Jeremy Scott’s Moschino extravaganza menswear resort 2018 streaming live this June 8 in Los Angeles. It was a huge event at Milk Studios in DTLA, where artists and celebrities enjoy a really Las Vegas entertaining show, Dita Von Tesse, Fergie, Vanessa Hudgens, DNCE, Ashley Graham, Cindy Crawford, Kaia Gerber, model Shaun Ross, conceptual pop singer Allie X, among others.
Speaking before the show, Scott explained that he’d premised his collections on the idea of a road trip from L.A. to Las Vegas—two cities for dreamers, as he pointed out, with a lot of empty highway in between. Or not so empty, if you’re really looking. Had the exuberant guests at tonight’s Moschino show in Hollywood made a pilgrimage to the Vegas slots, en route they might have noticed small-town girls in prairie dresses and denim, striped Navajo blankets being sold by the side of the road, billboards featuring the Marlboro Man (R.I.P.), and leather-clad bikers filling up their tanks at rundown gas stations. Scott himself is a noticer, as well as a connoisseur of Americana, high and low; his re-imagining of the classic Route 66 road trip was wise in the way it absorbed the personae of rest stops and blink-and-you’ll-miss-it small towns into the fantasy glam of the Cities of Sin and Angels alike.
Thus his cowboys and bikers were sexed-up and turned out, their suits bedazzled and licked by hot-rod flames, their muscle-hugging trousers and biker jackets embellished with studs and snakeskin appliqué. His girls were pin-up manqués, in prairie dresses nakedly sheer, showgirl bustiers, and denim, genuine or patchwork-printed, hanging low on the hip or cut down to shorts so abbreviated they’d make Daisy Duke herself think twice before donning a pair. It was the best kind of Jeremy Scott hodge-podge, with just enough finesse—to wit, in the tailoring of the leather and suits—to elevate the camp. The collection was also enlivened by a handful of inspired ideas, notably the pin-up silhouette appliqués featured on numerous looks. Scott is the rare designer capable of being sexual in a non-prurient way—this collection, baldly sexy as it was in both its men’s and women’s output, cast sex in the same light as a night at the craps table, just another symptom of Americans’ undying belief that eventually, everyone gets lucky . . . and there’s no shame in hoping tonight’s your night. Scott’s embrace of America’s cheese and sleaze, alongside its apple-pie iconography, came off as both patriotic and frank. In whole, it was a rootin’, tootin’ rejoinder to those among us who think the United States isn’t already great.
