Street smart: A new Moschino realness
For Spring/Summer 2027, Simone Rizzo and Loris Messina made their Moschino debut, filtering the house’s familiar wit and irreverence into a more real and wearable wardrobe. Anders Christian Madsen reviews the show.
“What is clothing, and what is costume?” was the question asked by the new designers at Moschino. For their debut, Simone Rizzo and Loris Messina – who founded the brand Sunnei – seemed to answer that question simply by asking it. Under Jeremy Scott, the house amplified the camp spectacle and humour of Franco Moschino’s vision, while later, Adrien Appiolaza tried to make it cool. On Friday afternoon, on the rooftop of a conference centre by Linate airport, Rizzo and Messina tried to make it real: wearable, commercial, down-to-Earth.
At Sunnei, the designers staged their shows as a kind of performance art, which often served as loaded commentary on the industry and the world that surrounds it, much in the spirit of Franco Moschino. On the founder’s runway, they created a street setting where models walked against hordes of regular people as if they were moving through the city. It was a cool format, but in their dressed-down, understated seriousness, it was almost as if the new Moschino vision blended in with the everyday crowd. Sure, there were moments of bold shape and colour, pannier skirts, flat-cut dresses and frilly hems that added drama, but in essence, the statement Rizzo and Messina were making felt like a case for an everyday Moschino wardrobe. “Reignite Moschino without imitating it,” they wrote in their show notes. “A clear universal present-day language is needed.”
In a Milan Fashion Week that’s zoned in on retail-friendly creativity – Prada’s skirt collection, Gucci’s store show – you could say the designers were on point. But then again, Moschino’s magic was always its ability to give us a moment of fantasy and fun, even if those creations were charged with sly backhands and socio-political messaging. In the new custodians’ streetscape of normality, that magic sometimes got lost in the crowd.
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