Fashion has always taken itself very seriously, a reality that Franco Moschino understood better than most. At the height of conspicuous luxury in the 1980s, the Italian designer turned clothes into a running commentary on the industry’s own vanities and absurdities. He introduced 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 fashioned from neckties, and a handbag boldly announcing, “This Is Not an It Bag.”
His jokes, however, were rarely gratuitous. They were a method of taking fashion apart from the inside, exposing its inflated sense of self-importance by exaggerating it until it became impossible to ignore. Moschino mastered sophisticated semantic wit and jeu de mots, transforming clever observations into slogans without ever sounding pretentious or overly didactic. Crucially, his irreverence was entirely grounded in technical mastery. Moschino could brilliantly parody couture because he understood precisely how it worked, translating trompe-l’œil and pop cultural references into astute critiques while delivering chic, highly wearable collections.
It is this intellectual lineage of Franco Moschino—rather than simply the man of the smiley face, the sardonic T-shirt, and the deliberately outrageous accessory—that Simone Rizzo and Loris Messina have been evaluating since taking over the creative direction of the house last June. Stepping into roles previously held by Rossella Jardini, Jeremy Scott, and Adrian Appiolaza, the former Sunnei designers spent their first two months in the position doing something counterintuitive for the modern fashion calendar: they chose to listen rather than make immediate noise.
“We are meticulously studying why Moschino made sense,” the designers said during a preview at the brand’s Milan headquarters, preferring, as is their custom, to be quoted in unison. “लेकिन—but we don’t want to replicate it. We want to understand it in order to create the Moschino of the future.”
It is a deceptively simple distinction, yet one fraught with creative challenges. For a house whose visual vocabulary has become so universally recognizable that its own jokes can easily devolve into clichés, the persistent temptation is to treat the historical archive as a mere dressing-up box: pick a slogan, throw in a windmill, and call it Moschino. Rizzo and Messina are deliberately taking the opposite route. They have spent time examining the garments, studying their construction, and, as they describe it, “metabolizing” what they found. Their objective is explicitly not reproduction.
“We don’t want to reproduce anything he did literally,” they noted. “The only thing we are carrying forward is his spirit and his way of thinking.”
That may be the most revealing insight they have offered regarding their appointment. While Franco Moschino’s humor has been endlessly imitated across the decades, his underlying methodology has been considerably less explored. Rizzo and Messina are fundamentally interested in the machinery operating 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.”
This philosophy is deeply rooted in their own history with Sunnei. For twelve years, Rizzo and Messina built a label largely outside the traditional parameters of the established fashion system, spending much of their tenure dismantling its rigid conventions from within. They famously staged shows featuring voice-overs that broadcasted what models were actually thinking while walking down the runway, invited audiences to vote on what they saw in real-time, and incorporated crowdsurfing into performance pieces. Their presentations were never simply static showcases of garments; they were active experiments in how fashion and its audience could interact.
Now, approaching the age of 40, they describe themselves with characteristic self-deprecation as “two serious rompipalle”—two genuine pains in the neck. Yet the expression carries more perspective and resources than it did in their earlier independent days. Their underlying punk instinct has not disappeared; it has simply acquired maturity and the backing of substantial industrial infrastructure.
“We have always been spaccapalle, not really simpatico,” they remarked. “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 independent fashion enterprise, they find themselves suddenly behind the wheel of an industrial racing machine. “At Sunnei we were used to driving a Fiat 500,” they joke. “Now we are driving a Maserati.” This comparison comes with a profound appreciation for what the manufacturing power of parent company Aeffe can achieve, granting them the opportunity to build a wardrobe where conceptual intelligence is matched by an exacting, high-level standard of execution.
They visualize the ideal Moschino wearer as an “aristocrat on Mars”—someone possessing the freedom to dress entirely as they please, the discernment to choose wisely, and the expectation of superior quality. The phrase encapsulates the balance they are striving to achieve: sophistication without solemnity, and fantasy without sloppiness.
“We want Moschino to speak the language of luxury,” they stated. “The thought behind Moschino has to be connected to an impeccable product.”
This mindset shapes how they read Franco Moschino’s legacy. They view him less through the journalistic caricature of fashion’s enfant terrible and far more as a rigorous 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 observed.
They describe Moschino as a potential “cultural amplifier,” an incubator of ideas capable of navigating fluidly between fashion and broader cultural expressions. The brand’s founder understood that a garment could operate simultaneously on multiple levels: immediately legible as a visual image, yet infinitely more complex as an intellectual idea.
Restoring that layered quality is central to their vision. “Moschino is a brand as powerful as Coca-Cola,” they noted, comparing the fashion label to a ubiquitous corporate giant. “It is a widespread platform of meaning.” It is an unexpected parallel, yet an apt one, as both names have long since transcended their commercial origins to become cultural shorthands carrying significance far beyond individual products.
Consequently, the physical archive—which is currently dispersed between Milan and Cattolica—is being treated not as a static catalogue of items to copy, but as an active laboratory. Reviewing the garments in person, Rizzo and Messina were struck above all by the exceptional quality of the tailoring and construction. While historical pieces have provided starting points for new ideas, the iconic windmills, smiley faces, and literal slogans will not return as nostalgic, lazy props.
The future visual identity of Moschino may appear quieter, but it promises to be considerably noisier on an intellectual level. The designers speak of stripping away the banal iterations of Moschino humor that accumulated over the years, replacing them with a sharper, more sophisticated semantic language. Furthermore, they are committed to maintaining the performative approach that defined their independent careers—not as a superficial merchandising trick or an attention-grabbing social media stunt, but as their most natural form of expression.
For their debut collection, they are taking a path that diverges sharply from contemporary industry norms: they are working entirely without a stylist. In an era where the fashion stylist has become nearly as integral to a brand’s authorship as the designer, Rizzo and Messina trust their internal team.
“The ideas are clear,” they said, describing their creative process as “a form of magic, a form of alchemy that we produce between ourselves… an expressive urgency that is difficult to explain.” They intend for their runway show to stage an actual thought rather than merely decorate one. In their view, the clothes are not illustrations of a concept; rather, “they are where the concept happens.”
This sense of urgency explains why they have little interest in competing with prevailing fashion culture on its current terms. Instead, they appear intent on stepping sideways from it. Fashion, they argue, has entered a period of “cacophony,” saturated with excessive voices, endless content, and an increasingly aggressive approach to provocation. In such an environment, they suggest that the most genuinely radical gesture might be something startlingly old-fashioned: beauty.
“Today there is nothing more irreverent than the serenity of beauty,” they remarked. “Knowing how to stand, a certain posture.”
It is a perspective that serves as a manifesto for the new era of Moschino—not because they intend to render the house polite, but because true confidence comes from no longer needing to shout for attention. “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 recent year away from the relentless fashion calendar has undoubtedly contributed to this self-assurance. After twelve years at Sunnei, they took a deliberate sabbatical, disconnecting entirely from the industry to travel, exercise, walk, and spend time with friends. They describe the break as an extraordinary privilege.
“We’ve come back as fresh as two little flowers,” they joke.
More importantly, the sabbatical provided the invaluable gift of distance, allowing them to return to work with a clearer sense of purpose and a heightened suspicion of industry fatigue. While fascinated by digital culture, they believe the medium has reached a point of exhaustion after years of hyper-digital saturation.
Their response is not to abandon the digital sphere entirely, but to dial down its volume. Moschino will represent an exercise in “grounding”—shifting focus away from constant broadcasting and back toward real-world encounters and physical experiences.
“We don’t want to waste energy creating something that will last for zero seconds of attention,” they stated. “We want to create something that lasts much longer.”
That conviction directly impacts how they will present their work. Their inaugural Moschino collection will not be livestreamed on social media—a deliberately provocative decision for designers who built their early reputations through digital experimentation. Their argument centers on recalibration rather than mere rebellion, noting that social media chatter is not equivalent to genuine consumption, and digital visibility does not equate to human connection.
“There is a digital bulimia that, frankly, is excessive,” they observed. “There has to be a way of breaking free from this addiction to being there at all costs.”
In many ways, this outlook mirrors the foundational instinct of Franco Moschino himself, who looked at the fashion establishment of his day and questioned why everyone treated its arbitrary rules as immutable. Rizzo and Messina are similarly examining a contemporary fashion system saturated with immediacy, commentary, and digital noise, and asking whether those rules still serve a purpose. They harbor no illusions that the aesthetics of the 1980s or 1990s can simply be resurrected; the world has changed, fashion has evolved, and so have they.
“The purpose is not to attack, or aggression or rage,” they emphasized. “It is to share the privilege of doing this work, to create beauty, express a thought, exchange.”
Ultimately, Rizzo and Messina are not positioning themselves as literal heirs to Franco’s punchlines. Instead, they are claiming his truest asset: the freedom to look at fashion and decide which codes are genuinely worth keeping. As Franco Moschino famously observed, “There’s no creativity without chaos.” But his chaos was never careless; beneath the provocation lay an obsessive command of craft and language—a disciplined chaos that Rizzo and Messina understand intuitively.
