Moschino Spring 2025 Menswear Collection

Before leaving Argentina for London (then Paris and now Milan), Adrian Appiolaza once had a job in insurance sales. To present a respectable facade to potential clients, his employer required him to wear a suit provided by the company. Speaking at his first menswear show for Moschino – and in fact his first menswear show ever – Appiolaza shuddered as he recalled, “I felt like a prisoner of that suit.”

This afternoon, that formative trauma collided with something Franco Moschino himself once said: “It is better to dress the way you want, than the way you should.” This line was engraved on the bowling bag at Look 37 (part of this show’s simultaneously presented resort collection) and on the T-shirt in Look 22 (a figure for Appiolaza himself). It was also the starting point for the designer to weave together three separate stories: a shift from formality to freedom, the archival landscape of Moschino itself and Appiolaza’s own journey.

We started in the office. The egg and banana jewelry represented breakfast: Appiolaza started his commute with some heartily tongue-in-cheek takes on corporate attire. A shirt skirt worn with a real shirt but unreal suspenders and a four-button suit paired with three hats were among the first of many, many archival references. The shredded Moschino fax jacket and overcoat, the Moschino Air hat and the farewell Post-it suit seemed to take our runway to a happier place.

That Appiolaza figure in very Franco-pastiche Chanel was the turning point toward a series of wearable wish fulfillments; archetypes whose identities spoke to the different stories he combined. The football jersey paired with a three-star baseball cap was a tribute to Argentina, while the football pair with the Italian flag – one with an authentic red sauce splattering – was a gesture to Appiolaza’s new creative home. A Latin American lover in carpenter jeans and a southern siren in an embroidered skirt from Naples preceded a luxurious guest in slipper bag and bathrobe with a terrifying tool bag in hand: her gaze seemed to echo Fashion Italia’s 2010 Makeover Madness editorial by Steven Meisel. The canonical Moschino heart bags were paired with paneled raffia basket bags. The founder’s recurring goose motif returned in prints on skirts and shirts in a hokey, rural countrywear duet. There were in-jokes, out-jokes, literal Moschino Easter eggs, and purposefully ambiguous references you could use depending on your direction of travel.

A lilac-and-light-turquoise men’s sarong printed with office supplies, worn under an unbuttoned shirt (which was mostly unbuttoned), suggested that our salaryman had found his summer paradise. The closing all-white suit in heavy linen with a sleeved skirt was both a reversal and a return to the beginning. Appiolaza’s cast walked around piles of lost luggage during their finale that symbolized the tangle of transformative travel stories he was playing with: this was a show that was both scholarly and personal, taking you places.