Adrian Appiolaza, the new designer now in his third season at Moschino, is a fashion completist, intent on not just recasting the house founder Franco Moschino’s legacy for a 21st-century audience, but also imparting all he knows about the tastemakers and the styles of decades past for anyone who’s watching. His show today was the runway equivalent of a subcultural grand tour, a study of fashion cliques from a guy with an obsessive eye for detail.
It started with a group of all-white looks: they were the connective tissue between this collection and his debut in February, and their draped silhouettes were inspired by a photo of Moschino twisting fabric around a mannequin that Appiolaza dug up. From there he made nods at other icons of his: inviting Terry Jones, the co-founder of i-D magazine, to produce graphic slogans in his trademark style for T-shirts and leggings, and collaborating with the Judy Blame Trust to borrow some of the assemblage necklaces the iconic late designer was known to use as accessories.
Blame’s edgy stylings seemed to have influenced the cocktail dress and le smoking embellished with punkish pearls, while the fedora-hatted duo conjured his Buffalo era. The chalk drawings that decorated those hats, as well as the backs of the models’ coats—a shame you can’t see them in the runway images—reproduced one of Moschino’s childhood drawings. The stripey knits and lacy slip dresses evoked the famous grunge collection of Marc Jacobs—at least that’s what I saw—but the black-and-white polka dots, including some hand-painted directly onto models’ skin, were Franco Moschino through-and-through. Most ambitious and interesting were the deconstructed LBDs—little T-shirt tube dresses (“tubinos” in Italian, Appiolaza said) that from the back were cut in the more expressive shapes of the ’40s, ’50s, and ’60s.
Will Appiolaza’s expansive vision conjure a Moschino clique? That’s the mission. “Fun and optimism are important for me,” he said. “I think that’s what people are going to find.” For the moment, at least, all those easter eggs have aroused the attention of fashion obsessives like him.
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