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Davide Renne is the new creative director at Moschino. The highly regarded Tuscan-born designer will start on 1 November, a statement from parent group Aeffe confirmed this morning. Massimo Ferretti, Aeffe’s executive chairman, said of the new hire: “We are confident that he will play a pivotal role in shaping the future of Moschino, a global house with an Italian heart.”
Renne, 46, has been the Milanese rumour mill’s favourite candidate to succeed Jeremy Scott as Moschino’s creative captain for several weeks. After an excellent decade at the helm, the American Scott left the role in March this year. This September’s show at Milan Fashion Week marked Moschino’s 40th anniversary with four stylist-designed capsules. Now Renne will become the house’s fourth-ever lead designer following Scott, Rossella Jardini and the founder Franco Moschino.
Renne appears amply qualified for the role. Until recently, he was the head of womenswear design at Gucci. He rose to that position during nearly 20 years at the French-owned, Rome-based house that spanned the eras of both Alessandro Michele and Frida Giannini. In an autobiographical note, he writes of Michele: “He taught me to dream bigger and pushed me further ahead.” Renne joined Gucci in February 2004 after nearly four years working alongside Alessandro Dell’Acqua, who he describes as “my first teacher and mentor in fashion”. Renne is a graduate of the Polimoda fashion school in Florence.
Franco Moschino founded his eponymous label in 1983 at the encouragement of his then-boss Gianni Versace. Aeffe, which had been founded by Massimo and Alberta Ferretti in 1980, produced the collections as a licensee from the outset. In the decade before his death in 1994 from complications due to Aids, Moschino defined some of the most irreverent and confoundingly subversive codes in all of fashion — chief amongst which was a burning disregard for fashion itself.
As he memorably told New York Magazine’s Michael Gross in 1989: “Fashion is absolutely tacky. Being fashionable is not positive at all. Fashion is over. Let’s talk about something worthwhile. Fashion kills people. It is fascism. As a designer, I have to convince you to change — to cut your hair, to change the frames of your glasses. You’re a creature of the fashion system, a Muppet, not yourself.” Moschino used his platform to promote environmental clothing manufacture and to decry racism while producing collections that combined dark humour, irreverent surrealism and — despite his protestations — compelling clothes design. Those codes were then carefully cultivated by his assistant-turned-successor Jardini before Scott arrived to add his adjacently counter-intuitive take.
