Until a few years ago it had become popular for quite a lot of young fashion designers name-dropping certain influences to prove how well-educated they were. The Bauhaus, for example, became the fertile territory for many name-dropping exercises even for those designers who didn't display any connections with the German art school.
As the years passed, the Bauhaus was left beyond in favour of more oscure references such as Italian architect, interior designer, pilot and photographer Carlo Mollino, often mentioned by Riccardo Tisci in connection with his collections for Givenchy.
Mollino resurfaces in fashion every now and then, he is indeed a mythological figure with a cult status, famous for his work, yet at the same time not so extraordinarily well-known, a reference to him allows therefore the name-dropper in question to prove they have a grasp of culture, a taste for the oscure and some architectural knowledge.
Jeremy Scott must have thought that, since other designers had mentioned Mollino, well the time had come for him to leave little ponies behind and finally show off his culture. So one section of his Moschino's A/W 18 menswear show that also featured designs from the Pre-Fall 2018 womenswear collection, featured dresses with prints of Carlo Mollino's erotic images (we sincerely hope Scott has paid to use them).
Believe it or not, this reference was actually well-timed: tomorrow a new exhibition entitled "L'occhio magico di Carlo Mollino" (Carlo Mollino's Magic Eye) opens in Turin (it will be on until May).
The event will feature his photographs taken between 1934 and 1973 and will be divided in four sections, with images dedicated to houses and interiors, surreal pictures, photos focused on skiing and flying, and the infamous erotic pictures of women that Mollino took with his Polaroid camera.
There is actually one picture related to Mollino (but not taken by him) that is fetishistically architectural: it shows a masked woman in front of a building and could be easily taken from a fetish book.
Yet the image actually portrays a skier at Casa del Sole, a building located in Cervinia and designed by Mollino (who also did the interiors and the furniture).
Somehow this mysterious image is the missing link between Moschino's new collection and Carlo Mollino: most looks on the Moschino runway pointed indeed at fetishism with models clad in patent leather or shiny body-suits matched with lace-up boots and masked faces.
The show actually opened with another reference, Madonna singing "Express Yourself" in September 1989 at the MTV Video Music Awards wearing the corset-cum-suspenders designed at the time by Jean-Paul Gaultier. Scott pilfered a lot of Gaultier's looks, deconstructed tailored coats, jackets and shirts around the shoulder area and anchored and pinned these parts with suspender systems.
Then followed a series of dominatrixes, fetish masters and refined ladies in '40s gowns evoking "Madame Satan" or in pristine '60s coats matched with perverse body-suits.
The Mollino section included velvet and chiffon gowns (well, in some cases Scott was pretty unimaginative creating the same gown with the same print in its short and long version) with Polaroids of Turin's street walkers and exotic dancers.
This section actually added some splashes of vitality to an otherwise dark collection, with Mollino's paintbrushed colours (he used them to retouch by hand his pictures) breaking the monotony.
Unfortunately, Scott also added a fetish uniform theme, stealing the look and the styling from Piero Tosi's costumes in Liliana Cavani's "The Night Porter". Tosi was inspired in his costumes for this film by the images taken by German photographer August Sander, but many fashion designers throughout the decades ended up being fascinated by the disturbing style Tosi came up with for the main character of the film, concentration camp prisoner Lucia, wearing trousers, suspenders, long leather gloves and a beret with a turquoise mask on top of it, while singing for a group of SS officers.
Scott tried to make the connection less evident by adding a frilly dressing gown on a male model, but the Nazi reference sadly lingered.
A punkish touch was added by coats decorated with prints of oversized safety pins and in the outerwear covered in safety pinned cut-out words that read "Fantasy", "Physical", "Pain", "Adult", "Crazy", "Trash", "Dangerous", just to mention a few of the slogans used as a form of semantic bondage.
The final surreal moment consisted in a gown with a train shaped like a huge glove and a tuxedo joined at the tails that was dubbed by many as the "tandem tux", donned by shirtless models with their hair fashioned into devil horns (one of them was drag queen Violet Chachki who modelled the look effortlessly well).
As a whole, since the collection mainly revolved around black, there may be the chance for Scott to recycle some of these looks on some of the future red carpets/events supporting the #whywewearblack campaign (maybe the surreal glove-shaped train could be a symbol of power?).
Yet, while it was interesting to see Mollino on the runway and there was absolutely no problem in mixing genders and erasing differences, blurring lines and boundaries between feminine and masculine moods, "The Night Porter" references should have been edited out of the collection together with some of Scott's favourite tropes. It is definitely time for him to say goodbye to the motorcycle leather hats for example, but it is also about time to try and come up with less derivative designs that look less pilfered from somebody else's and more original.
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