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.”
Committed archive-seekers are the archaeologists of fashion, and it was Appiolaza’s passion for digging that brought him closer to Moschino. The brand’s archive includes almost everything produced by the brand from its founding in 1983 to today (“I was expecting to find three blouses and four dresses,” he says, “but there’s everything”), and Appiolaza began wading into it all, searching for a kind of inspiration that he could build on with his own visions. In some ways, Appiolaza’s new work feels almost like a collaboration with the legendary Franco. “This is what I discovered opening the vaults: How forward-thinking he was for his time,” Appiolaza says. “And then you see his shows…. He was putting so many references together. I connected to him instantly because of my passion for the ’90s and for conceptual and avant-garde designers—that’s what I grew up with while I was studying fashion.”
During my own upbringing in Italy in the ’80s, Franco Moschino was the cultural agitator you just couldn’t wait to hear more about: He sent underwear as show invitations, and his campaigns sometimes featured himself in disguise; he replaced buttons with pinwheels, sewed cutlery on to classic suits, and embroidered sale prices on to elegant black sheath dresses. Some of his strongest pieces offered an arch critique of the capitalist frenzy Italy was about to embark upon under Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi.
Appiolaza, who has a vivid memory of those eruptive years, has brought a similar bravado to his Moschino work, which has been receiving praise for the way he has delivered a smart and witty take on the founder’s legacy. He points to his white jacket with a 1,000-lira print on the back below the embroidered words “Money Doesn’t Make the World Go Around.” Nearby is the Italian-flag-themed gown from a 1994 Moschino collection, a starting point for Appiolaza’s debut. “My version deconstructed the top part and created a feeling of draping the flag into the dress to get a little bit more of a dynamic look—I always try to bend things, but you still recognize the original.” Franco’s famous 1988 black bra dress, meanwhile, was transformed, in Appiolaza’s hands, into a chic cocktail dress.
Along the way, he’s also played with some of Moschino’s sacred archetypes: The famous tubino dress, for example, an elegant sheath that Franco used as a billboard for provocative ideas. “We closed the last show with a series of deconstructed tubinos,” Appiolaza says. “I wanted this juxtaposition of something very simple with something from a different era.” Or Franco’s military-style survival jacket from 1991, with each pocket containing a beauty product instead of a weapon. He laughs as I open a nail polish bottle stuffed in one of the pockets and sniff the vintage chemicals. “I did a version that was about surviving in the city,” he says, showing me his creation, which features pockets filled with pens, notebooks, reading glasses.
Then something else catches my eye: the fabulous plastic-bag dress from 1994, my absolute favorite piece—and one that Appiolaza will revisit for his upcoming collection. “Moschino used real trash bags—he was asking, ‘What is luxury?’ I wanted to play with the idea of luxury—it’s not just about the most beautiful fabric; it’s how you wear things, how things are made.”
Growing up in Buenos Aires, Appiolaza’s first references for fashion—and his first models—were his mother, his grandmother, and his aunt, though by his teens he began to dream of rupture. He and his friends were into the British music of the ’80s and early ’90s—Depeche Mode, the Cure, the Smiths, Happy Mondays. “I dreamed of moving to London to be part of the scene there,” Appiolaza remembers, and as soon as he came of age, he abandoned both his studies and his job at an insurance company and flew over, speaking little English, with no job and no plan. Through London’s vibrant club scene, he became friendly with Nicola Formichetti and then Kim Jones, who encouraged him to apply to Central Saint Martins, and the rest is history: He was soon working at Alexander McQueen, Miu Miu, Louis Vuitton, Chloé, and most recently, Loewe.
Appiolaza’s almost primal love of fashion is also reflected in 20 Age Archive, a vintage emporium he owns and runs with his partner, designer Ryan Benacer (the two met through mutual friends in 2016). “Fashion is a very personal form of expression,” Appiolaza explains, “but it’s also part of social and cultural history—there is always so much to learn from it.” What started as a shared passion for collecting vintage Maison Margiela and conceptual pieces from Comme des Garçons, Balenciaga, Céline, and others quickly snowballed into a 4,000-piece archive, with the couple renting to stylists, magazines, and bands. Aside from his collecting and, of course, his day job, Appiolaza spends much of his free time listening to vinyl—
everything from jazz and classical to pop music (“Music determines my daily mood,” he says)—and watching film noir and vintage horror movies.
Appiolaza proposes that we take a stroll to his favorite antiques stores in a nearby industrial area under a tramway. Soon after we begin digging for treasure at the first, Crazy Art, we’re giving each other knowing glances amid the corals, ancient books, even an entire section of vintage vacuum cleaners. Magazzino 76 across the street, which features Italian and international furniture from the ’40s through the ’70s, seems more promising. Appiolaza is on the hunt for a metal four-bay bookcase he spotted on their website, but other gems keep appearing among the armada of chairs, lamps, and tables, and our knowing glances have been replaced by broad smiles: Disorder and chaos—along with their corresponding delights—seem to be the rule here as well. Appiolaza is already taking notes.