Jeremy Scott, long the king of American kitsch couture, has returned—not in the form of a runway resurrection but as a living, breathing testament to the joyful absurdity that launched his career. Teaming up with visual artist Katherine Bernhardt, Scott transforms the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art in Kansas City, Missouri, into a hyper-charged shrine to consumer joy, hometown sentiment, and cultural reappropriation. Their collaborative exhibition, “House Party”, running through September 14, 2025, becomes a candy-colored diary of nostalgia and neon-flecked rebellion.
This editorial dives into the metaphysical and material journey of Jeremy Scott: from Missouri misfit to Moschino messiah, and now back again—not to retreat, but to reframe what American fashion can be when it truly embraces the joyful chaos of its own culture. Beneath the stickers, spangles, and satire lies a quietly radical notion: that fashion, like fast food, is for everyone—and Jeremy Scott never forgot that.
From Southwest Missouri to Global Runways: The Pop Pathway
Jeremy Scott’s story is one of improbable success wrapped in improbable fabric. Born in Kansas City in 1975 and raised in a rural corner of Missouri, his obsession with fashion emerged in sharp contrast to his surroundings. From hand-drawing runway sketches in his school notebooks to reading Vogue in cornfields, Scott’s ambition always exceeded his geography.
After graduating from Pratt Institute in New York, he debuted in Paris during the late 1990s, a time when fashion was fixated on minimalism. He did the opposite: inflatable latex, McDonald’s-themed couture, and tongue-in-cheek branding became his currency. When he took the reins at Moschino in 2013, his ethos clicked perfectly with the label’s history of irreverent fashion satire. For the next decade, Scott flooded pop culture with designs that bordered on parody but always struck a cultural chord—often before critics could even process their significance.
The Barbie pinks. The Cheetos gowns. The questionably glamorous crash-test-dummy heels. His work wasn’t about being tasteful—it was about being tasteless in a world obsessed with taste.
Katherine Bernhardt: The Visual Twin Flame
Scott’s creative counterpart in “House Party”, Katherine Bernhardt, shares a similar DNA. Known for her zany, oversize paintings of consumer detritus—Pop Tarts, Duracell batteries, Garfield cartoons—Bernhardt filters American junk culture through the language of contemporary art. Her process is visceral and unapologetic, rejecting traditional aesthetics in favor of bold outlines, fluorescent hues, and graffiti logic.
The synergy between Scott and Bernhardt feels not only inevitable but necessary. Together, they build a language of visual maximalism that refuses apology or explanation. In “House Party”, they don’t just celebrate consumer culture—they canonize it, rendering hamburgers and happy faces as totems of shared experience.
Their aesthetic is not merely nostalgic; it is foundational. It asserts that these supposedly “lowbrow” artifacts—Lisa Frank stickers, plastic toys, snack food packaging—shaped the emotional and creative palettes of an entire generation. And now, finally, they’re given their museum due.
IHouse Party as Autobiographical Architecture
Walking into “House Party” feels like trespassing into Scott’s subconscious. Curated with an almost diaristic sense of intimacy, the exhibition blends Bernhardt’s murals with Scott’s archival garments, video installations, neon signs, inflatable sculptures, and rotating displays of vintage ephemera. Imagine Pee-wee’s Playhouse built on the bones of a Prada store. The result is both disorienting and familiar, like remembering a dream you never had but somehow recognize.
There’s a coat that looks like a bag of Cheetos next to a wall-sized mural of Yoda eating ramen. Elsewhere, a Moschino gown styled like a Hershey’s chocolate bar faces off against a blaring print of Pink Panther cereal. These juxtapositions form a language all their own—funny, irreverent, and unexpectedly moving.
One standout piece is a photographic altar dedicated to Scott’s Kansas City youth. There are photos of his high school days, early sketches, and even Polaroids from his first DIY fashion show staged in a local mall parking lot. The message is clear: this isn’t a vanity exhibit. It’s a love letter—to the city that birthed him, to the culture that shaped him, and to the idea that art can come from anywhere.
Beyond Moschino: A Life Rewritten, Not Retired
After leaving Moschino in 2023, many assumed Jeremy Scott was stepping back from fashion’s frontlines. But as he now makes clear, the designer never stopped creating—he just stopped conforming.
His recent projects point toward a multidisciplinary renaissance. In Berlin, he designed more than 500 costumes for Blinded by Delight, a cabaret-style theatrical production at the famed Friedrichstadt-Palast. He’s also collaborated with beauty brand SpoiledChild on packaging design, consulted for visual campaigns, and begun archiving his 30-year fashion career—some of which appears, delightfully haphazard, throughout House Party.
He has also returned to the tactile pleasures of personal design: decorating his Palm Springs home, restoring furniture, and “learning to be present again,” as he puts it. For an artist whose entire brand once rested on overstimulation, this shift reads not as retreat but as recalibration. Joy is still the fuel—but now it’s focused inward before spilling back out.
The Politics of Pop: Is Kitsch Still Subversive?
What gives House Party its depth is not just the aesthetics—it’s the politics embedded in them. In an age where fashion increasingly markets “authenticity” through austere minimalism and muted palettes, Scott and Bernhardt double down on exuberant falseness. In doing so, they force us to question why joy, abundance, and plasticized color are so often dismissed as unserious or gauche.
There’s a quiet class critique at work here. Fast food, cartoons, and cheap toys are the materials of working-class American childhood. To elevate these into couture and museum art is to reject the hierarchy that separates “good taste” from mass taste. When Scott puts Ronald McDonald on a runway, or when Bernhardt paints Darth Vader beside a Diet Coke can, they’re not mocking—they’re mythologizing.
And yet, it’s not satire for its own sake. These are expressions of affection as much as criticism. Scott has always worked within the pop lexicon not to escape it, but to honor it. The difference between irony and sincerity, in his hands, collapses.
Midwestern Modernism: Kansas City as Muse
Kansas City, often overlooked in the American cultural imagination, becomes the unlikely epicenter of this dialogue. The city’s quiet sprawl, Midwestern affordability, and unpretentious pace gave both Scott and Bernhardt the space to dream big in small places. That legacy is embedded in every wall of House Party. This isn’t a tale of escape from the flyover states—it’s a return with arms open wide.
The Kemper Museum itself, with its commitment to contemporary and boundary-pushing art, proves the ideal host. Free to the public, the show underlines Scott’s belief that fashion and art should be democratized. “You shouldn’t need a ticket to Paris Fashion Week to experience beauty,” Scott has said. “It should come to you.”
Here, in his hometown, that philosophy is realized with Technicolor tenderness.
Flow
Jeremy Scott has always trafficked in the aesthetics of joy. But House Party elevates that ethos to something spiritual. This isn’t just a retrospective of pop couture or a flashy artist collab. It’s a living installation of memory, community, and celebration. It’s what happens when two artists with nothing to prove and everything to say join forces not to impress but to express.
In an age of algorithmic sameness and sanitized branding, Jeremy Scott and Katherine Bernhardt remind us that art and fashion can still be messy, maximal, and deeply personal. Their work speaks to the eternal power of the pop object: the Happy Meal toy, the bubblegum wrapper, the punk cartoon scrawl—these are the relics that shape us, and in the right hands, they’re sacred.
In Kansas City, the sky is still wide, and Jeremy Scott is still dreaming—this time not of escaping, but of illuminating the place he calls home.