Jeremy Scott Doesn’t Care If You Get It

Jeremy Scott has always occupied the part of fashion where camp and sincerity stop being distinguishable. His collections were never subtle—wings on sneakers, bears on backpacks, leopard print doing structural work—and his Adidas collaboration gave him a mass-market canvas for exactly that sensibility. The result was clothes and shoes that people either loved immediately or dismissed as a joke, which might have been the point.

Somewhere in his story there’s a real American fashion narrative: the kid from rural Missouri who went to Parsons, moved to Paris in the late nineties with almost no money and showed a collection out of his apartment, got noticed by Vogue, kept going. His whole aesthetic—irreverent, loud, willfully uncool in the way only someone very deliberate can pull off—reads partly as defense mechanism and partly as genuine philosophy. Fashion takes itself very seriously. Scott has always found that funny.

Paris Fashion Week is the natural home for that kind of controlled excess, the place where the industry performs its own absurdity with total seriousness. Scott just does it louder and with more stuffed animals. Whether that makes it high art or elaborate provocation probably depends on what you think fashion is supposed to be doing. He seems happy either way.