BURNOUT

Advertising for fashion is getting more and more creative. My favourite from this week is from Moschino.

From anguish and ashes something new always rises. Moschino collection by Jeremy Scott – hardcore glamour for a hard, hard world – was presented in the post-apocalyptic wreck of a once-pristine, now-traumatised palazzo. It’s been purged and pummelled by change and what’s left in the aftermath is shattered and still smoking from the impact.

The best medicine for hysterical times is historical context. This season Jeremy Scott went back to the Nineties – the 1490’s – and stared deep into the Falò delle vanità (Bonfire of The Vanities) that befell the beautiful people of Florence. On the night of Mardi Gras in 1497 a mob of puritanical Dominicans stormed the city, smashing and bashing objects of beauty – and objects to create beauty – that they decreed might lead unto evil. Mirrors, musical instruments, manuscripts, works of art and decoration and clothing – beautiful, life-enhancing, liberating clothing – were all put to flame. It was a declaration of small-minded, fear-driven war against the Renaissance virtues of self-expression and intellectual stimulation. Ultimately, of course, they lost: the Renaissance, like the Enlightenment it prefigured, help shape the modern world.

Dresses incorporate the splintered shards of smashed gilded mirrors, or have been skewered by a grand chandelier made with crystals from Swarovski that’s crashed down from the ceiling above. Another is bedecked with the stringy innards or a brutalised grand piano.

In a technical first, several super-special dresses waft trails of smoke as they come down the layered carpet runway – beneath their charred skirts and crinolines are hidden integrated smoke machines. It’s apocalypse wow.

No piece of outerwear carries with it the attitude of creative resilience to match the Perfecto. Ever since Marlon Brando wore it in The Wild One this jacket has been emblematic of youth-charged cultural revolt – creative uprising. Thus Moschino has long adored the biker, and this season that love reaches new heights as Scott grafts and splices its disassembled elements into a collection of super-tough evening wear: couture It collides with girl gang grit. There are skull and crossbones emblems and chains deployed as integrated skeletons: because deathliness becomes her.

Smoke curls into the atmosphere of this season’s Buy Now Wear Now capsule too: consume for instant gratification.

Cigarette carton evening bags, matchbook clutch bags, pack of 20 iPhone cases and burnt-print Moschino logo T-shirts represent a dangerously addictive array of temptation.