as well as a faux Jeremy Scott, sporting a ‘I don’t speak Italian, but I do speak Moschino’ plain white t-shirt. Miniature figures meant that the venue also had to be downsized, illuminated by a dazzling puppet-sized chandelier. The overall display of the show was sleek and clean, with neat symmetry lines promoting the beauty in simplicity, all to the sound of violins being played in the background. “The return to simplicity was completely intentional” (Bustle), it’s a “Moschino wink-and-nod to the fact that in order to begin anew, you have to start small”, the brand said in a statement.

Both Moschino’s 40 looks, as well as the show’s delivery method, truly capture “fashion’s rediscovered appetite for haute couture and craftmanship – boosted by the unstoppable savoir faire of designers like Scott, John Galliano, and Pierpaolo Piccioli” and how it “seems to know no end” (Vogue). At the end of the day, thinking outside the box lies at the very core of every creative industry, and this year’s pandemic has posed the perfect challenge: extraordinary solutions for extraordinary problems.

Acclaimed critiques have attributed Scott with more than his stylistic display, reading between the lines to point out elaborate metaphors of political puppeteering, and posing questions of what is real, and what is not. In the age of fake news and social media, such questions are always present.

Will the events of 2020 fuel our desire for couture even further? “People are like, ‘Sweatpants forever!’ Scott told Vogue, referring to the impacts of lockdown dressing. “But I love exciting things that are one of a kind and refined. We’re all desperate for that. I constantly kept getting dressed up every day even if I weren’t seeing people. It’s part of who I am.”