Usually, when you do a web search involving the words “fashion” and “plastics,” you end up with a whole lot of links to items about cosmetic surgery. But not this week.
OK. You still get a lot of links. It's just that there currently are some fashion items about plastics which have nothing to do with someone's face lift or nose job.
Most recently, it was from the Oscars, when actress Lily Cole wore a gown using fabric made from recycled PET bottles on the red carpet before the Academy Awards. The gown, made by the design house of Vivenne Westwood, is part of a project called Red Carpet Green Dress, which supports fashion made from sustainable materials.
Just in case you're asking, “Lily who?” Cole has appeared in “Snow White and the Huntsman” and “The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus.”
The designers at Moschino, meanwhile, have been busy playing with plastic bottles in a different way. For its recently unveiled Moschino Fresh fragrance, the company chose a container with a very different connotation than high end perfume.
Instead it wanted to “juxtapose the most mundane and commonplace of all products, the household cleaner, with something so precious — the juice of a luxury brand's fragrance.”
Just to be clear, the words “juice of a luxury brand's fragrance” were definitely their phrase, not mine.
So what does that mean in non-designer language? It means that a 50 milliliter bottle of a fragrance that retails at about $70 is packaged to look like a $5 window cleaner, right down to its non-functioning trigger spray nozzle closure.
Or to put it in Moschino's words: “Taking the iconography of a bottle that has no aspirational value and using it as the inspiration for a vessel to contain something so luxurious and haute couture, creates the ultimate dichotomy of high and low. What could be more Moschino than that?”
Since I'm not exactly the target audience for Moschino, I'll take the designers' words for it that it's very haute.
My only advice is not to confuse Moschino Fresh for an actual cleaning product when you're doing your spring cleaning. That would just be silly.
