Show Report
Jardini looked back to Franco Moschino's role as the enfant terrible who relentlessly poked fun the self-satisfied excesses of Milanese power-dressing.
Girls just want to have fun. Or so reasons Rossella Jardini of Moschino, a house whose shows are always impossible to watch with a straight face. For S/S 2010, Jardini looked back to the label's eighties roots and Franco Moschino's role as the enfant terrible who relentlessly poked fun the self-satisfied excesses of Milanese power-dressing. In this show, however, it wasn't entirely sure what was fun and what was finance: if that opening pearl-braided Chanel pastiche was intended as a riposte to power-dressing, it ended up joining their ranks as status symbol itself. Much of the collection riffed on Chanel-isms - with several biopics on her doing the rounds, the timing seems apt. But the point seemed to be lost when many of Moschino's reworkings seemed to reference Karl Lagerfeld's own send-ups of Coco's legacy: the bomber jacket constructed of jangling gilt-chains bordered in leather seemed particularly redolent of Kaiser Karl's early 1990s 'Coco on Cocaine' collections. The silk dresses in clashing prints, ruched, ruffled and puffballed around the body were another question mark - fun and frivolous certainly, but they felt more like pure redux than ironic comment, and certainly pandered to the current establishment taste for the crasser side. It was odd - and frankly slightly disheartening - that the collection looked best when Moschino stopped laughing. An apron-front dress in stark black and white, bow-backed taffeta strapless frock and fantastic drape-fronted black crepe trenchcoat-dress were the standout pieces. Even when accessorised with intentionally tacky gilt sandals and padded heart-shaped hats, their innate, understated good taste was clear to see.
