In 1911, Pablo Picasso was accused of stealing the . After Leonardo da Vinci’s masterpiece had gone missing from the Louvre, the French poet Guillaume Apollinaire became a suspect and eventually implicated his friend Picasso (both were exonerated when the real culprit turned out to be museum employee Vincenzo Peruggia). This obscure bit of trivia, now relegated to art history books, was one of the jumping-off points for Jeremy Scott’s spring/summer 2020 collection for Moschino. “That’s the thing about Picasso,” the designer tells , a few days ahead of his Milan Fashion Week show. “Just when you think you know everything there is to know, he surprises you.”
The Picasso woman
In a nod to the incident, the designer’s latest presentation will see works of art go walkabout. “I’ve created a couple of giant gilded frames for the models to go through,” he explains. The models, in turn, wear Picasso-inspired looks, some that reference his muses and others that lift directly from his artwork. To prepare for the show, Scott read everything he could find on the topic, watched documentaries and devoured ’s 10-part TV series , in which Antonio Banderas plays the artist. “He painted so many portraits of the same women over and over again,” the designer adds. “His wives, his lovers, even his daughters. It got me thinking about the Picasso woman.”
He cites painter Françoise Gilot and surrealist photographer Dora Maar as prime examples, both creative powerhouses in their own right. “She’s the closest to my heart,” Scott says of the latter. “Picasso’s portraits of her are so emblematic of his work and Dora really brought out something special in him.” In translating these images into outlandish dresses, the designer sampled their bold colour palettes and experimented with volume and proportion. “I thought a lot about cubism,” he says. “I wanted to subvert the shapes of the garments in the way that Picasso subverted reality. The angles are skewed, and I played a lot with symmetry.”
Matadors and mortality
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Even more theatrical are the outfits that riff off recurring themes in Picasso’s oeuvre. “He had such a long career, so I tried to touch on different periods of it,” the designer adds. “We know he loved bullfights, for instance, so I had to address that.” Nodding to paintings like 1933’s , he created a painterly matador jacket and shorts complete with gold tassels. “I’ve done matador jackets myself over the years and even Franco Moschino had a long history with matador-style looks,” says Scott. “They make you think about the fragility of life. In bullfights, blood will be drawn and someone will die, either the bull or the bullfighter.”
This notion of mortality dominates another look, too, which Scott calls “the death dress” – a puff-sleeved, floor-length gown that features a chalky illustration of a skeleton. “Death was such a big part of Picasso’s life,” the designer explains. “When his little sister was ill, he made a pact with God that if he let her live, he’d never paint again. After she died, he felt like it was his fault because he loved art so much and wanted to keep working.” Two of his partners and muses – Jacqueline Roque and Marie-Thérèse Walter – took their own lives. “For Picasso, death was always lurking nearby,” says Scott. “That felt really powerful.”
Abstract motifs and cubist shapes
Beyond the black mourning gown, there’s no shortage of showstoppers. One of Scott’s favourites is a “cubist reconstructed guitar dress” made of studded leather. “It has a sexy bustier, printed panels and looks abstracted, like a splintered guitar,” he explains. “The guitar motif was important to Picasso, as it was to Juan Gris and Georges Braque. They broke it down and dissected it, so I wanted to look at musical instruments within that cubistic vernacular.” There’s also a wedding dress made of ruched chiffon and dotted with sequinned doves. “It’s a double entendre because Picasso named his daughter Paloma, the Spanish word for ‘dove’,” he explains. “It’s angelic.”
And the final flourish? “I have my dear friend Stephen Jones making a few inspired hats,” adds the designer. “They’re a gestural, abstracted version of toreador hats which I’m so excited to see.” That’s the thing about Scott – just when you think he has outdone himself, he does one better.