MILAN, September 28, 2005 – Honoring the late Franco Moschino's "classico con twist" mantra, the house's creative team continues to serve up serious, well-behaved classics that are always enlivened with a dash of humor. For spring, the Moschino girls stepped through life-size silhouette cutouts that formed the backdrop for their shenanigans in clothes that ransacked the decades. It seemed as though a ponytailed young girl had been let loose on her grandmother's lifetime horde of attic treasures—and had mixed them up with some of her own thrift store trouvailles. She might shrug a shrunken black leather biker's jacket over an oyster satin thirties camisole, or wear her heart-shape Lolita sunglasses with a stiff little sixties A-line evening dress. And how to give a punky edge to those well-behaved chiffon and black lace cocktail frocks? How about clumpy patent platform shoes, licked with fluoro color?
The collection's inventive trompe l'oeil effects included full-skirt fifties garden-party dresses, their hips swagged with prints of chain-link belts, or a writhing mass of pearl necklaces scattered with the real (faux) thing. And the Moschino team not only succumbed to the season's mania for ruffles (in tiers of Coco Chanel-like sequined black tulle, or a frill peeping from the hem of a rigid dress) —it also parodied it, in the form of a plain swing skirt painted with imagined flounces.
– Hamish Bowles