Jeremy Scott’s Finest Party Trick

Jeremy Scott has always understood that fashion is theater before it’s clothing—and his collaboration with H&M, released under the Moschino TV H&M label, is exactly the maximalist sugar rush you’d expect from someone who once sent models down the runway dressed as fast food. The collection was announced at Coachella, which is either the most Jeremy Scott launch venue imaginable or a self-aware joke about itself. Possibly both.

H&M’s designer collaborations have always been a controlled explosion of access—the premise that you could wear Lagerfeld or Stella McCartney for the price of a decent dinner out. Scott’s version is louder than most of them. The Moschino DNA, the camp and irony and very deliberate tackiness elevated into something you actually want, translates into the H&M price bracket with surprising grace. The Berlin launch party pulled in the usual faces—Lena Gercke, Palina Rojinski, Lena Meyer-Landrut, who won Eurovision for Germany back in 2010 and has been a fixture at every Berlin event worth photographing since—and by all accounts the champagne was good enough that nobody really scrutinized the seams.

Whether you’d wear any of it outside a party is a separate question. But then again, Scott has built his entire career on collapsing the distance between the party and the rest of your life, and occasionally it works. This is one of those times.