Moschino: Fragrances from the Man Who Shook Fashion Conventions with Laughter and Parody

“I am not a fashion designer. I am a painter and a decorator, not the author of a new era.”

— Franco Moschino (1991, The New York Times)

Basic Information
The Founder and the Brand’s Origins
What Defines the Brand
1. The Philosophy of Fragrance: “Surprise” as the Only Rule
2. Bottle and Packaging Design: “Bringing the Noble into the Everyday, and Ennobling the Everyday”
Fragrance Lineup
1. Classics Continuing from Franco’s Era
2. The “Toy Box” of the Jeremy Scott Era
Incidentally…

Basic Information

Founded: 1983
Founder: Franco Moschino (1950–1994)
Based in: Milan, Italy
Official website: https://www.moschino.com
Fragrance manufacture and distribution: Euroitalia S.r.l.
Note: The correct pronunciation of Moschino is “moss-keen-oh.” It is often misread as “moh-shee-no,” but the former follows Italian pronunciation rules.

The Founder and the Brand’s Origins

An Aspiring Painter Born into an Ironworks Family Near Milan

Franco Moschino was born on February 27, 1950, in Abbiategrasso, approximately 22 kilometers southwest of Milan. His family operated an iron foundry, and his father hoped his son would take over the family business. What Franco dreamed of, however, was not the smell of iron but the colors of paint.

At around seventeen or eighteen, Franco left for Milan. His destination was the Brera Academy of Fine Arts, the Accademia di Belle Arti di Brera, where he aimed to become a painter. To pay his tuition, however, he continued working part-time as an illustrator for fashion magazines and clothing brands. While keeping up with the painting studies that were supposed to be his main pursuit, he found himself drawn into fashion. That element of chance gave rise to the “calculated disorder” of the later Moschino brand.

The Man Who Drew for Gianni Versace

In 1971, after completing his studies, Franco formally joined Gianni Versace’s atelier as an illustrator. For the next six years, he used his sketches to give visual form to Versace’s talent. Moschino later said, “I have always copied fashion and trampled on other designers. I recreate what has happened in an effort to understand people’s motives.” His experience in the Versace years appears to have formed the basis of a perspective that dismantled the codes of high fashion only after thoroughly understanding them.

In 1977, he left Versace to become a designer for the Italian brand Cadette. There, Franco produced eleven consecutive seasons of collections, accumulating the experimentation and experience that would serve him when he later founded Moonshadow.

1983: From Moonshadow to Moschino

After leaving Cadette in 1982, Franco founded his own company, Moonshadow S.p.A., in 1983 and launched the Moschino Couture! brand. The first womenswear collection, for Spring/Summer 1984, was presented in Milan and immediately drew attention. A menswear line followed the next year, Moschino Jeans in 1986, and the first women’s fragrance in 1987. In just four years after starting the brand, he rapidly expanded from fashion into perfume.

In 1988, he introduced the lower-priced Cheap and Chic line. It combined more accessible prices with an emphasis on quality. The name “cheap and chic” was itself a kind of parody, taking aim at the industry’s convention that a high price is the hallmark of quality.

Franco’s designs were not merely eccentric. Embroidering “Waist of Money,” a pun on “waste of money,” onto a classic Chanel-style suit, using safety pins on a bodice, and creating a coat festooned with teddy bears were all forms of intellectual criticism of the fashion system itself.

“Fashion is something you can laugh at forever. Yet because people take it too seriously, it is also one of the hardest things to laugh at.”

— Franco Moschino

An Eye for Social Issues

Franco was a social critic as well as a designer. In 1992, he launched advertising campaigns opposing drug abuse, violence, and animal cruelty. In 1994, he presented the Ecouture / Nature Friendly Garment collection, made entirely from environmentally friendly materials. Even from today’s perspective, these initiatives can be seen as ahead of their time.

His final runway show took place in October 1993 to celebrate the brand’s tenth anniversary. At its conclusion, men, women, and children dressed in white and wearing AIDS ribbons filled the stage. The message went beyond fashion.

An Untimely Death at Forty-Four

On September 18, 1994, Franco Moschino died at his home in Annone di Brianza, near Milan, at the age of forty-four. The company’s announcement at the time attributed his death to a heart attack resulting from complications of an abdominal tumor. Other reports and retrospective accounts, however, describe AIDS-related complications. Since his death, part of the brand’s sales has been directed toward supporting children living with HIV through the Franco Moschino Foundation.

In accordance with Franco’s wishes, Rossella Jardini, the assistant he had trusted most during his lifetime, succeeded him as creative director. Jardini led the brand for approximately nineteen years, preserving its humor and elegance.

Creative Directors After Franco

In October 2013, American designer Jeremy Scott became creative director, carrying forward the camp and surrealist tradition pioneered by Franco in a style fully immersed in pop culture. He remained for approximately ten years, until his departure in March 2023.

After Scott’s departure, Davide Renne was appointed, but died suddenly in November 2023, nine days after taking up the role. In January 2024, Argentine-born Adrian Appiolaza became the fifth creative director. Having spent ten years working under Jonathan Anderson (JW Anderson) at Loewe, he said upon his appointment: “Jackets with 3D postcards, a dress with a skirt made from twenty bras, countless trompe-l’œil effects… the list of works Franco Moschino inscribed in fashion history is almost infinite.” Appiolaza subsequently left the role on June 19, 2026.

What Defines the Brand

The Philosophy of Fragrance: “Surprise” as the Only Rule

If Moschino perfumes could be summed up in one phrase, it might be: “The story has already begun the moment you pick up the bottle.” Since the first fragrance in 1987, Moschino has consistently aimed to offer not simply a scent, but a complete experience that includes the bottle design.

Fragrance development and manufacture have been handled by Euroitalia since the fragrance business began in the 1980s. In a 2024 statement, founder Giovanni Sgariboldi said, “Our ties with Moschino go back to the time of its founder, Franco Moschino. We are proud of the privilege of having innovated the fragrance market alongside him.” The brand’s spirit has thus also been carried forward through its long partnership with Euroitalia. Leading perfumers including Olivier Polge, Alberto Morillas, Nathalie Lorson, and Olivier Cresp have participated in composing its fragrances.

In September 2024, Euroitalia acquired Moschino’s beauty and fragrance rights from its operator, the Aeffe group, for €98 million, gaining full control of the fragrance rights.

Bottle and Packaging Design: “Bringing the Noble into the Everyday, and Ennobling the Everyday”

Moschino bottles are often described as works of art and have collectors around the world. Underlying their design is the idea Franco Moschino brought to fashion: laughing away the boundary between high and low.

The bottle for Cheap & Chic (1995) takes its shape from the slender silhouette of Olive Oyl in the Popeye cartoon. It won the 1996 FiFi Award for Best Women’s Packaging, the fragrance industry’s equivalent of an Academy Award, and was also honored with display at New York’s Museum of Modern Art (MoMA). It was a symbolic moment in which a prominent fashion-house fragrance bottle was recognized as art.

Although the bottle for Fresh Couture (2015) is a glass spray bottle, it looks exactly like a household window-cleaner container. Jeremy Scott himself described the concept: “To contrast the most ordinary, everyday product with the most precious thing, a luxury-brand fragrance. To take the iconography of a bottle with no glamour and make it a vessel for the essence of couture. It is the ultimate high-and-low dichotomy. Could anything be more Moschino?” Supermodel Linda Evangelista appeared in the advertising campaign, photographed by Steven Meisel.

Fragrance Lineup

Classics Continuing from Franco’s Era

Moschino for Women (1987) was the brand’s landmark first fragrance. It appeared before the opening of the Milan boutique in 1989, suggesting that Franco regarded fragrance not merely as an accessory but as central to the brand’s expression.

Cheap & Chic (1995) was released after Franco’s death under his successor, Rossella Jardini. With its Olive Oyl-shaped bottle and its history of display at MoMA, it became emblematic of the direction of Moschino fragrances.

Cheap & Chic I Love Love (2004–2005) inherited the vivid colors and signature silhouette of Cheap & Chic, combining a fresh citrus-floral scent with an effervescent personality. It was composed by Olivier Cresp.

Moschino Funny! (2007) is a fruity-floral fragrance in a striking vivid-blue bottle. Its top notes of bitter orange, redcurrant, and pink pepper develop into a heart of green tea, peony, and jasmine.

The “Toy Box” of the Jeremy Scott Era

Toy (2014) was Jeremy Scott’s first fragrance for the brand. The teddy bear’s body forms the bottle, and twisting off its head reveals the spray nozzle. Sold in a box that looks as though it belongs in a toy department, the perfume also pays homage to Franco’s teddy-bear fur coat from the Autumn/Winter 1988–89 collection. Composed by Alexandra Kosinski, this unisex fragrance moves from top notes of mandarin, cardamom, and bergamot through a heart of lavender, violet, and hawthorn to a base of sandalwood, vanilla, and acacia. It sold out immediately after its launch at Harrods in London.

Fresh Couture (2015) is the cleaning-product-bottle-shaped fragrance described above. Its floral-woody composition features top notes of mandarin, bergamot, and ylang-ylang; a heart of raspberry, white peony, and osmanthus; and a base of light woods, white patchouli, and ambrox. Pink Fresh Couture and Gold Fresh Couture were also developed.

The series expanded with Toy 2 (2018), Toy Boy (2019), and Toy 2 Bubble Gum (2021), establishing the teddy-bear bottle as an icon of Moschino fragrances. Toy 2 Pearl, announced in 2023, is distinguished by an onyx-lacquered bottle with the iridescence of Tahitian pearls and a formula described as 94% biodegradable and 44% naturally derived ingredients.

Incidentally…

Moschino designed the costumes for the country-name placard bearers who led the delegations at the opening ceremony of the 2006 Turin Winter Olympics. Kylie Minogue and Madonna are also known to have favored Moschino.

In addition to its display at MoMA mentioned above, the Olive Oyl-shaped Cheap & Chic bottle is held in the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History. For a perfume bottle to be displayed or collected by two major art and history museums is unusual even within the fragrance industry.

In 2024, the thirtieth year after Franco’s death, Milan hosted an exhibition titled Franco Moschino: Il Genio Visionario, and he was posthumously inducted into the Art Directors Club Italiano’s (ADCI) Hall of Legends 2024. His laughter and provocation directed at fashion continue to be appreciated as art across time.

Franco disliked being called a fashion designer. In a 1990 interview with the Los Angeles Times, he said, “I have always said that I am not a fashion designer. I don’t have the power to impose my ideas on anyone.” Yet immediately afterward he added, “But I also want to save the world of clothing,” a characteristically self-contradictory remark that he seemed to relish.

References