Jeremy Scott: I Am a Cliché?

It’s the second to last day of fashion week in New York, and all I can think about are prescription drugs, and how badly I want them. (That’s what fashion people eat instead of salads, which are for fatties.) Xanax would be tasty. Maybe some Klonopin paired with a refreshing white wine spritzer. I’d also settle for a half a tab of Adderall, so that I could better count the number of weird coppery metallic fringe bits that seem to be falling off that model’s bustier onto the runway. Or, I could use my newly found prescription-strength attention span to list all the New York City clichés I spot in Jeremy Scott’s spring collection, not because I’m mean and want to rip it to shreds, but because I’m convinced that this really is a show about Cliché.

A quick assessment of the soundtrack confirms it, or so I think: X-Ray Spex singing “I am a cliché,” and then all those Ramones songs! Not even the deep cuts, but straight up radio hits, like “Blitzkrieg Bop” and “I Wanna Be Sedated.” A New York City punk cliché of a soundtrack if I ever heard one! After all, Jeremy Scott is a very clever guy, so I figure he must be sending out Chelsea boys in leather chaps and t-shirts that say “Fetish” as an ironic statement about the lack of originality in fashion. His cocktail dresses made out of crushed soda cans and garbage bag dresses? That must be some kind of commentary on design school clichés, right?

And even though Jeremy Scott thought to make a dress out of plastic slices of ham (or maybe it was prosciutto, which is a classier meat) well before Lady Gaga donned her own skirt o’ steak (but not Linder Sterling), there’s got to be something super deep going on there. Straightjacket worn as a wedding dress, with a veil? ‘Nuff said. Or, maybe, at this point in the week, to quote the great Poly Styrene, my mind is a plastic bag. I decided to check in with Jeremy Scott and see what he had to say about these “hidden” messages I found as I played the proverbial record backwards. The truth is about as uncomplicated as a night at CBGB’s in ’77.

Vice: Was this a collection about cliché? I kept hearing that phrase repeated in the soundtrack, “I am a cliché” by the X-Ray Spex.
Jeremy Scott: Really, it was just about New York, ultimately. We used the X-Ray Spex and different quotes that she used because she was just such a strong, seminal person of that time period. It was just about the cool girls in the city that have inhabited it and stomped through clubs and bars and restaurants from Debbie Harry to Leigh Lezark, and everyone in between.

Is bacon the new black?
Perhaps! It seems like it is! I’ve been planning this for a while, but it seems like I’ve suddenly stumbled into a trend at the same time.

Did you see Lady Gaga’s meat dress?
Of course I saw it! I loved it. Her incarnation of it was great. I mean, obviously hers is real, and mine’s latex. Hers is more of a barbarian style, mine’s a little bit more of a chic, Marilyn Monroe style.

And there were a lot of reference to garbage: soda cans, plastic bags, ticket stubs.
Absolutely. It’s part of the urban landscape of Manhattan!

Is marriage a straightjacket for you?
No, but for you as a woman it may be. I just want to enlighten all the women out there!

Thanks, Jeremy! I’ll never get married!

RENATA ESPINOSA