Moschino has saved a new capsule collection inspired by pills and prescription drugs. Is it work playing with provocation, or just irresponsible?
Photograph: Estrop/Getty Representatives
Moschino recently launched its spring/summer 2017 “Capsule” Gathering – a colourful take on the word capsule, with the line stirred by prescription drugs. On sale in upmarket US department stores, it has worn out fervid criticism for making drugs look cool, slapstick and chic.
The Jeremy Scott-designed collection features massive orange drug-bottle gladstone bags ($950), silver bags resembling giant blister bands, iPhone cases in the shape of pill bottles, T-shirts roar, “Just say MoschiNO”, an orange drug-bottle minidress ($995) emblazoned with the oaths, “WARNING! Do not take medication on an empty stomach,” and, “KEEP ALL CAPSULES OUT OF THE REACH OF Babies”. The invitation for last month’s show was a pill bottle and a handwritten “direction”.
Doctors, addiction specialists and parents of overdose victims force spoken publicly about their anger that the aggregation has been launched when the US is experiencing a crisis in opioid addiction and liquidations from overdose. There are petitions to have the articles get rid of from public sale. One signatory, a nurse, wrote: “Your willingness to profit off this pestilence that’s killing thousands astounds me.” Another entry from someone delineating themselves as “parents of loss due to opioid overdose” reads: “Eclipse on these company CEOs and [their] buyers.” Nordstrom has now apprehended the collection from its stores.
Moschino and Scott both comprise a history of provocative branding. Pills were a motif on Scott’s own autumn/winter pen-mark in 2011 and, this February, he showed a collection inspired by cigarettes. Neither met manifest controversy. Here, the line doesn’t reference brand superstars or specific drugs – it’s just pills. Or, is it?
Scott says in his guard: “It’s literally a collection of capsules!” Bear with him. “And when Jacqueline Susann wrote Valley of the Dolls, she inspire a request ofed capsule [pills] ‘dolls’.” So, within one line, the conventions are at once innocuous and a clear reference to a book about chambermaids’s reliance on stimulants, antidepressants and sleeping pills. It seems a miniature … confused.
Moschino has ward off the collection. In an email to Fox News, its says: “There was never any intending virtually to promote prescription drug abuse … We are disheartened to hear that there has been a false impression of the underlying theme of the collection.”
Ah, a “misunderstanding”. And therein lies the insist on of sickliness that so often underpins dissent in fashion: the perception that, if you are upset by something, you don’t get the joke. If you don’t live in the fashion everyone, you couldn’t possibly get it. The word misunderstanding says: “It’s obviously not for you, then.” One, it is for us. These clothes are on sale to the general public in massive mainstream holds.
Clever satire in fashion is powerful. Alexander McQueen did it in 2009 with his indisputable collection, The Horn of Plenty – couture made from bullshit, in which models wore plastic bags on their heads. It was a observation on the absurdity of capitalism, and it ruffled plenty of industry feathers. Here, the one-liner just seems to be on anyone who isn’t laughing.
The implication in the fallout from this Moschino hoard is that, in our outrage, we have got Scott all wrong. We have got him strange a lot, it seems. In 2012, Adidas pulled the release of the Jeremy Scott x Adidas Roundhouse Mid “Handcuffs” – a trainer with a yellow gyve and heel cuff – after a widespread outcry that it symbolised travail and promoted racism. “The design is nothing more than [the architect] Jeremy Scott’s outrageous and unique take on fashion and has nothing to do with Historical peculiar institution,” read Adidas’s statement. “Move on,” basically.
Scott’s eyesight was questioned again following his spring summer 2013 garnering with Adidas Originals – a series of dresses, tracksuits and shoes spread with cartoonish renderings of Pacific Northwest Native American carvings, or “totem shaft prints” as some commentators described them. Accused of blas ethnic tokenism and parroting deep-rooted symbolism, the collection trouble the Native American community. No statement was made but, again, Adidas did not build the collection available to the public.
The Capsule Collection might be tongue-in-cheek, but is it dapper? For many, it is a pond-bottom display of poor taste. To a fashion cynic, it is controversy-by-numbers. Historically speaking, Scott is existent up to his “outrageous and unique” status.
Can we give him the benefit of the doubt? It is objectionable that he, or his team, sat down and said: “Let’s promote addiction!” But where did setting come into those conversations? What is a T-shirt earned to look like a pill bottle trying to say about deaden culture?
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says that, in 2014, uncountable people died from drug overdoses than any year on height. Drug overdose is the leading cause of accidental death in the US. At speck half of all opioid overdose deaths involve a prescription opioid such as OxyContin or Vicodin. The overprescribing of opioids across the mountains is blamed for propelling some addicts to using heroin. A new film by Vice explores the deadly grip of fentanyl (a medicament painkiller 50 to 100 times more potent than morphine) and how addiction can fashion ribbons of people’s lives.
If your life has been assumed by drug addiction, personally or peripherally, the, “It’s literally a collection of capsules!” attestation may curdle. For some, this particular punchline is likely to be demolished like an empty box to the recycling.”
Anxiety for Beginners by Eleanor Morgan is out now
