Rebel With a Pop Cause: Jeremy Scott

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For the last fifteen years American designer Jeremy Scott has been provoking fashion critics and fashionistas with his Pop-meets-Surrealism aesthetics.

When he presented his first collection in Paris in 1995, the Missouri-born designer shocked his audience showing chic’d out car crash victims.

A few years later, for his Autumn/Winter 2001-02 collection, way before the financial crisis threw us all into a deep despair, he dared mocking consumerism in his “American Excess” collection that featured dollar bill cocktail dresses.

Junk food, phones, road signs, gasoline pumps, Cadillac cars, Mickey Mouse and futuristic cartoons à la The Jetsons were cleverly incorporated season after season into the tongue-in-cheek and kitschy prints, knitted motifs or tailored yet cartoonish silhouettes of his designs.

Scott’s skills at reinventing a Pop Art aesthetic for contemporary fashionistas scored him collaborations with seminal brands such as Adidas, Longchamp and Schott.

For his Spring/Summer 2010 the designer – currently living in Los Angeles but showing his collections in New York – took his inspirations from Flintstones prints.

Black prevails instead in his Autumn/Winter 2010 collection that is infused once again with his witty irony: bejewelled crosses appliquéd on dresses and bodysuits, sporty yet sensual body-con designs and cone bras are indeed used as references to fashion victims, Chanel’s iconic L(ittle) B(lack) D(ress) and legendary pieces à la Gaultier, reminding us that, maybe, fashion shouldn’t take itself too seriously.

The next issue of Zoot Magazine, that should be out soon, will include a photo shoot featuring Jeremy Scott’s designs accompanied by a Q&A I did with him. I’m enclosing here just a couple of questions to give you an idea about what it will be about.

Photographer Mike Kobal is the author of the photo shoot and of the brief video you find at the end of this post as a teaser to the interview and shoot. Mike explains on his site how he shot it using with Canon’s T2i camera, playing a bit with colours, saturation, contrasts and sharpness.

Can you tell us more about the inspirations and themes behind your A/W 10 collection?
Jeremy Scott: The collection is a tribute to fashion itself, an open love letter to my favourite “F-word”, “Fashion”! It moves from the concept of the idea drafted by a designer on his or her sketchbook to the first toile coming alive in the studio and touches upon the industry clichés – from fashion victims and the age-old debate between fashion Vs style to the brand worship of consumers, rampant coping of originals and the acceptance of the fake. In a nutshell, the collection tells through the different designs all the most relevant stories from the history of fashion.

The new collection also features a few black dresses: could we consider them as reinvented versions of Chanel’s 1920s “little black dress”?
JS: Yes, Sir! That’s exactly what the point is: the black sweater dress that appears to be simple from the front has “Little Black Dress” knitted in bold letters on the back side of it and that’s intended to be the literal manifestation of the little black dress!

You have a passion for knits: if you could come up with the most extraordinary knitted piece what kind of material would you use? Maybe a 24K gold yarn?
JS: That’s very Rumpelstiltskin of you! I guess I’m onto much simpler designs and I’m happy with plain old wool and cotton!