This summer, the Metrograph cinema on the Lower East Side staged a revival of Susan Seidelman’s obscure debut feature film, Smithereens, which was set in the same general environs as the theater. Originally released in 1982, the movie documents the hardscrabble lifestyle of the young bohemians then making the scene, and though it’s a dark film, in certain ways, its characters seem all the more alive for the fact that their existence in downtown New York City was premised on a daily struggle just to survive. Smithereens induced mixed emotions: Exiting the theater, it was hard not to appreciate the well-scrubbed city that has taken the place of cesspool Manhattan in the past 30-odd years—and at the same time, mourn the loss of the borough’s population of feisty weirdos.
Jeremy Scott’s latest collection brought Smithereens instantly to mind, as it was a paean to the city’s good ol’ bad ol’ days. Speaking before the show, Scott acknowledged that he was waxing nostalgic about a difficult era he never had to endure; his was a rose-tinted take on early-’80s days of East Village squats, barmy club nights, and pervy peep shows. Perhaps a neon pink–tinted take is more accurate. The reason this period of depredation continues to fascinate is that it conjures a bygone vibrancy—a time when New Yorkers could get up to all kinds of freakiness, thanks to the fact that they were largely ignored. Scott got at that vibrancy through his flashy palette and jutting geometries, motifs that came fully to life in his series of sculptural, sequined show-closing looks.
This was largely a show about sex. Bondage elements like latex and collars, clothes half unzipped, garments with peepholes, grainy porno prints, tees and knits shouting HOT HOT HOT and Rated X. Scott’s spin on the theme was intriguing in its cheerfulness; his pervs were oddly heroic in their latex trenchcoats and skintight micro-minis and, for the beefcake men on the runway, neon motorcycle jackets and taut checkerboard jeans. It was all very commercial, by Scott standards, lots of peppy colors and accessible silhouettes. But where there’s a hero, there must be a villain: In Scott’s telling, that was an alien come to cover the city with a layer of slime. Replace alien with Giuliani and slime with money, and the collection’s narrative flourish didn’t seem so far-fetched. Enter Jeremy Scott, stage left—embodied in the form of a tube of toothpaste, “Cool Mint Jeremy,” there to save the day by wiping away the city’s decay. In this case, not to make it spiffy clean, but to reveal the grit.
