Franco Moschino understood that fashion was too serious a business not to be laughed at. In the 1980s, at the height of conspicuous luxury, he turned clothes into a running commentary: a Chanel-like suit embroidered with “This is a Waist of Money,” a little black dress carrying its own price tag, buttons replaced by windmills, skirts made from neckties, a bag announcing “This Is Not an It Bag.” His jokes were rarely gratuitous.
They were a way of taking fashion apart from the inside, exposing its vanities and absurdities by exaggerating them until they became impossible not to see. He turned sophisticated semantic wit and jeu de mots into slogans without ever sounding pretentious; he didn’t want to lecture.
And his irreverence was grounded in technique: Moschino could parody couture because he knew exactly how it worked, translating trompe-l’œil and pop references into not just astute critiques, but chic, wearable collections.
It’s this Franco Moschino, not simply the man of the smiley face, the sardonic T-shirt, and the deliberately outrageous accessory, that Simone Rizzo and Loris Messina have been considering since taking over the creative direction of the house last June, following in the footsteps of Rossella Jardini, Jeremy Scott, and Adrian Appiolaza. The former Sunnei designers have been in their new role for barely two months, and their first instinct has been not to make noise but to listen.
“We are meticulously studying why Moschino made sense,” they said at a preview at the brand’s headquarters (the designers prefer to be quoted in unison). “But we don’t want to replicate it.
We want to understand it in order to create the Moschino of the future.”
It’s a deceptively simple distinction. For a house whose visual vocabulary has become so recognizable that its own jokes can easily become clichés, the temptation is to turn the archive into a dressing-up box: pick a slogan, throw in a windmill, and call it Moschino.
Rizzo and Messina are taking the opposite route. They have looked at the clothes, studied their construction, and, as they put it, “metabolized” what they found.
The objective is not reproduction. “We don’t want to reproduce anything he did literally.
The only thing we are carrying forward is his spirit and his way of thinking.”
That may be the most revealing thing they’re saying about their new appointment. Because if Franco’s humor has been endlessly imitated, his method has been considerably less so. Rizzo and Messina are interested in the machinery beneath the joke. “For us it is fundamental that irony is in the concept,” they explained. “If irony is in the product, it becomes ornament.”
The difference matters. It’s also where their own history with Sunnei comes into play.
For 12 years, Rizzo and Messina built a label outside the traditional fashion system, then proceeded to spend much of their time dismantling its conventions from within. They staged shows in which a voice-over talked about what models were actually thinking while walking, audiences voted on what they saw, and crowdsurfing became part of the performance.
Their shows were not simply presentations of clothes but experiments in how fashion and its audience could behave.
Now, as they both approach 40, they describe themselves with characteristic self-deprecation as “two serious rompipalle”—two serious pains in the neck. The expression is less frivolous than it sounds. Their punk instinct has not disappeared; it has simply acquired a little more perspective, and more resources to make it happen.
“We have always been spaccapalle, not really simpatico,” they say. “We were born outside the system and became anti-system, even though now we are inside it up to our necks.” After years spent driving their own fashion workhorse, they’re suddenly discovering that they are behind the wheel of a racing machine.
“At Sunnei we were used to driving a Fiat 500,” they joke. “Now we are driving a Maserati.” The joke comes with an appreciation of what the machinery of a historic Italian fashion house can make possible.
They praise the high level of manufacturing at parent company Aeffe, which gives them the opportunity to build a wardrobe whose conceptual intelligence is matched by an equally exacting standard of execution.
They describe their imagined Moschino wearer as an “aristocrat on Mars,” someone who has the freedom to dress as they please, knows how to choose, and expects a superior level of quality. The phrase describes the balance they’re after: sophistication without solemnity, fantasy without sloppiness. “We want Moschino to speak the language of luxury,” they remarked. “The thought behind Moschino has to be connected to an impeccable product.”
That is where their reading of Franco becomes particularly interesting. They are less interested in the caricature of Moschino as fashion’s enfant terrible than in the designer as a thinker.
“There is this narrative that he was irreverent. Yes, he was irreverent, but he was also extremely intelligent.
He was a philosopher, a person of thought. He was a painter.
He was more sarcastic than ironic.” They describe Moschino as a potential “cultural amplifier,” an incubator of ideas able to move between fashion and other forms of culture. The house founder understood that a garment could operate on several levels at once: immediately legible as an image, but considerably more complex as an idea.
That layered quality is something the new directors want to restore. “Moschino is a brand as powerful as Coca-Cola,” they noted. “It is a widespread platform of meaning.” It’s a rather unexpected comparison, but perhaps an apt one: both names have long since escaped the confines of their origins to become cultural shorthands, carrying meanings well beyond the products themselves.
The archive, accordingly, is not being treated as a catalogue of things to reproduce. It is more like a laboratory.
The physical archive itself, they explain, is dispersed between Milan and Cattolica, and they are already thinking about how to bring it more fully into the house. They have looked at the clothes, and were moved by seeing them in person.
What struck them most was the quality of the tailoring and construction. Some archival ideas have become starting points for new ones.
But the windmills, smiley faces, and slogans are not about to return as nostalgic props.
That future of Moschino may be quieter visually but considerably noisier intellectually. They talk about stripping away a certain banal version of Moschino humor that has accumulated over the years and replacing it with a more sophisticated semantic language. They’re also determined to continue with the performative approach that has always been part of their practice, not as a merchandising device or an attention-grabbing trick, but as their natural form of expression.
For the first show, they are doing something unusual in a fashion system where the stylist has become almost as integral to the authorship as the designer: they are working without one. “The ideas are clear,” they say, and they trust the team they have assembled at Moschino to translate them without another layer of interpretation.
“It is like a form of magic, a form of alchemy that we produce between ourselves,” they say of their creative process. “It is an expressive urgency that is difficult to explain.” They want the show to put a thought on stage, rather than simply decorate one.
The clothes, in other words, are not illustrations of a concept. “They are where the concept happens.”
That urgency also explains why they are not particularly interested in competing with the current fashion culture on its own terms. If anything, they seem intent on stepping sideways from it.
Fashion, they argue, has entered a period of “cacophony,” with too many voices, too much content and an increasingly aggressive idea of provocation. In such an environment, they believe, the genuinely radical gesture might be something unexpectedly old-fashioned: beauty.
“Today there is nothing more irreverent than the serenity of beauty,” they say. “Knowing how to stand, a certain posture.” It is a line that could almost be read as a manifesto for the new Moschino.
Not because they intend to make the house polite, but because they are interested in the confidence that comes from no longer needing to shout. “We don’t want to have to climb over ourselves to find formulas to be cool.
We will go straight ahead, concentrating on creating something beautiful.”
Their year away from fashion may have something to do with that confidence. After 12 years of Sunnei, they took a year off, deliberately disconnecting from the industry.
They traveled, exercised, walked, saw friends. They call it an extraordinary privilege.
“We’ve come back as fresh as two little flowers,” they joke. But the sabbatical also gave them something more useful than rest: distance.
They returned to work with a rather clearer idea of what they wanted, and an equally clear suspicion of what they did not. They are fascinated by digital culture, but after years of being hyper-digital, they now believe the medium has reached a point of exhaustion.
Their answer is not to abandon it but to reduce its volume. Moschino, they say, will be an exercise in “grounding”: moving from the digital back into the real world, from constant broadcasting towards actual encounters.
They want to reconnect the house with people through what they call “happenings,” experiences and physical exchanges rather than relying on the endless production of content. “We don’t want to waste energy creating something that will last for zero seconds of attention,” they say.
“We want to create something that lasts much longer.”
That conviction will extend to the fashion show itself. Their first Moschino show will not be livestreamed on social media.
For designers who came of age by experimenting with tools such as those, the decision is deliberately provocative. But again, their argument is less about rebellion than about recalibration.
The social-media conversation, they point out, is not the same thing as consumption, and visibility is not necessarily connection. “There is a digital bulimia that, frankly, is excessive,” they say.
“There has to be a way of breaking free from this addiction to being there at all costs.”
It is perhaps the most Franco Moschino idea in the entire conversation, not because it resembles anything he did, but because it applies his fundamental instinct to the present moment. Moschino looked at the fashion system around him and asked why everybody was behaving as though its rules were immutable.
Rizzo and Messina are looking at a fashion system saturated with immediacy, commentary, and digital presence, often unnecessarily mean, and asking whether those rules still make sense. And despite their affection for the founder of the label, they’re not interested in pretending that the ’80s or ’90s can somehow be recovered.
The world has changed; so has fashion; so have they.
“The purpose is not to attack, or aggression or rage,” they say. “It is to share the privilege of doing this work, to create beauty, express a thought, exchange.” That could be the most intriguing way to understand the arrival of two former outsiders at Moschino.
They are not presenting themselves as heirs to Franco’s jokes. They are trying to represent his freedom—the freedom to look at fashion and then decide which codes are worth keeping.
After all, the original Moschino trick was never really the joke. It was knowing exactly where to place it.
“There’s no creativity without chaos” was one of Franco Moschino’s principles. But his chaos was never careless: beneath the provocation was an almost obsessive command of craft and language.
Disciplined chaos, maybe. Rizzo and Messina seem to understand that attitude instinctively.
Now they just have to show us how much trouble they can cause.