Before he left Argentina for London (then Paris, and now Milan), Adrian Appiolaza once held down a job selling insurance. To present a respectable façade to potential clients, his employer obliged him to wear a company-provided suit. Speaking before his first menswear show for Moschino—and, in fact, his first menswear show ever—Appiolaza shuddered as he recalled: “I felt like a prisoner of that suit.”
This afternoon, that formative trauma collided with something once said by Franco Moschino himself: “It’s better to dress as you wish than as you should.” This line was inscribed upon the bowling bag accompanying Look 37 (part of this show’s simultaneously presented resort collection) as well as on the T-shirt in Look 22 (a cipher for Appiolaza himself). It was also the starting point for the designer to intertwine three loose narratives: a shift from formality to freedom, the archival landscape of Moschino himself, and Appiolaza’s own journey.
We started in the office. The egg and banana jewelry represented breakfast: Appiolaza began his commute with some heartily ironic takes on corporate attire. A shirt skirt worn with a real shirt but unreal suspenders and a four-button suit teamed with three hats were amongst the first of many, many archival references. The shredded Moschino fax housecoat and overcoat, the Moschino Air hat, and the goodbye Post-it suit seemed to semaphore our runway take off to a happier place.
That Appiolaza cipher in very Franco pastiche Chanel was the turning point towards a series of wearable wish fulfillments; archetypes whose identities spoke to the various stories he was combining. The soccer-ball sweater teamed with a tri-starred baseball cap was a salute back to Argentina, while the Italian flag soccer couple—one with an authentic red sauce splattering—was a gesture to Appiolaza’s new creative home. A Latin lover in carpenter jeans and a southern siren in an embroidered postcard-from-Naples skirt preceded a slipper-pocket bathrobe-wearing luxury guest toting a fearsome tool bag: Her look seemed to echo Vogue Italia’s 2010 Makeover Madness editorial by Steven Meisel. Canonical Moschino heart bags were toted against paneled raffia basket bags. The founder’s recurring goose motif returned in prints on skirts and shirting in a hokey, bucolic countrywear duet. There were in-jokes, out-jokes, literal Moschino easter eggs, and purposefully ambiguous references left to be taken according to your direction of travel.
A lilac-and-pale-turquoise menswear sarong printed with office supplies worn below an untied-tie shirt (that was mostly unbuttoned) implied that our salaryman had found his summer paradise. The closing all-white heavy linen suit with a sleeve skirt was both an inversion of and return to the start. Appiolaza’s cast walked their finale around piles of lost luggage that symbolized the tangle of transformational journey narratives he was playing with: This was a show both scholarly and personal that took you places.
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