IN THE lobby of the Milan headquarters of the fashion house which Franco Moschino created in 1983, there is an odd photograph of the man himself. Back in the 1980s, Moschino used to put in vivid, wacky appearances in his advertising campaigns, cavorting good-humouredly across glossy magazines dressed as Marilyn, the clown prince of fashion.
The image which covers one wall of the reception, however, is altogether more sober. It shows an unsmiling Moschino with a strange, attenuated shadow standing behind him. In the dim corner it is like a metaphor for death, which snuffed out his distinctive visual spark in September last year.
What happens when a business is based on an individual's genius and that individual has gone forever? If you are the people at Moschino, you follow his spirit along the peculiar track laid down by the designer for over a decade. You try to keep the joke - and the craftsmanship - alive. And although the Moschino offices, on this grey, foggy morning, appear shrouded in mourning, the gloom is actually because a troupe of Milan's finest engineers are working on the electricity cables in the street outside.
With Moschino, of course, nothing is ever quite what it seems ? The name of the new Moschino spring/summer collection is Plus Ca Change, Plus C'est La Meme Chose (the more things change, the more they stay the same). That's part of the joke, in the same way that the T-shirts in the men's fall collection after his death had asked 'And now?' Then (and now) the person who constantly has to answer that difficult question is Rossella Jardini, the head of the design team, who started working with Moschino in 1984 and who knew him for at least 10 years before that. The option of leaving the company last year did not occur to her. 'I don't think we can do anything else except Moschino,' she remarks. 'It's not a question of imitation, it's a matter of what's in our tissue, in the blood.' Everyone who met Moschino seems to have liked him. Jardini, who still becomes genuinely emotional when she talks about him, and who is wearing a jacket patterned with pages from his sketchbook, describes him as charismatic, smart and capricious. He once signed a public letter about the environment ('I declare that it will be our priority to ensure that honest ecological products will become the only materials used in our creative processes in the near future') with a trio of titles: the Revolutionary, the Prankster, the Provocateur.
That final flourish carried a certain swagger which he liked to bring to his designs. It also conveyed the idiosyncratic nature of his commitment. For Moschino had a terrible dilemma; he needed to create, yet he loathed the fickle, kissy-kissy world of fashion. So he sent it up and in doing so he was, ironically, embraced by it. 'I know I don't fit and the only reason I'm rich and famous is because the fashion system wanted me to be odd,' he once said. 'They wanted me to fit without fitting.' They also wanted him to make exceptionally tailored clothes. His sartorial jokes - skirts made from men's ties, jackets trimmed with cutlery or teddy bears - were never the sort that fall apart after one outing; they were beautifully made and expensive and the people who bought them were themselves a form of fashion label. They had names like Madonna and Sting and Yoko Ono. Perhaps that sort of success with the glitterati did not make him entirely happy. 'I love my work sometimes but I'm not sure that people understand it,' he said towards the end of his life. 'But for me, it is only a game ?' So now the game continues. But who knows the rules? 'Franco didn't leave specific directions about style,' admits Jardini. 'The concepts of freedom and self-expression are so strong in themselves, and within them there is a wide range of possibilities. We were afraid that there would have been difficulties with the public but sales are up, which leads us to believe people know that behind Franco there was a team of people working with him.' The 1996 spring/summer collection will be the toughest test of Jardini's ability to keep customers happy by juggling what is new with what is recognisably Moschino. She looks, it has to be said, exhausted by the effort: 'Every six months there is more and more pressure, the exams are never finished.' Does she sleep? 'No, not very much.' She was already effectively in charge when Moschino was ill during most of 1994 and describes the collection earlier this year as 'a homage, almost a retrospective'. The latest collection is, she believes, simpler, a progression from the darkness ? And at the very instant she says these words, the lights come on.
Jardini laughs for the first time. You can see her fondly thinking, That prankster. The pair used to argue a good deal about design and she misses the squabbles. 'After his death, I understood a lot about his way of thinking, things he had done that I hadn't agreed with before. When I had to substitute for him, I understood more than I did.' Now that the racks of clothes hugging the walls of the room are illuminated, it's possible to inspect the Jardini influence on the Moschino label. Tucked away behind a desk, constantly smoking, she had seemed saddened by all this talk of her lamented, dead friend. But once she is diverted into professional action, she moves briskly around the rails, plucking garments and comments out of the air.