Moschino: MW 2018

What a difference four months makes. In February, when Jeremy Scott sent out a vaguely Vegas-themed Fall/Winter 2017 collection for his eponymous brand, the clothes exuded a kind of desperate hedonism, born out of Scott’s post-election fury and fear. This evening, as Scott revealed his latest Moschino collections—likewise Vegas-inspired—there was a sense of optimism and plainspoken American can-do on the catwalk.

How appropriate that the show coincided with the day that millions of Americans were glued to their screens, watching James Comey testify before the Senate Intelligence Committee: June 8, 2017, may well be remembered as the day America got its hopefulness back.

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.