FUN HOUSE

Moschino creative director Adrian Appiolaza is spinning new classics inspired by the brand's provocative and mischievous history. By Chiara Barzini.

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As I ascend the staircase at the Moschino offices near Milan’s stazione centrale, I’m greeted by a headless Greek statue resembling a Venus de Milo wearing black stockings—a set piece from a late-’80s advertising campaign sculpted in my childhood memory. When creative director Adrian Appiolaza took over the brand in January 2024, he placed the statue at the building’s entrance—and used the vintage campaign image in his first show.

Upstairs, Appiolaza, with a slightly mischievous smile, welcomes me into a large, bright room filled with the 40 or so ’80s and ’90s Moschino pieces that inspired his recent work. There’s a smiley yellow leather jacket from 1992; a shirt with the archangel Gabriel exclaiming “Yo, Mary!” in Neapolitan dialect from 1994; another jacket from 1993 embroidered with a childlike drawing by the house’s founder, Franco Moschino; and a papal-like hat from 1994—all arranged around the room in a way that makes them fresh, visceral, alive.

“I’m obsessed with religious attire,” Appiolaza, 52, says. “I mean, I grew up in Buenos Aires going to church every Sunday with my grandmother, but I was more focusing on the clothes of the nuns and the priests than the prayers.” Political manifestos, smileys, religious satire––the provocative and ironic Moschino symbology is very much here, along with a colorful array of ties, collars, bras. “Non c’è creatività senza caos,” Franco famously said, and Appiolaza plunges into a similar delight in disorder. “I knew I needed to reformulate Franco’s sense of chaos into my own.”