Style & Fashion

When Joe Zee, the editor in chief of Yahoo! Style, saw Kelly Osbourne at Jeremy Scott’s New York Fashion Week show, there was only one thing he wanted to do: nuzzle her dog, a beguiling mass of fur which she carried in her arms. Osbourne obliged, and obliged yet more people who also wanted an audience with the aforesaid pooch.

Scott, a fan of The Young and The Restless (and therefore already a man of exquisite taste by our estimation) is also a master of mixing pop and pop culture, and when the clothes started coming, they did so with as many flashes of mischief as of color.

The show, a gaudily exuberant homage to the 1980s, began with ‘New York’ emblazoned across an oversized sweater. Then came bra-tops teamed with short skirts and trousers, a sweater dress in pink and purple, and poster-art faces (that could have furnished your eighties bedroom) drawn across T-shirts and dresses. ‘Hot Hot Hot’ screamed one set of banner lettering.

Male models wore the same pastels as the women, and the same checkered trousers designed in NYC taxi yellow and black. That design also came as a bikini.

“I was just really thinking about New York City folklore, the early ’80s that I’ve read about in books and magazines,” Scott told the Associated Press. “These fun party scenes and these extravagant characters going around on the Lower East Side, and Times Square being seedy and having X-rated cheaters.”

The campy jewel colors got darker in what seemed like a knicker-bra combo, and then, at the end, a parade of colorful, riotous shimmering and glitter overtook the catwalk like an exhilarating fireworks display—in jumpsuits, in long dresses that were also adorned by strange hoops, like rings around planets or UFOs, and—best of all—giant capes that made for the best kind of outrageous wind-breaker or sun reflector. Here, the practicality of clothes was subverted entirely. And yet amazingly, the items looked wearable. Even if such detailing meant you did get stuck in Wholefoods’ doorway, it would be the best kind of fashion moment. There would be no embarassment, only applause and Instagram likes.

The joy of Jeremy Scott is inscribed in his designs—a love of pop, art, camp, and fashion—and the busting of all conventions and its limits. He sees a boundary and brazenly jumps headlong over it, and the audience—including, presumably, the adored ball of fur that was Kelly Osbourne’s front row dog—loved it.