Moschino Fresh Couture

The irreverent designer Jeremy Scott gives the ordinary extraordinary status with a new perfume that looks more like a bottle of Windex than a designer spritz.

Aesthetics aside, Moschino Fresh is exactly what the name suggests. Spray it and you’re surrounded by crisp fresh citrus notes of bergamot and mandarins layered atop hints of peony and ylang-ylang. Its floral longevity, though, is the true kicker: Should a fragrance housed in a spray bottle that largely resembles a cleaning bottle not be more clinical, or perhaps, cool?

The visual distance between luxury and pop art is, in fact, what makes Moschino so cool. Since Jeremy Scott’s creative direction began in the fall of 2013, Moschino’s typically novel style has become entirely pop-centric. With Moschino, low-status cultural icons have become the latest references in pop art: Barbie, Spongebob Squarepants, McDonald’s. The new Fresh perfume, in campaign and approach, is another cheeky play on status, pairing a high luxury item like designer perfume with a most non-glamorous everyday item like Windex cleaning spray.

Enter Linda Evangelista, the famed chameleon model of the Supermodel era and a household name herself. Evangelista covers the campaign as a fair-skinned ginger and we meet a 1990s supermodel revived, dressed like a ’50s-era housewife. Again, Moschino took the ubiquitous and made it shine in dull clothes. In an era where emojis rule and the reality-show mundane is newsworthy (thanks to outlets like Instagram and Snapchat), this Fresh campaign paints a high-end model and fragrance as extraordinarily ordinary.

Despite flipping expectations, Moschino came out with a product that is coveted for its value as a fragrance—clean, feminine, and sweet—as much it is for its packaging. If nothing else, Moschino Fresh is a novelty buy for cool points, meant to inspire joy. But with such an intentionally comical aesthetic, Moschino dutifully inverted the buying experience as well. Why not buy a perfume that you don’t intend to use? That’s a real fresh take on consumerism.

Moschino Fresh Couture EDT, $110 (100 ml), available at Holt Renfrew.