Jeremy's Plastic Pulse

Bourdieu, Moschino, and Inflation

Pierre Bourdieu’s “Haute Couture and Haute Culture” has buried within it a fantastic metaphor of the fashion system. He imagines designers Balmain and Scherrer in a TV debate where each represents political “right“ and “left“ respectively. In this debate, Bourdieu imagines that Balmain spoke “in very long, rather pompous sentences, defended ‘French equality’, creation, and so on; Scherer spoke like a student leader in May 1968, with unfinished sentences, dramatic pauses and so on“. Bourdieu goes on to define the exact language used to describe both designers in various magazines, Balmain as “'‘luxurious’, exclusive, elegant, traditional, classic, refined, select, balanced, made to last‘“ and Scherrer as “‘super-chic, kitsch, funny, appealing, witty, cheeky, radiant, free, enthusiastic, structured, functional ‘“.

Balmain Vs Scherrer circa Bordieu’s 90’s

The language and nature of this distinction sound familiar to today’s fashion landscape, although their differences have begun to fray. The pretension and nationalism of high fashion first attempted to mask itself in the wake of capitalism until the assimilation of streetwear into high fashion. Now, Haute couture wants to have its cake and eat it too, advertising the traditional while claiming association with the revolutionary and the street. Think of Gucci, repackaging their old designs while reinterpreting Adidas gazelles in a way that references & appropriates bootleggers of street cultures. Think of Virgil Abloh and his status as revolutionary designer appointed to traditionalist Louis Vuitton, the DNA and language of the traditional and the fledgling Off White slowly intertwining and formalizing until any attempted replication feels incomplete without the other.

Enter Moschino, a regular “Scherrer“ by Bordieu’s standards. Moschino emerged in the 80s as a fashion outsider crafting hyper-ironic camp couture. A blazer is printed with the words “expensive jacket“, a Roy Lichtenstein piece adorns a full suit, and collaborations with Spongebob, McDonald, or the Sims would all seem commonplace. Moschino oscillated between critiquing consumerism and indulging in it to the fullest, mocking the silliness of self-serious clothing while always understanding its use as a political weapon. Under 2000’s low art wizard Jeremy Scott (Think winged Adidas and all over prints), Moschino has had minor “capital-F” Fashion moments, though mainly has catered to their nostalgia as part of a 90’s early 2000’s club culture. Since Moschino has at one time meant “cool“, it can now plaster its name on anything and everything in a desperate hypercommercialism of the once Haute (Coach and pre-Nigo Kenzo are two immediate parallels).

One response to Bordieu’s designers hypothetically corralled into political lefts and rights is a resounding “who cares”. When intense nationalisms are on the rise, liberal governments flail, and both are threatened by climate catastrophe, where does the importance of a culture war fit in? Then again, the nationalists do in fact wear Dolce & Gabbana, and the leftists do happen to wear painter’s pants. It isnt simply that clothing is political, its that aesthetics are. How aesthetics meld and shift has profound implications for how we conceptualize wealth, success, and ourselves.

This brings me to Moschino’s Spring 2023 show which premiered last week. Explaining the show, Jeremy Scott told Vogue “Everybody’s talking about inflation“. This was look 58.

Do you get it? God, what poor taste. God, what great draped silks. God… what? Should we keep this dress in the realm of a bawdy political joke? Couture subversion? Both? Similarly, how do we read the object separate from the dress here? Swan, sure, but constructed as both a mythical classical symbol of elegance and Trompe d’oeil plastic version of opulence (a showboat!). It’s low art grafted onto the high, a joke that references the political that at first glance completely evades politics. It’s a collage of imagined pasts, from childhoods to eras of art and style. It is a Moschino for the new world.

Let’s start at the beggining. Set in a runway world of heavy curtains and pristine fountains, women in wide hats and voluminous curving dresses fill Scott’s collection. Some have inflatable lapels or inflatable hearts that pattern their “fashion black” ensembles. Others have inflatable hats. These clothes do more than reference the world of haute couture, they accurately reconstruct them, and thanks to what Moschino has become, the clothes themselves become actual couture.

In terms of the loose politics Scott ascribes here, the doubling irony could read as follows: Fashion cannot respond to the issues of the world except shallowly via aesthetic reproduction and visual pun. Since fashion cannot save us, our only hope is to gain chic-ness through its powers, even if it may mock us. Another lens may be to see the hollowness of Moschino’s couture as indicative of greater fashion hollowness, each dress and look like a balloon to be deflated and inflated at will. Whatever the look may bring, a shape, an implication, sex, or class, all are unfixed. They can be deflated.

The idea Moschino posits, that each garment or look or philosophy of couture can be deflated is a fascinating one that begins to move Moschino past its self-defeating and endless ironic spirals. This is more than that. This is a questioning of how we understand fashion as a system, and what it has the potential to do for us.

“Sometimes we feel like we’re drowning… we have to save space for joy“ Scott muses. Hence, the return of the Moschino life preservers from 1989 transfigured into dresses, coats, bracelets, and hats that accompany Chanel-esque tweeds in nautical blues. If the opening ensembles of chic black and red inflatable ensembles posed a question about what couture or clothing can do, these looks provide an answer. They are life preservers in which inflation gives them an ability to protect. In other words, fashion rises to the occasion of politics.

Moschino circa 1989

This shift to the power of joy sparks something in the logic of the show. The nautical sparks blue stripes resembling sailors, umbrellas, or both. The rubber of the life preservers turns bright pink, it covers dresses, composes motorcycle jackets, then becomes transparent. Glitter, psychedelic swimsuit florals, more animals, fuller inflatables, our swan from before, until the cacophony of texture, pattern, color, and composition fracture into the show’s closer. As the prints grow brighter and begin to overlap, the surety of the next garment and the next inversion begins to waver. It isn’t so much as an escalation as a multiplication of the show’s motifs and themes. It is insane.

The Moschino that Scott settles within this collection is not dissimilar to many of the collections he’s developed before. They are maximalist, print-heavy, almost unwearable ensembles of glitz and low art charm. Some collections are political but always marred by the self-defeating irony of the brand’s humor. This is different. Rather than emptily parade politics or hide behind a brand legacy like Bordieu’s Balmain (or fight endlessly until absorbed by the status quo like Scherrer for that matter) Scott uses a seemingly empty political pun as an impetus to examine the power of his medium as well as the system of his medium. Scott’s Moschino provides an opportunity to escape from Bordieu’s structure of temed revolutionaries, of joyless and cannibalistic couture.

Perhaps this shift works because for Scott the power, and perhaps for him the politics, is in the opportunity of a garment - not necessarily in the system. When deflated, an object in service of a system loses power. In service of life, however, a deflated object is simply one waiting to be inflated.

In thinking of Scott’s spring show, I am reminded of a film I watched for class this week called The Hypothesis of the Stolen Painting by Raul Ruiz. In the film, a collector links a series of paintings in increasingly intricate and exaggerated ways, each analysis impossible to affirm due to a stolen painting in the set. Analyzing Moschino can sometimes feel that among the irony and the humor and the hypocrisy, answers are impossible. What Scott and Ruiz may agree on, however, is that beauty is not in the answer but in the desire to analyze.