Moschino’s New York Show is Jeremy Scott’s Love Letter to Gotham

“I’m screaming and screaming it louder / I got the, I got the power.”

That was the soundtrack refrain oft repeated by bounce legend Big Freedia at last night’s combined Moschino Pre-Fall 2020 womenswear and Fall 2020 menswear show.

It blared through (inoperative) subway cars—with far more clarity and roundness than what one normally hears on the underground—at Brooklyn’s New York Transit Museum. The event marked the Milan-based label’s first catwalk in Gotham, bar its ultra-successful collaboration with H&M, for which a runway presentation was held in 2018.

The music, which also included tracks from Megan Thee Stallion, served as an aural propellant through which models stepped and swaggered between car poles while wearing a full wardrobe of glammed-up New York City sartorial-isms; uptown tweeds, downtown leathers, vintage sports- and streetwear, flat-brim hats (XL in size, or converted into bags) and even a gargantuan backpack that may well live on as creative director Jeremy Scott’s in-your-face outsized and unconventional accessory. (Simon Porte Jacquemus has his infamous straw hat; Alexander McQueen had his armadillo heels—every designer needs one!)

Though Scott is a Missourian who now lives predominantly in California and Moschino is Italian, the former spent more than a few formative years in New York. For one, he attended Pratt Institute, about two miles from the Transit Museum. His populist and popular take on fashion is still in a league of its own; nobody does intelligent Pop barometry quite like him. He’s not afraid to be extra. It’s the bloodline—the polychrome toe-tap and the endless wink—that keeps him in forward motion.

Stars Kacey Musgraves and Madelaine Petsch turned up, dancing in their seats. The presentation concluded with a group of Showtime dancers, hype-men under Big Freedia’s still booming declaratives, decked in Moschino windbreakers. iPhone’s flew (the label had smartly set up WiFi, given that there was no cell service otherwise). And, judging from this writer’s own social postings, lots of people thought the show was occurring on an actual, functioning subway.

All said, and in an absolutely miserable downpour no less: Scott proved he has still got the, still got the power.