Marc Jacobs (Q2057)
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American fashion house
- Marc Jacobs International
| Language | Label | Description | Also known as |
|---|---|---|---|
| English | Marc Jacobs |
American fashion house |
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Statements
1997
creative director
designer
intern
freelancer
retail worker
collaborator
designer (Marc by Marc Jacobs)
2008
face
Editor’s note: This year was a big one for Marc Jacobs, who marked his 40th anniversary in fashion and became the first guest editor of AmericanVogue.We’re closing out 2024 with an archival look back at the designer’s career. This fall 1999 collection, presented in SoHo on February 15, 1999, has been digitized as part of Vogue Runway’s ongoing efforts to document the history of fashion shows.A muted palette of browns, grays, and lavenders suited the demure mood at Marc Jacobs for fall 1999. One of the highlights of the collection was the chunky knits, which included hoodie-style cardigans, pullovers, and floor-sweeping striped scarves. Tailoring subtly borrowed elements from military and westernwear (there were cow-print skirts), and the dressier numbers looked somehow modest. Apronlike dresses, empire-waist frocks, and Hester Prynne–ish capelets had Melanie Rickey ofThe Independentdubbing the vibe “prairie chic meets rustic street.”
29 December 2024
Editor’s note: This year was a big one for Marc Jacobs, who marked his 40th anniversary in fashion and became the first guest editor of AmericanVogue.We’re closing out 2024 with an archival look back at the designer’s career. This fall 1997 collection, presented in SoHo on April 8, 1997, has been digitized as part of Vogue Runway’s ongoing efforts to document the history of fashion shows.At first glance, Marc Jacobs’s fall 1997 collection looked restrained, even Calvinistic (as in Calvin Klein), but if these clothes were minimal in design, they were made of exclusive materials. Waffle knits came in cashmere, and streetwise hoodies became plush sweaters for SoHo yoga moms. In a collections report, Vogue wrote: “Shock of the new: Marc Jacobs chopped his hair. It’s a new look to go with his clean, no-frills collection of baggy gray flannel pants, orange cashmere sweatshirts, and spiky five-inch heels. (Trendsetter alert: This is the new downtown uniform.)” Think of those stilettos as exclamation marks; the clothes looked quiet, but they had oomph as well.
27 December 2024
Editor’s note: This year was a big one for Marc Jacobs, who marked his 40th anniversary in fashion and became the first guest editor of AmericanVogue.We’re closing out 2024 with an archival look back at the designer’s career. This fall 1995 collection, presented at the Plaza Hotel on April 4, 1995, has been digitized as part of Vogue Runway’s ongoing efforts to document the history of fashion shows.Marc Jacobs’s fall 1995 collection, presented in the Baroque Room of the Plaza Hotel, read like a time lapse of early-’60s fashion. There were boxy suits and pillbox hats, headscarves and cocktail dresses, a white mink in aButterfield 8vein, and hints of space-age design in the cutout looks that closed the show. “To me the most modern period in fashion was the ’60s,” Jacobs toldVogue. “If I saw those clothes walking down the street today, I wouldn’t say they looked retro. I would say they looked modern, experimental, and classic.”WhenVogueincluded a sparkling ensemble from this collection in “Seasoned Simplicity,” in which Kirsty Hume and Donovan Leitch are cast as mods and pose with a Queen Elizabeth II impersonator, the caption read: “Marc Jacobs turns fashion upside down.”
26 December 2024
Editor’s note: This year was a big one for Marc Jacobs, who marked his 40th anniversary in fashion and became the first guest editor of AmericanVogue.We’re closing out 2024 with an archival look back at the designer’s career. This fall 1994 collection, presented in a loft in SoHo in April 1994, has been digitized as part of Vogue Runway’s ongoing efforts to document the history of fashion shows.This was a comeback show for Marc Jacobs. Not long after presenting his infamousgrunge collectionfor Perry Ellis in 1992, the brand decided to discontinue womenswear, and the designer allowed himself a break. During that period,he toldElsa Klensch, “I had time to think about what it is that I really love.” Hearts, which appeared throughout the collection, seemed to be one object of his affections, as were diamond brooches in the shape of letters and numbers. The latter were cheekily used to write out a telephone number on the le smoking Amber Valletta wore. Jacobs indulged in the mad mix, pairing a leopard skirt with an electric blue sweater and a taxi yellow jacket. Kate Moss’s LBD was accessorized with furry earmuffs. There was lots of latex, but also customized Fair Isles, plus diamanté spaghetti straps on a valentine red knit dress, laminated A-line minis, and a skating dress hot enough to melt ice. Suffice it to say, Jacobs was having a ball playing with notions of ladies and vamps and good and bad taste. InVoguehe said his process was “all about insane combinations. Anything goes in fashion today.”The designer definitely returned with his sense of fun intact, and at a time whenVoguewas crowing about “putting the fun back in fashion.” The magazine ran a four-page editorial, “Colorful Character,” on the collection, and Bloomingdale’s Kal Ruttensteindeclaredit “a whole new way of dressing, perfect for the ’90s, and a wonderful way for Marc to come back.”
25 December 2024
Editor’s Note: Marc Jacobs is American Vogue’s first guest editor. To mark the occasion, this early collection has been digitized as part of Vogue Runway’s ongoing efforts to document historical fashion shows.Marc Jacobs’sspring 1998co-ed took a vacation for spring 1999. The “demi-pants,” theEvening Standardhad called out a year earlier were back, only this time in taffeta with deep pockets and bows at the side of the legs;Vogueincluded them in a roundup of cargo-style pants. Actual drawstrings were used to gather dresses at the front, and the soft puckering the technique created was echoed in the playful and gentle scallops edging necklines and seams. Half circles became full when a polka dot jacquard and disc-shaped cutouts were introduced.“At times the collection was too chaste and demure for a sophisticated woman,” notedThe Washington Post’s Robin Givhan at the time, “but to utter such a remark would seem ungrateful.”Vogue’s Kate Betts, for her part, wrote that Jacobs’s “prim scalloped coats and smocked dresses were so unlike his usual ‘edge’-conscious outfits, you had to assume he was pressing feminine sweetness and simplicity into the service of irony.” That said, there were a few sartorial wink-winks here. The sheer, light materials layered over sturdier opaque ones in the finale dresses called to mind the sardonic title of a 1932 book,Virgins in Cellophane. The collection had a look-but-don’t-touch quality that celebrated a precious prettiness.
11 November 2024
Editor’s Note: Marc Jacobs is American Vogue’s first guest editor. To mark the occasion, this early collection has been digitized as part of Vogue Runway’s ongoing efforts to document historical fashion shows.A look atMarc Jacobs’s spring 1998 show offers a master class in quiet luxury more than 25 years before it became a trend, and an AP-level lesson in American style. The collection skews young. White shirts and pleated skirts call to mind the clean orderliness of school uniforms, while the sleeveless sheaths capture the propriety of the ladylike, or debutante, aesthetic. Though it’s more difficult to put one’s finger on the element of cool, it’s definitely there, and is related both to ease and touch.“At show after show last week… outrageously luxe basics [took] to the catwalk,” wrote London’sEvening Standardat the time. “The apotheosis of this low maintenance, high luxe mood were Marc Jacobs’s ‘cashmere tulle’ T-shirts, as expensive as a round-the-world plane ticket, as simple as American pie. And impossible to copy.” The richness of the piece is difficult to discern with the eyes, but easily felt when the fabric is next to the skin. This feels in line with America’s Puritan legacy—with taste filling in for faith.Demonstrating his own belief in Jacobs’s talent, earlier in the year LVMH’s Bernard Arnault had tapped the New Yorker to develop a ready-to-wear line for Louis Vuitton. (See Jacobs’s Parisdebuthere.)
11 November 2024
“I believe in living with authenticity—free from validation and permission of absurd conservatism and societal norms.” Marc Jacobs said he was after “joy, period” at his show tonight. It lasted all of six minutes—a short, sharp shock—but it made a big, big impression. I saw Marilyn Monroe in her iconic subway grate dress fromThe Seven Year Itch, Minnie Mouse in her red and white polka dots, and princess gowns out of a Disney classic. There were other references for other eyes, but there’s no debate that this was a collection full of main character energy.The future can feel like it’s closing in, with the far right gaining ground across Europe and the U.S., threatening reproductive freedoms, gay marriage, and other rights Jacobs holds dear. Reckoning with these issues can be heavy work; some may question if the runway is even the right medium. But it’s Jacobs’s chosen medium, and he’s developed a healthy knack for underscoring sticky current issues of late. What would the world look like if he was in charge? It’s a safe place for all kinds, but especially the oddballs who wear too-big shoes and clothes with cartoonish proportions, who prefer hyperbole to the understatement of quiet luxury.Jacobs, just for the record, is completely capable of quiet luxury; his fall 2010 collection, a personal favorite, stands as the sine qua non of that style. But that’s not what this moment calls for, a fact he seemed to underscore with a soundtrack featuring Philip Glass’sEinstein on the Beach, an opera about the anxieties of the information age, and, a little more unseriously, with his own nail art, which he keeps assiduous track of on his Instagram. Of his latest “out-of-control French manicure with pastel colors,” he told Hunter Abrams inVogue, “there’s this joy I get from dressing up, accessorizing, and expressing myself; [nails are a] component in that kind of joyous puzzle.”On the runway: more puzzle pieces. It looked like a sequel to his spring 2024 blockbuster, only here the doll clothes motif had a Hollywood gloss: Marilyn and Minnie and all the rest. Either that or he was looking back at his own oeuvre and giving it an exaggerated spin (remember, he celebrated his brand’s 40th anniversary in February, an important milestone).
A large-buttoned skirt suit familiar from his more understated era had a super-shrunken shape, while the hourglass of a lace dress was exaggerated, befitting an animated bombshell, and sweater sets and a-line skirts had the Plain Jane knocked right out of them in acid colors. There was even an itsy-bitsy, teenie-weenie yellow polka dot bikini, only it wasn’t itsy-bitsy or teenie-weenie, but several sizes too big, like a doll in real girls’ clothes.The proportions played funny tricks on you as the models walked the New York Public Library’s impossibly long, narrow hallway, and a similar effect can be seen in these pictures: The miniskirts’ ultra-short lengths, and the arcing hemlines of knee-length skirts, especially when they were higher in front than in the back, made other models look like giants—protagonists if for no other reason that you couldn’t peel your eyes off of them. With his uncanny shapes, hyper colors, and crazy shoes, Jacobs tilted the world on its axis for the briefest of moments. “The future remains unwritten,” he wrote in his notes. Couldn’t we stop time in Marc Jacobs’s fairy tale and stay a while?
1 July 2024
Marc Jacobs has been posting about his brand’s 40th anniversary on Instagram—he was the Design Student of the Year at Parsons back in 1984—so the question, as his show approached tonight, was would he revisit his own previous collections. There’s been plenty of archival revivals across fashion these last few years, no special anniversaries necessary; among designers of a certain age, quoting yourself has become all too common. Jacobs may be a student of fashion, one who has often looked to the past when designing, but he’s never seemed especially preoccupied by his own history. He’s much too irreverent, and that kind of self-seriousness just isn’t on brand.Still, 40 years! That’s a long time. There’s just a handful of designers on the New York Fashion Week calendar—the official start is still a week away—who can boast that kind of longevity. Tom Ford, his fellow ’90s superstar and just two years his senior, retired from the industry last year. But if Jacobs is one of our elders now, he retains the fashion-mad quality of his youth.The Park Avenue Armory was dark as we walked in; when the lights came blazing up very close to 6 pm-sharp, a giant folding table and chair stood at attention at the back of the runway. They were the work of the late artist Robert Therrien, whom Jacobs quoted in his show notes. “I try to stay with themes or objects or sources I can trace back to my personal history. The further back I can trace something as being meaningful to me in some way or another… the more I am attracted to it.”The models emerged from backstage and walked under the table, a skewed perspective made all the more extreme by the exaggerated proportions of their clothes, the stiff foam-like fabrics Jacobs chose, and the way some of the garments were sewn together with side seams on the outside, or exposed their alterations rather than hiding them. Their everydayness had been all but squeezed out of them, a disorientation that felt timely and germane. On chunky sweaters, shoulders were pushed forward, creating odd 2D effects, and flat trompe l’oeil embellishments were added, creating the impression of a necklace or brooch.They were living paper dolls of a mid-century vintage, in ladylike suits, shifts, cocktail dresses, and evening columns glinting with oversize paillettes—though track suits with shrunken jackets and pants rising to the sternum, and pastel velour sets à la Juicy Couture via Balenciaga did disrupt the swans-on-psychedelics narrative.
So did the, ahem, “ludicrously capacious” version of his Venetia bag, a best-seller from the aughts that had a memorable cameo inThe Devil Wears Prada.Walk the streets of New York City, or take the subway, and Marc Jacobs’s Tote Bags, the words spelled out across the side in his familiar sans serif all-caps font, are everywhere you look, a mini phenomenon with a new generation. Jacobs put some of his own thoughts to paper. “Through the unavoidable lens of time, my glass remains full of wonder and reflection,” he wrote. Thirty-one years after his infamous grunge collection for Perry Ellis, and 40 since his graduation, he’s still New York’s most reliable source of fashion highs.
2 February 2024
This was a Marc Jacobs show that was over before it began. The models did two finale laps and then Jacobs was out taking his bow. It was all over in about three minutes. A comment on the relentless pace of fashion? The grind of modern life? A swipe at our tendency to consume “content” that takes days, weeks, and months to create in mere seconds and then swipe up to move on to the next? Or was he taking the piss?With Jacobs you don’t always know, but he left some clues. The clothes themselves looked indebted to the 1980s, the last analog decade before the internet went wide, and the one when Jacobs came of age in New York City, but the show notes were written by the newly launched Open AI Chat GPT in a noticeably bland, monotonous style. Sample line: “The Marc Jacobs fashion show mesmerized its audience with an awe-inspiring fusion of masculine tailoring and feminine elegance.”In truth, the clothes moved by too fast to inspire awe, but you have to hand it to Jacobs for his audacity. Few other designers have the brio to stage a fashion show and then not give the audience time to actually see the fashion. The surprise of the experience, a rewriting of the show rules, made you wonder if Jacobs is onto something. People could move on quickly to dinner dates, to their families, to flights out of town. There’s the internet for examining each look in detail, after all.As brief as they were, the back and forth of the two finale walks colored in the broad strokes of the show notes. The models’ cyberpunk bowl cuts conjured Pris, Daryl Hannah's pleasure model replicant fromBlade Runner, which seemed like another clue about what Jacobs was up to. They wore the masculine tailoring the Chat GPT described with overscale shoulders and high-waisted deeply pleated pants, as well as femme minidresses that showed off lots of leg–black stockings sliced at the calves over white ankle socks, and pointy-toed flats.Fashion-wise, it was a sharp about-face from Jacobs’s two previous June-time shows at the New York Public Library and their outsized layers, as well as a scaling back of the 1980s references of his recent ode to Vivienne Westwood. The black-and-white palette and the body-conscious attitude of the little nipped waist dresses made it seem more essential, more New York than that tribute show.
It’s not the first time Jacobs has referenced the ’80s (see: fall 2018 and fall 2009, for starters), and he’s also made a habit of breaking runway conventions (his spring 2008 show, the one that was infamously two hours late, unspooled backwards), but it may be the most authentic to the look and feel of the downtown streets he knew. Clubby, where the others were couture-ish or more curated.Is Jacobs feeling nostalgic for his own past? At 60 that sort of comes with the territory, but he’s not one to indulge in sentimentality. He’s always preferred to shock, more than aim to please, and that appears to be what he was up to here with this short, sharp show (it was just 29 looks). InBlade Runner, it’s a battle to the end between the replicants and the humans, just as it may be between AI and its human creators. Though it’s sure to be a tough fight, Jacobs has the advantage he’s always had: that singular talent for provoking discussion and for making us feel.
26 June 2023
We were back in the Park Avenue Armory with Marc Jacobs for the first time in three years, and what a difference between tonight’s collection and his Karole Armitage-choreographed show of February 2020. Where that one was kinetic, a performance that took up much of Armory’s cavernous space featuring models and professional dancers in smart, colorful separates with the efficiency of American sportswear, this one was almost a requiem.The giant room was pitch dark and almost empty, save for a single row of chairs and spotlights illuminating the space in front of them. A solo violinist, Jennifer Koh, played a portion of Philip Glass’s “Einstein on the Beach.” Jacobs gave the collection a name—Heroes—and included a Vivienne Westwood quote in his show notes more earnest than irreverent: “Fashion is life-enhancing, and I think it’s a lovely, generous thing to do for other people.”Westwood died in December at 81, and when she passed Jacobs posted a black-and-white photo of the legendary designer as a young woman. In it, she wears her bleached blond hair in spikes and a button-down stenciled with the words: “Be reasonable, demand the impossible.” At the time, Jacobs wrote that he was heartbroken, saying, “I continue to learn from your words, and all of your extraordinary creations.”Jacobs has many heroes: Yves Saint Laurent, Rei Kawakubo, Miuccia Prada. This was an homage to the “godmother of punk,” from the top of the models’ peroxide wigs to the bottom of their platform shoes. Naomi Campbell, you’ll remember, famously fell in her platforms at Westwood’s fall 1993 show. But Jacobs has “learned” much more than that from the late designer.The “tit tops” of Westwood’s Pirate collection circa 1981, in which she twisted t-shirt fabric into “nipples,” were reinterpreted as casual knit leotards and nipped and tucked sheath dresses. Here, the romantic silhouettes that Westwood lifted from old master paintings, with their bustles and bustiers, got a dressing down in military surplus, heavy on the cargo pockets. Jacobs recreated her signature volumes by turning a shirt into a skirt and tying its sleeves in the back, or by dressing models in upside-down jackets, hems dramatically framing their faces. A few of the models walked past with their arms crossed, pantomiming Westwood’s defiant audacity. Turn those jackets rightside-up, by the way, and you’re looking at some ace outerwear.
Long-line coats with the geometric patchworks of quilts may not be of direct lineage, but their DIY-ness chimes with Westwood’s punk ethos. They’re special pieces, not precious because of the materials Jacobs used—they actually looked quite humble—but because of their remarkable handwork.Tonight’s show scooped New York Fashion Week’s official start by a week and a day. In the pre-pandemic era, Jacobs was New York’s main event. He’s been off the calendar ever since, showing collections that have only become more expressive—the shapes stranger, the layers piling up. This time around there was all that plus tone-on-tone crystals, crushed velvet in shades of ruby and chartreuse, and giant polka dots. Tinged with sadness, yes, but also life-enhancing.
3 February 2023
“We have art not to die of the truth.” Marc Jacobs quoted Nietzsche in his show notes. Confronted, as we are, with a rogue Supreme Court determined to strip women of their reproductive rights, with Clarence Thomas threatening to attack gay marriage next and even to make contraception illegal, fury may give way to despair. But that’s not where Jacobs is at.Last month, when I spoke to him about his coming out story for a series on this website, he told me: “For many, many years—decades now—I’ve lived my life very openly. I learned somewhere along the way… that I’m only as sick as my secrets and that one thing I won’t live with is shame.” You could say that this collection was a visual expression of that sentiment, an insistence on experimentation, with a drive to move forward, shown on a cast of all genders. “Creativity is essential to living,” his statement read.A year ago, double-vaxxed and optimistic, most of us were looking ahead to a brighter 2022. Last June, Jacobs channeled that energy into a dynamic collection, raising the fashion stakes here in New York in the process. That brighter future hasn’t really materialized, as we’re all too aware. Covid keeps coming back in successive waves, and here in America the will of the majority has been hijacked by the minority.Nevertheless, Jacobs persists. Supersizing jeans and jean jackets, or treating denim to surface treatments that made the all-American classic look more like French couture. Adding so much stuffing to ribbed knit sweaters they could double as pillows. Toying with Gilded Age bustles—and by that I mean evoking them by wrapping jackets around the waist. And cutting ball gowns of exuberant volume in unexpected, even strange fabrics. His materials list included, but wasn’t limited to, foil, glass, paper, plaster, plastic, rubber, and vinyl.Interspersed with that excess, however, there was spareness. Jacobs lowered the waistlines of column skirts and cropped flares to bumster levels and accessorized them with barely-there bejeweled bikinis or the sparest of bustier tops. A pair of suited looks in black weren’t quite minimal, but they came close, a reminder of his talents as a tailor. As for the three matching looks at the beginning of the show in gray, hospital green, and lavender—were they Jacobs’s version of scrubs? Given the recent moves by the Supreme Court, it was hard to think otherwise.
Adding to the dystopian vibe: the models’ hairdos, which were “shaved” on the sides with bumper bangs in a style that called to mind Sean Young’sBlade Runnerreplicant.And yet. All this was paraded out in the Public Library with opera gloves and sky-high white or black mary jane platforms. Dressed up in spite of the circumstances. Or maybe because of them? Definitely because of them. Marc Jacobs is a fighter, whose medium happens to be fashion. He’s gone 12 rounds and he’s still swinging. Knock-out stuff.
27 June 2022
In June 2021, Marc Jacobs returned to the New York runway by building up shapes with puffers and twills and layered knitwear and then, magically and methodically, stripping them away. His elongated, bulbous silhouettes turned rail-thin models into monoliths, statues of a hulking beauty that was all lashes and platforms. For his follow-up collection, Jacobs peeled back even more, cutting up and recomposing the ideas from that June collection.With just 10 looks modeled by a veritable A-list, from Bella Hadid to Anok Yai, the collection hung on the idea of destruction. Cargo pants were cut up and remade into skirts. Jacobs’s new monogram was shredded into fringe that spiderwebbed around torsos and trailed along the floor. Plastic paillettes, worn by Meryl Streep on the red carpet, were strung into belly chains and adornments. This interstitial collection was not intended to introduce new ideas but rather to further the message lurking in Jacobs’s mind of late: one of looming, semi-threatening models with a postapocalyptic edge.These look book images were released, unannounced, withi-Dmagazine, where Jacobs’s stylist, Alastair McKimm, is editor in chief. The pictures were photographed by McKimm’s wife, Amy Troost. Jacobs has always kept a small, close-knit community, a “Champagne for my real friends, real pain for my sham friends” sort of spirit. When these photos hit Instagram at the start of London Fashion Week, the fashion world’s ears pricked up. What does Marc Jacobs have to say? He promises a runway return soon. We’ll be all ears and eyes.
19 February 2022
Tonight’s Marc Jacobs show was a comeback of multiple kinds. Jacobs hasn’t shown a collection since his spellbinding fall 2020 presentation circa February of last year, choreographed by Karole Armitage and starring a corps of professional dancers backing up the likes of Gigi and Bella Hadid. Most of us in the audience hadn’t been to a proper show in almost as long. COVID ground the runway show system here in New York to a halt, though we’ve consumed countless hours watching digital shows on little screens.Stepping inside Jacobs’s New York Public Library venue, the collective sense of joy was apparent. Smiles and hugs and even kisses were exchanged. To RSVP we had to provide proof of vaccination.In the 16 months since the pandemic hit, that fall 2020 Jacobs runway took on special resonance. To stumble upon an iPhone movie from the show during lockdown was to gasp in disbelief—the dancers vamped and vogued in between the little cafe tables, close enough to feel the rush of their breath and body heat. Fashion, in the meantime, got really, really comfortable, before it coalesced around retro notions of glamour for a redux Roaring Twenties. Bigger picture, as major world events tend to do, the pandemic helped define a new generation. If the look of Gen Z was blurry pre-COVID, it now feels codified : gender-irreverent, body positive, vintage-loving, thrown-together. To this Gen X-er, it looks free.Two generations ago, Jacobs co-opted the look of grunge on the Perry Ellis runway, losing himself his job and cementing his reputation as New York’s downtown arbiter of cool in the process. Heaven, Jacobs’s recently launched lower-priced collection of cheeky sweaters, statement tees, and printed jeans, is modeled on the thrown-together finesse of Gen Z. So what would this new ‘new beginning’ bring? If we were playing by the old rules, it might’ve been a maximal counterargument to fall 2020’s minimalism; in the Before Times Jacobs was fond of a fashion 180. It’s also tempting to look for clues in his very active personal Instagram account, where lately he’s been posting a series of Courrèges looks by the Paris newcomer Nicolas di Felice. Neo-Space Age, then, maybe?What we got was Marc Jacobs couture, a bold statement about the dynamism and allure of dramatic mid-century and, yes, Space Age-y proportions, filtered through an American sportswear vernacular and put together with an eye to the assemblage style and rule-breaking of Gen Z.
Jacobs has clearly been paying attention to the ins and outs of fashion: There were both ribbed knit bodysuits and holographic paillette dresses here, which alternately conjured lockdown homewear and reemergence proposals seen elsewhere. But this collection was less about where we’ve been or the current fashion conversation than it was a raising of the fashion bar. It read as an endorsement of adventurous, even extravagant silhouettes: puffer hoods and snoods, cocoon coats, skirts over pants, and faux fur scarves that trailed behind the models like trains. On one side, there were chunky sweaters and almost iridescent ski pants; and on the other, bodysuits cut out at the sides and back worn with flat front midi skirts in Op Art intarsias.
28 June 2021
A recent profile of Marc Jacobs named the designer’s ability to predict a cultural moment one of his signal characteristics. To my mind, Jacobs’s gift is more complicated than that. It’s his talent for sussing out a previous cultural moment and finding its resonances with today that makes his shows so compelling. Seeing the past through his eyes we learn something—about the state of the industry, the state of the world, possibly his own state of mind.Tonight’s show began with a bang. Dancer and choreographer Karole Armitage found the spotlight in the darkness of the Park Avenue Armory and reminded us all why she earned the nickname the “punk ballerina” in the 1980s. Her performance was electric but brief; it was no more than a few seconds before she dashed past the audience and back into the darkness, but the dancers that followed her formed an expressive backdrop, moving in unison or emoting solo in Jacobs-designed bra and skirt sets, or slip dresses, or basic T-shirts and black pants.Mostly absent of prints and, at least where the daywear was concerned, free of any extras or adornments, the collection was as spare as the dance was audacious. Jacobs threw it back to the 1960s—Jackie Kennedy, Rosemary Woodhouse, the mods, and all that—but filtered those references through the minimalism and slink of his own label’s beginnings in the 1990s.This wasur-Marc Jacobs, familiar to those of us who saw his shows in that pre-internet era: a three-button A-line coat; a little crewneck and straight-leg trousers; matching pastel jackets and minidresses and tights; a sequin shift dress. Miley Cyrus made a cameo wearing a black bra and pants. The evening dresses were more couture-ish—the designer was just in Paris shooting Givenchy’s spring campaign with Charlotte Rampling, and the experience looked like it rubbed off on him—but they too were essential Marc Jacobs. Ornamented, yes, but still American in their aerodynamics.This season’s lesson? Nostalgizing is good for us. New York Fashion Week ended on a universal high.
12 February 2020
The models in Marc Jacobs’s show emerged en masse from the far side of the Park Avenue Armory tonight, spilling out of a small door and spreading to fill the cavernous space. A chorus line of brilliant color, sparkle, flower prints, and Stephen Jones chapeaux, they got closer and closer and eventually breezed right past the audience. For a brief moment some thought it was over before it began. Jacobs is just perverse enough to do it, but he had clearly taken too much pleasure in the making of this collection not to let it last.His show came near the end of a Fashion Week cut from seven days to five by the new CFDA chairman, Tom Ford. Renaissance is too strong a word for the goings-on here in New York, but the runways have felt revitalized—by the experiential approach designers are taking to their staging and by engaging clothes. This Jacobs collection was the capstone to that. And fun, too!Jacobs has been a big proponent of fun lately. His Instagram feed is a lively mix of dog pics, throwbacks, selfies, and #OOTDs, each one more inspired and fabulous than the last. He was just named toVanity Fair’s 2019 Best-Dressed List, and no wonder. Few people take as much delight in dressing up as he does, and what a wardrobe: Demna Gvasalia’s Balenciaga, Prada, Rick Owens, the Savile Row tailor Huntsman—Jacobs gives props to them all and then some.His new collection was sort of like Instagram’s #OOTD tag (275 million posts and counting) come to life. Jacobs has eclectic tastes, and he let them roam far and wide here. There were odes to Yves Saint Laurent and Karl Lagerfeld, and to Shelley Duvall, Anita Pallenberg, and Ann Reinking inAll That Jazz. Some of the models slinked across the Armory like a Bob Fosse dancer (props to choreographer Stephen Galloway). That attitude and sense of individuality was central to the collection’s magic. The last look, a long jersey dress with a lace back, was lifted from a famous Jeanloup Sieff photo of Marina Schiano, who died just this week.In his program notes, Jacobs railed against design by “computer or the cloud or the transient archives of the internet.” Time marches on and the digital revolution will get all of us in the end, but that doesn’t mean we have to go down quietly. You know Jacobs won’t.
11 September 2019
Marc Jacobs and his stylist Katie Grand made headlines last week when they helped Tomo Koizumi, a Japanese designer Grand discovered on Instagram, put on a show in the basement of Jacobs’s Madison Avenue pop-up store. Fashion loves beginnings, and this was a big one, stamped with not just the imprimatur of Jacobs and Grand, but also of hair and makeup stars Pat McGrath and Guido Palau, and the actress Gwendoline Christie, who took a catwalk turn. Tastemakers assembled, and Koizumi’s giant rainbow polyester organza poufs were the talk of the slow-to-heat-up New York collections.Fairy godparent duties over, it was Jacobs’s turn in the spotlight tonight. Though it’s been decades since his own beginning, he’s still essential viewing. The collection had prodigious volumes in common with Koizumi’s “ruffle armor.” The American designer has been exploring hyper-proportions for a couple of seasons now, via the 1980s silhouettes of Claude Montana and Yves Saint Laurent. Grand shapes were back again for Fall, but this time Jacobs was looking in the mirror, rather than at the couturiers of old. His repertoire is full of cloth coats and capes, of shredded tulle party dresses, of A-line skirts and crewnecks, of Prince of Wales pantsuits. Only here, in many cases, they were taken to extremes, the coats and capes pumped up with air, the dresses made more expressive with layers of crinolines. Stephen Jones–designed hats on nearly every model added inches to their stature.The feeling the show conjured was one of tenderness. It was partly the intimate setup—just 180 seats—and partly the models’ slow procession through the spotlit dark, but mostly it came down to that sense of the unfamiliar familiar, like déja vu, but different. When Christy Turlington, who walked in Jacobs’s seminal 1992 grunge show for Perry Ellis, glided out in an off-the-shoulder jet black frock embroidered all over with glossy feathers, murmurs of delight echoed down the rows. To see time pass is bittersweet. In hosting Koizumi, Jacobs made tacit acknowledgment of that. Last week, one of the many, many Instagrams that streamed through our feeds about Koizumi was an Oscars pitch. Call us old school. The better choice for that all-important red carpet would be one of Jacobs’s befeathered party dresses.
13 February 2019
There are moments that can change your life and moments that can change history.Marc Jacobs’s Spring 1993 collection for Perry Ellismanaged to be both. It was 1992, a time when fashion was still catering squarely to the practicality of working women and the upper echelons of society, when Jacobs turned his eye to the grunge scene bubbling in the Pacific Northwest, sending out Carla Bruni in Dr. Martens boots, Tyra Banks in Birkenstocks, Shalom Harlow in Converse All Stars, and Kate Moss and Kristen McMenamy in tees with Robert Crumb graphics. His cast of supers were decidedly dressed-down on the runway, looking more like their off-duty selves than the glamazons the fashion press was used to, spinning and strutting in flannel shirts, vintage-y pear-print wrap dresses, and raglan tees in neon colors elongated into slinky maxi dresses. The look, as Jacobs said at the time, was inspired by the authenticity of the music world and the way his model friends were already dressing. It was an early bellwether of fashion and music coming together, of youth culture impacting high fashion, and of fashion becoming a talking point for pop culture. Today he tellsVogue, “The Grunge collection epitomized the first time in my professional career I was unwavering in my determination to see my vision come to life on the runway, without creative compromise.”The story of what happened next is essentially fashion legend. Critics across the industry panned the collection: Cathy Horyn wrote “Grunge is anathema to fashion, and for a major Seventh Avenue fashion house to put out that kind of statement at that kind of price point is ridiculous.” (She retracted her statement decades later.) Suzy Menkes, for her part, declared “Grunge is ghastly.” Not long after, Jacobs was surreptitiously fired from Perry Ellis. It was the dismissal heard around the fashion world, one that birthed Jacobs’s eponymous collection, which has been, since its inception, a prism that refracts the obsessions and aesthetics of American subcultures through a fashionable, singularlyMarc Jacobslens.This November, Marc Jacobs—with the approval of the Perry Ellis company—is bringing grunge back, recutting 26 looks seam-for-seam from his Spring 1993 collection. Modeled here by Gigi Hadid, Binx Walton, Slick Woods, Dree Hemingway, and more, the collection looks surprisingly modern.
Coco Gordon Moore, whose mother, Kim Gordon, was the star of Marc Jacobs’s first-ever ad campaign, wears Kate Moss’s finale look: an ivory blazer and Crumb tee. Lily McMenamy, whose mother appeared hand-in-hand with Moss in the show’s finale, wears her mom’s lilac ensemble. All to say, there’s a lot of fashion to love here—and it’s almost certain to sell. In the 12 hoursVoguehas had the lookbook, millennial staffers have already begun planning out which items to buy.
16 November 2018
Breaking with recent tradition, the Marc Jacobs show started late, as in nearly an hour and a half late. Something about a truck of clothes stuck in traffic . . . . The experience took us olds in the crowd back to September 2007, when Jacobs’s 9:00 p.m. show didn’t go off until 11. That season, Suzy Menkes took Jacobs to task in theInternational Herald Tribune; this season, the Brits beat hasty retreats to waiting Ubers a good 45 minutes before the first model hit the runway, to catch flights back to London. Eleven years on, fashion feels like a different business—less fun and more serious.The takeaway from New York’s Spring 2019 shows is a tale of the haves and the have-nots. On one side are the big guys, with budgets to rival their European counterparts but with not much authentic or essential to say. On the other are the scrappy kids, who are idea rich but mostly resource poor. In between, mid-career designers are getting squeezed: downsizing, opting out of shows, or dropping off the calendar entirely. It doesn’t feel sustainable.Jacobs is one of the big guys, but from time to time—well, it’s been a long time, actually—he demonstrates that scrappy kid quality. The designer, who is 55 this year, was a fashion-mad teenager, and the collection he showed tonight played out like one of his fever dreams. There were callbacks to ’80s-era Yves Saint Laurent, to Karl Lagerfeld’s earliest days at Chanel (everyone says it’s the job he’s always wanted), and to his own deep archive, only everything was taken to extremes: the froth, the feathers, the giant ruffly Pierrot collars. Like cotton candy, which its pastel colors evoked, the collection was ridiculous and sublime at the same time, and its couture extravagance absolutely won you over.For the past few seasons, the fashion press, this journalist included, have worried over Jacobs’s commercial prospects. This fanciful offering won’t alleviate that. What it does reinforce is how necessary and vital Jacobs is to the local landscape. He is New York’s keeper of the fashion flame.
12 September 2018
The Park Avenue Armory was pitch-dark save for a narrow spotlit runway down its center. His label’s fortunes are down and the fashion winds are reshaping the New York hierarchy of cool, but Marc Jacobs still knows how to cast a spell. With the news earlier this month about Baja East’s John Targon being brought in to design his company’s contemporary line, tonight was Jacobs’s moment to deliver a fashion message that couldn’t be ignored. Underneath those spotlights we’d say he succeeded.This was a collection of extremes, inspired by 1980s haute couture—names like Montana, Mugler, Ungaro, and Saint Laurent. All the hallmarks of the era were here: the bold shoulders, the big bow belts, the baggy pleated trousers, neck flourishes—only Jacobs didn’t modernize those anachronisms; he exaggerated them by sizing them way, way up. As in shoulders so wide, you might not make it through the door.Fashion is in the midst of an ’80s renaissance. The bluster of the period’s silhouettes is aligned to the times we’re living in, with the tax cut for the ultrarich and the rolling back of everything from reproductive rights to environmental regulations. But Jacobs rarely puts his politics on the runway. This show felt less like a response to Trumpian excess than it did a finger in the eye of the commercial pressures he’s facing. With their oversize shapes, thick, heavy fabrics, and resolutely dressed-up sensibility, these clothes couldn’t be any more different than the trends currently dominating the market. Jacobs has never shied from playing the contrarian, and he did so with complete gusto here.As sexy as his confidence is, though, the body-swamping clothes were short on sex appeal, and that can be a deal breaker for a lot of women. He compensated with some stretchy knit pieces and a high-waisted pant and polka-dot blouse with the sleek athleticism of a matador’s costume. Commercially speaking—hey, business is business—the most relevant part of this collection was its evening looks, after dark being when contemporary women embrace this kind of flourish and extravagance. The models’ matching dye jobs were a fabulous, modernizing touch.
14 February 2018
The Marc Jacobs show was silent. All 56 models walked only to the sounds of their shoes on the old wood planks of the Park Avenue Armory. Then they came back out for their finale with the aria from the 1981 French filmDivaas an accompaniment. There may be nothing to read into that; then again, indulge us. WhenDivawas released, critic Roger Ebert argued in his four-star review that the movie was about many things, but that it’s real subject was the joy director Jean-Jacques Beineix took in making it. That jibes with Jacobs’s own written summary of this collection; his program notes called it a “reimagining of seasons past somewhere beyond the urban landscape of New York City.” And who’s had more fun making fashion than Jacobs in the last 25 years? Yes, if you can believe it, he designed his infamous grunge collection—the one that got him sacked from Perry Ellis and launched his solo career—for Spring 1993, a quarter-century ago this season.There was visual joy baked into these clothes. The giant daisies and other overscale flowers; the Crayola colors, tinsel trimmings, and sequins, sequins, sequins; the easy-on-the-ankles sports sandals and easy-on-the-waistline sarouel track pants; the silk turbans by Stephen Jones. Jacobs’s idea here was to return to the archives, passing old ideas and former hits through “exaggerated, decadent, and exotic” filters. Hence the huge flowers, the hyper-vivid palette, and the weekender-size bags dangling charms that spelledSomewhere. Fanny packs looked like a nod to tourist gear and a simultaneous sidelong glance at the celebrity vogue for wearing the nerdy accessory in paparazzi pics. With the turbans Jacobs was quoting himself. He memorably put Kate Moss in a silver one the year they cohosted the Met Ball. Yet this didn’t feel joyful the way a greatest-hits collection ought to. The rope-belted jumpsuits and dresses had an easy appeal, but the oversize shapes were a little ponderous, and the acid-trippy flowers overly retro. The soundless room also played a part; music does so much to set a mood and trigger emotion. And again, since that was intentional, it feels like there’s a message there.Jacobs shot to fame for channeling the energies of contemporary youth. As he begins his second quarter-century, maybe the formula is as simple as that: Find something that really turns him on. And dig in.
13 September 2017
If Marc Jacobs’s Resort pictures bring to mind Robert Longo, it’s no coincidence. Jacobs was inspired by Longo’s lurching, writhing, dancing figures at his lookbook shoot this season. There are significant differences. Longo’s original charcoal and graphite drawings are in black and white, and Jacobs’s new collection fairly pulsates with color: soft lemon yellow, baby blue, lilac pink. But he designed the collection to maximize a sense of movement. Pencil skirts are scalloped, waistband to hem, with fringe; an LBD is dripping with teardrop-shape black paillettes; and sherbet-y cocktail dresses are trimmed in plastic beads. Even the pockets of faded boyfriend jeans got the fringe treatment. Paired with kitten heels, some reminiscent of his famous mouse flats of many years ago, the collection had a dressy sensibility (fitting for the holiday party season it ships in) and a mod ’60s spin. Logo T-shirts featured headshots of models made up with cat eyes and beehives to looks like girl bands such as the Supremes. Diana Ross and company would’ve been delighted with stage clothes like these.A couple of terrific crinkle vinyl coats didn’t get the Longo treatment. Also not featured in the lookbook: tracksuits with the label’s double-J logo decorating the side stripes. Fans who fell for the casual spirit of Jacobs’s Fall ode to 1980s hip-hop will be happy to find those sporty pieces in stores come November alongside these party clothes.
7 June 2017
At the end of a New York Fashion Week that can generously be described as timid, the industry’s great showman Marc Jacobs stripped his runway down to the essentials. Advance word suggested he might, but the two rows of bare metal folding chairs marching narrowly across the Park Avenue Armory was a striking sight, nonetheless. There was no set, no music, no big hair and makeup statement, and no iPhone photography permitted. What gives?Jacobs wasn’t doing interviews. We were warned about that in advance, too. But in another unusual move for the designer, he spelled out his thought process in writing. The collection, he said, was inspired by a documentary calledHip-Hop Evolution. “As a born and bred New Yorker, it was during my time at the High School of Art and Design when I began to see and feel the influence of hip-hop on other music as well as art and style. This collection is my representation of the well-studied dressing up of casual sportswear. It is an acknowledgement and gesture of my respect for the polish and consideration applied to fashion from a generation that will forever be the foundation of youth culture street style.”Last season, Jacobs and his rave-inspired collection were the subject of online criticism for what was seen as cultural appropriation—his cast of mostly non-black models sported candy-color fake dreadlocks. Was this new collection a mea culpa or a kiss off? Even with the social media ban, the Internet is bound to make its own decision on that one. Out on Park Avenue, the models (a significantly more diverse group than last season, it should be noted) posed in front of two giant banks of speakers, and it didn’t take long for those pics to start flooding Instagram. In this reporter’s view, addressing his detractors was a brave move on Jacobs’s part. At a moment when designers are struggling to find brand-appropriate ways to acknowledge America’s roiling political and social issues, he appears more engaged than most.But what did this collection have to say about how to dress next Fall? That, at least, is quite simple. That a fur-collared jacket and a thigh-skimming party dress is something you should wear with sheer stockings and sturdy, retro platforms. That track pants go with just about everything. That you can never have too much corduroy (a fact Jacobs and Miuccia Prada lately agree on). That the color brown and all its variations are beautiful. And that a hat with personality is absolutely essential.
Also: If you’re going to wear jewelry, it might as well bling. These were not necessarily needle-moving fashion messages—designers have been cribbing from hip-hop for decades, and, as Jacobs acknowledges, it has become the defining mode of our day. But this collection at least had a sophisticated edge on its predecessor.
16 February 2017
If there’s one big takeaway fromNew York Fashion Week, it’s the designers’ instinct to boost the collective American spirit. This election cycle hasn’t been one of uplift—doom is more like it. In response, some designers have opted for sunny brights and flowers. Others have turned to show tunes.Marc Jacobsorganized a rave. If things do end up going to hell in a handbasket, we might as well all go out for one last, big rager, right? At least that was what the Marc Jacobs set up felt like at the Hammerstein Ballroom, where Stefan Beckman built an elevated, grease-slicked stage and above it strung thousands of little lights.Jacobs’s models sported candy-colored dreadlocks and platforms that seemed even higher than the ones he sent out last Fall; from dreads to toe, they must’ve topped 7 feet. In between, there was sparkle, satin, and snakeskin, along with doses of chilled-out denim and camouflage. He merged his lower-pricedMarc by Marc Jacobsrange with his main line little more than a year ago, and since then there’s been quite a spread between the haute stuff and the more commercially minded jeans and army jackets. Inevitably, the finer pieces were more compelling today: mod, fur-collared, A-line coats in metallic lamé or rainbow-patterned holographic sequins; a crocheted cardigan sprouting feathers at the shoulders; Kiki Willems’s show-opening metallic doublet jacket.Theme appropriate or not, hoodies are beginning to feel a bit played out, but Jacobs came up with a pretty wonderful way of elevating the more ordinary items on the runway, and unifying the high and low aspects of the collection. The artist Julie Verhoeven, with whom he memorably collaborated on his Spring 2002Louis Vuittonshow, supplied illustrations which were embroidered onto not just sweatshirts here, but also bags and those towering shoes. A silver snakeskin coat with a Verhoeven design on the back was the show’s standout piece. It’s much too precious to wear to a rave or whatever the kids are calling their all-night parties these days, but it would definitely be mood-elevating.
15 September 2016
Karl Aberg, the archly entertaining actuator ofMarc Jacobs’svision for Marc Jacobs menswear, acknowledged this evening that next Spring’s collection was as closely aligned to women’s Resort as it has been recently. You only needed to recognize the MTV logo to see that, and it was here in sequins with a sub-pattern of palm trees on a purple sweatshirt. An awesome picture of Keith Richards looking absolutely in the zone from 1974 was the visual kernel of Aberg’s particular vision for this collection: Like Richards, it featured animal, stripes, and a wide-eyed dissolute raffishness.Shots of bright color, pink and orange predominantly, fired through a multigenerational palette of street-sourced grunginess. So the checkerboard prints on open-necked shirts and pajama suits bore the faintest mark of bleach-spatter. There were ’90s raver pants and pink leopard shirts, skinny-ringer logo tees, tumbled-stud denim, stitched-in-pleat tracksuit pants in lovely tropical-weight wool, broken-stitch knits in cashmere silk (also strong for Resort), and some nice check shirts whose slightly drab check was happily zhooshed by the faintest golden hit of Lurex thread. A panne velvet tuxedo in black with ribboned pockets and a killer olive and gold sequin tiger-print jacket were the most winning evening pieces. A military section featured oversize ripstop olive cargo pants, an authentically drab M-65 (with a palm-tree pin), and nylon pieces with tiger-camo paneling. And there were rainbows, too. Yet again this was a collection that merited the scrutiny of lying bare on the rail.
20 June 2016
Walking into a showroom atMarc Jacobs’s headquarters for his Resort mini show (well, not so mini, there were 55 looks), guests were greeted by a mannequin in an MTV sweatshirt, the blockMdotted with neon palm trees like it might’ve been on the TV station’s logo 30-something years ago. The top, which reappeared in different versions on the runway, is a descendant of the Coca-Cola wave sweatshirt Jacobs put on his catwalk three Springs ago, and of a piece with the co-opted logos and borrowed branding images seen on other runways lately.Jacobs is not averse to capitalizing on a hot trend, as the patch-strewn denim and camouflage pieces in the new collection also prove. It’s the zest, irreverence, and go-for-brokedness with which he does it that sets him apart from his New York peers. Few others could get away with a laser cat meme T-shirt, but then who else would try?“We took Fall and made it kitsch, and went from YouTube back to MTV,” he said backstage. In keeping with the 24-hour music channel in its early days theme, Duran Duran played on the sound system, and the models wore their hair tightly crimped, their eyes darkly outlined. “I’m fried,” he said, “like the models’ hair.” The designer picked up the CFDA’s Womenswear Designer of the Year prize yesterday evening, but didn’t linger long at the ceremony. Preparations for this morning’s show went all night.Paradisewas variously printed and embroidered on the backs of jackets, but Jacobs said it wasn’t a nod to Paradise Garage, the famous New York in the ’80s discotheque. “Just paradise, this fictitious idea.” Real or virtual, he painted quite a picture: zebra stripes mixed with leopard spots, which clashed with racing checks; out-to-there crinolines were only outclassed by the exuberant puff sleeves of prairie dresses; and lace dresses came patch-worked with toucans and tropical flowers and martinis. A lot of it was silly, most of it was fun, and he’s going to sell a ton of MTV sweatshirts.
7 June 2016
Thank God forMarc Jacobs. Just when you were ready to give up onNew York Fashion Week—its dull, derivative shows, the general lack of risk-taking, the freezing cold, the traffic!—along he comes and renews your faith. Tonight’s set, a spare white box with glossy white floorboards, wasn’t necessarily auspicious. But then came the ping of a bell, and a model’s shadow crossed the backdrop. From the first sight of her gothy black liner and lipstick, foot-high platforms, shrunken band-concert sweatshirt, crocheted doily collar, and full skirt ballooning above a crinoline, we knew we were in for a show. Sixty-five heavily embellished, manically layered, and mostly black looks later, including one onLady Gaga, we were all pretty much floored.Like a lot of MJ collections, this one was full of callbacks; one of the pleasures of attending his shows is that they stir up memories. That concert sweatshirt was, of course, a direct reference toSpring 2016, but it took me back toSpring 2006, the season of the Penn State Blue Band. Black-and-white polka dots called to mind Jacobs’s Edie Sedgwick show; the long capes evokedlast Fall’sDiana Vreeland moment. That game could go on and on all night. The trick was how Jacobs made the clothes both familiar and new, recasting all of them in black and white and shades of gray, and playing with proportions. Most of the time, he sized jackets and coats way, way up, but he shrunk some, too, like Julia Nobis’s fabulous crystallized bolero. The outerwear and the sparkly evening pieces are likely to be the major takeaways for retailers.Also like a lot of Marc Jacobs collections, this was loaded with references. Jacobs name-dropped Lydia fromBeetlejuice,Christina Ricci (who sat in the crowd), and various unnamed “ghosts of New York.” Some saw Kiss’s Gene Simmons in the coq feathers, starry eye makeup, and platforms; others saw fashion legend andVoguecontributing editorLynn Yaegerin the furs on top of knits on top of prints on top of crinis. As for the cats and rats and crows that decorated many of the looks, they were drawn by Stephen Tashjian, the artist and drag performer known as Tabboo!Jacobs came out for his bow in a suit anda T-shirt he’s designed for Hillary Clinton’s campaign. On her website, it’s red, white, and blue, but if HRC knows what she’s doing, she’ll get Jacobs to make a few special-edition black-sequined versions like his own.
Bringing it all back around to the subject of New York Fashion Week, it’d be the see now-buy now item of the season.
19 February 2016
New York Fashion Weekbegan and ended with giant spectacles.Riccardo Tisci’s 9/11 Givenchy showwas contemplative, or at least set out to be;Marc Jacobs’s tonight was a clamorous, exuberant affair. Both got the public involved: It’s still hard to score access, but the shows are less and less an insular, insiders-only experience.Circumstance forced Jacobs out of his usual venue—sometimes the Army needs the Lexington Avenue Armory. He said he jumped at the chance to show in the Ziegfeld—as a native New Yorker, he grew up seeing movies at the famous theater—and that the innovative setup was custom-fit to the special location. “Marc Jacobs: One Night Only!” blazed the marquee. Inside, there was popcorn and fountain drinks; cigarette girls offered candy; and ushers dispensedPlaybills(not a mixed metaphor, the original Ziegfeld showed musicals, not movies) as they led celebrities like Bette Midler,Winona Ryder, Sandra Bernhard, andSofia Coppolato their seats. Outside, models includingBella Hadid, Guinevere van Seenus,Emily Ratajkowski, and thesinger Beth Ditto walkedthe length of a red carpet that stretched for half a block, stopping for a picture at the Marc Jacobs step-and-repeat, before they made their way up the stairs and into the theater, where we watched the street-side happenings on the Ziegfeld’s giant screen.The show was a love letter to the movies, America’s greatest invention; to America itself; and to a New York City that’s all but vanished. The Ziegfeld is the largest surviving single-screen theater in Manhattan, and trumpeter Brian Newman and his band played punk progenitors the New York Dolls’s 1973 song “Trash.” Nostalgia is the most powerful force in Jacobs’s work. This season he indulged his insatiable, catholic tendencies: High culture (Maria Callas as Medea), low (showgirls), and things in between (Janet Leigh inPsycho) mingled on the runway. You couldn’t help but think that Andy Warhol would have appreciated it, not least of all because some of the prints were suggestive of the Pop artist’s silkscreens.It’s the kind of collection that will reward an up-close look—dense with detail and hidden meanings, and totally irresistible.
18 September 2015
Marc Jacobs menswear designer Karl Aberg does not seem the kind of fellow to relish rush. Certainly when it comes to integrating the as-of-March defunct Marc by Marc Jacobs into this mainline collection, he's decisively chilled. "Gradually we are going to encompass more, I think, stretching it further," he said: "I'm really excited about it because it's fun product and real stuff that's maybe a bit less precious, which is a good thing." Precious? This Marc Jacobs collection? Well, certainly, if you're concerned with the materials. Hammered cream velvet slacks and jackets with sweatpants-style overlock stitching and a hefty break gleamed in the light like moonstone. Ringer tees and tank tops came in a fine-gauge cashmere, an opaque argyle tank in an alpaca mix, and its long-sleeved cousin in a silk and Lurex mix, "for a little tinsel." Piped pajama tops both short-sleeved and long were dappled with chinoiserie blossoms or served up in a gray check silk mix treated to have a rice-papery crunch. The baddest boys in the room were the single-button, shawl-collar, kimono-cum-evening jackets that you could imagine l'homme Jacobean wearing not only to the Met Ball or some such palaver, but out back by the pool over budgie-smugglers and slides.So while the fabrications had that gleam of preciousness, the vibe Aberg articulates through them did not. The interplay of Marc military staples and that souvenir chinoiserie emanated cultured army veteran, perhaps with a shady backstory: The Face but blessed with a brain, income, and a taste level that allows him to embrace dusky pink, crochet knits, and a pistachio seersucker jacket and seem not at all precious, but just so.
21 June 2015
More than the jeweled embroideries, the waffle-knit cashmeres, the deconstructed prom dresses, and the f'ed-up shoes, what has defined Marc Jacobs' career is the 180-degree turn. He loves a runway surprise. But not this season. Resort, which he showed in his Mercer Street store—35 girls, one for each look, crammed "backstage"—was a rethink of his Diana Vreeland Fall collection rendered in lighter-weight fabrics. The Fall show was a winner, and this one was, too: joyous and just a little bit twisted, starting with the head scarves and severe brows, on down past the chin-grazing plastic collars, all the way to the pointy-toe Mary Janes and the red platform boots.What held the collection together were the compulsive embellishments. The excess began with the fabrics. Broderie anglaise, St. Gallen lace, shimmery taffeta—Jacobs treated all of them to oversize crystals, grommets, and thread embroideries. And no item was too humble to escape the obsessive detailing, pullover sweatshirts and hoodies included. Even the numbers without those adornments looked like they had them—a nod, Jacobs said, to Martin Margiela, who printed sequin dresses facsimile-style on silk jersey back in the '90s. The show's stars were a pair of coats in red and white. "Fashion must be the most intoxicating release from the banality of the world," Vreeland once said. Single- and double-breasted, narrow of shoulder in the MJ way, and featuring clusters of crystals front, back, and on the sleeves, those coats qualified.
9 June 2015
It's been over a year now since Marc Jacobs left his post at Louis Vuitton. Good breakup or bad, splitting up is hard, and it sort of showed in his last two collections for his own label. Both last Fall's offering, over which Jessica Lange intoned unconvincingly that "happy days are here again," and the all-army green lineup he presented for Spring felt not exactly dour, but definitely melancholic. Tonight's show was something very different, with a Stefan Beckman-designed backdrop inspired by Jeremiah Goodman's painting of Diana Vreeland's sitting room and a bone-rattling loud soundtrack lifted from Darren Aronofsky'sRequiem for a Dream, both of which fairly screamed, "I'm back!"The clothes lived up to the advance billing. From the relatively quiet start of Erin O'Connor's almost-black checked sheath with four wide bands of bugle beads below the waist, the collection built and built. It touched on metallic brocades and leopard print, chevroned mink, grommeted leather, nailhead studded silk, and embroideries that looked like digitized and pixelated portraits of the eccentric Vreeland. "She was a genius," Jacobs said of the legendaryVogueeditor backstage. "She got the whole fashion thing: being decisive, being so excitable, and then being as passionate and dismissive about the very same thing the next day." Jacobs read herMemosbook while he was working on the Fall collection; the surprise is that he hasn't made a muse of Vreeland before. "I felt like that's what fashion is," he continued, "that complete addiction, obsession, that I've-got-to-have-it need until I basically wouldn't be caught dead in it."Over the years, Jacobs has produced that obsessive feeling in fashion lovers more reliably than most. As the models paraded by in their polished patent leather boots, you could tick off the looks that will get his fans' blood pumping, from the snake-print coats with jet embroidery to the long, straight column dresses that felt spare despite their swirls of sequins. Will the floor-scraping pleated skirts and the mutton-sleeve jackets that could've walked off the set ofThe Knickmake a comeback? Hard to say. They're definitely not where fashion's collective unconscious is in early 2015. But who knows? To borrow a quote from the famously quotable Vreeland, Jacobs may just have given us what we never knew we wanted.For Tim Blanks' take on Marc Jacobs, watch this video.
19 February 2015
Straight up from afar, perhaps just a bit twisted on approach, and with some giddy jolts when your eyes set to macro, this Marc Jacobs collection was a little treat. Seaming your check suit pants with sweat-appropriate overlock stitching is a light-of-touch yet arresting de-formalizing tweak. A librarian's tank top came in gently abraded leopard print perfect for extrovert nerds, and a French terry merino sweatshirt could be turned inside out for a ribbed day-two option. Cashmere silk sweats had a hidden polyamide layer that provided a spongy springiness. An M65 came lined in beaver so its wearer could look like De Niro but feel like Trump. And who knows how the Jacobs team achieved a suiting material that looked like straight-up check from a distance but was reduced to static at close range. As we looked at a staple pilled cashmere sweater, Marc Jacobs' menswear designer Karl Aberg commented: "It's a very Marc thing to take something that's very high end and treat it a little rough." Tough love.
18 January 2015
For a while now people have been saying that the traditional runway show needs a rethink, and yet the calendar just keeps getting more crowded. Leave it to Marc Jacobs to give a new twist to an old form. In a New York fashion week first, Jacobs partnered with Beats by Dre, who provided headphones for every guest. Without them you couldn't hear the vocal narrative that record producer Steve Mackey (the husband of Jacobs' stylist, Katie Grand) conceived with the designer to accompany the show. "The idea was to put everybody in their own world," Jacobs said backstage of the immersive experience. "It's what you make of it." As for the narrative itself, apparently the idea came from a 1976 short film by John Smith calledThe Girl Chewing Gum. Google it.But if the point of the headphones was to give the audience a unique experience, the collection, which was paraded around a pink house by models in matching wigs, told a different story. It was all about uniforms. Joan Smalls' V-neck dress was somewhere between hospital-scrub blue and standard-issue green, and belted at the waist to rein in its slightly oversize shape. As the show progressed, volumes became more pronounced, as did the embellishments. Bigger cargo pockets, shinier buttons, exploding cabochons, and silk duchesse in place of cotton drill. The uniforms weren't so uniform anymore. Think of them as surplus clothes with couture tweaks—a proposition not all that unlike the one Ralph Lauren came up with this morning, albeit realized in an entirely different way.Jacobs said he was looking at images of Grace Slick, who wore fatigues to protest the Vietnam War in the '60s. "Military clothes are part of the fashion vernacular now," he pointed out. How true. In the wake of Obama's speech last night about the U.S.'s new mission against ISIS, the timing here wasn't great. But in any case, the designer's major point seemed to be about fashion (even if you could argue that the monotone voice on the headphones was a comment on the way technology controls our lives). "In the quest for individuality," he said, "people start fitting into these flocks and looking the same." That's a concept that rings true after witnessing the bonkers street-style scene outside the shows this week. To win, Jacobs has got to be in the game. Come next season, you'll find his slouchy officer's suit, fancy Dr. Scholl's, and matte crocodile hobo bags smack-dab in the middle of the action.
11 September 2014
Marc Jacobs' men's collections, despite their increasing sophistication, are often exercises in camp—albeit exquisitely rendered, made-in-Italy, highbrow camp. It's how Jacobs gets his kicks, while bringing a dose of levity to his adoring fans. Spring was no exception. Nosing through the showroom racks, what at first seemed to be a salmon color story morphed into a fern story and on to a flamingo story—pinkflamingos, that fifties icon of lawn kitsch. At first subtle, they soon flocked across shirts in allover prints and landed on the back of a black satiny bowling-style jacket as one big and flamboyant sequined centerpiece.Aside from his feathery friends, however, Jacobs seemed to rediscover mid-century men's elegance, apparently nostalgic for that halcyon heyday of made-to-measure tailoring, cocktail attire, and vacation wardrobes. Glamorous bachelors would luxuriate in pastel hideaways like Miami's South Beach, Las Vegas, or, if they were feeling especially exotic, the casino resorts of Havana, where they'd foster fantasies of hobnobbing with foppish, well-mannered gangsters. Jacobs deftly tapped into this subtropical noirish scenario with cream-colored linen suits, soft-pink striped polos, crisp white ties on crisp white shirts, diaphanous knits, and that quintessential item of the made man, the vest—with the bottom button undone, as it should be.
21 June 2014
Marc Jacobs has your next New Year's Eve dress all sorted. His Resort collection, which was presented outside the showroom for the first time in an Upper East Side town house, was devoted almost exclusively to party clothes. Dolly bird minidresses in black guipure lace, jewel-toned crushed velvet, or leopard-printed sequins worn with sheer black hose and strappy heels or slouchy go-go boots formed the crux of the lineup. "People getting dressed up, going out. Happy, lively," offered Jacobs' design director, Joseph Carter, when he was asked for a few words backstage.The design team explored some of the same territory here that Hedi Slimane has at Saint Laurent in recent seasons. But Jacobs has long had an affection for the 1960s, as a backward glance at his Fall show reminds us. This collection will have a more straightforward appeal for customers than that one did, precisely because of how mood-elevating minidresses and sparkle can be. (Despite Jessica Lange's insistence that "Happy Days Are Here Again" back in February, that show resonated darkly.)Carter and co. nodded in the direction of more casual occasions with a red sweatshirt embroidered with crystal stars on the chest (the descendant of MJ's popular Coca-Cola sweatshirt for Spring ’14) and a crinkle leather mini. But it wasn't all leggy all the time. There was a pantsuit in acid-bright abstract floral silk chiné, and one of the best looks in the show was a pair of skinny sequined black guipure flares topped by a white rabbit fur jacket complete with a built-in bow.
2 June 2014
From a bombed-out beach to somewhere over the rainbow in less than six months. Since his last turn on a New York runway in September, Marc Jacobs has left his post as creative director of Louis Vuitton, a job he held for a decade and a half. He's a full-time Manhattanite again, with a possible future IPO in his sights. Tonight, as everyone in the venue or watching the live stream knew, was a big moment for Jacobs.The Stefan Beckman-designed set more than lived up to the high bar the house has established over the years. Suspended from the Armory ceiling were hundreds of pillowy Magritte clouds you could almost reach out and touch. Slice of heaven, silver linings, cloud nine—the Instagram captions practically wrote themselves. On the surface, at least, the vibe was a hell of a lot more serene than last season.The clothes echoed that mood. "It's all a pose," Jacobs said when we told him so backstage. "What do you do after you've trimmed everything with every bead, sequin, bow, and black bit of tassel? You come up with something that comes from a very powerful place, but in a fresh and soft way rather than an aggressive way." This wasn't minimalism, though. It began with reduced shapes in restrained fabrics: a scoop-neck tank dress in double-face wool paired with matching pants, a clingy mélange knit V-neck accompanied by ribbed leggings that pooled over the tops of comfy sneakers. Like loungewear for some next-level spa or health clinic—a feeling that was heightened by the models' fabric headbands and matching razor-cut bobs. As the show progressed, Jacobs slowly added demonstrative pieces in more lavish materials, crescendoing with hand-painted organza ruffles on a strapless dress and dense crystal beading on a swirl-print tunic and flares with a lean, 1960s look. His shearlings, dyed in sunset hues, will go down as best-in-show in a week that offered plenty of choices. The chain-strap bags looked luxuriously efficient.From beginning to end, it was all neutrals and soft pastels. Partly for that reason, it didn't bowl you over in that hyperkinetic way some MJ collections do. Instead, it worked a subtler kind of magic, almost a narcotic pull. The soundtrack certainly tunneled its way into your consciousness. It was Jessica Lange performing a spoken-word version of "Happy Days Are Here Again," the Depression-era song that Barbra Streisand and Judy Garland famously reprised in the sixties.
You couldn't quite tell if Lange was trying to convince herself or the audience. Either way, by the end Jacobs had made us believers.
13 February 2014
Once, not terribly long ago, Marc Jacobs' menswear collection—even in its highest-end, made-in-Italy iteration—was a paean to the young and the restless. The sweaters were aggressively pilled, the graphics graffitied, and the whole line had a nose-thumbing antiluxury luxury vibe. Today, a browse through the showroom racks revealed there are still pilled sweaters and graffiti graphics (this season, as usual, by longtime Jacobs collaborator Bäst), but the image the label is out to convey has been noticeably spruced up.The icons for Fall were Bryan Ferry and Jack Nicholson in their seventies lothario incarnations, dressing to kill. (The underline to this point was a peacock-feather print, which showed up all over.) Their influence gave the clothes a slithery,séducteurvibe: suits with wider, longer pants and long, almost stretched jackets; full-length shearling and beaver-trimmed double-breasted alpaca overcoats; velvet cut into everything from shirting to baseball caps to tuxes. An oversize robe coat—an item that, against all odds, has turned up in a handful of collections this Milan season—was practically postcoital. Yet when worn by a teenage model and rounded out by novelty bits like wool track pants and surplus-store military jackets, the collection retained—to its credit—a hint of the mischievous, kids-amok-in-the-retro-shop flavor it always had. If these are swaggering Nicholsons and Ferrys, they're embryonic versions. Which begs the question: Can you teach a new dog old tricks?
12 January 2014
All of New York fashion week we've been talking about the 1990s and hearing about clean minimalism. And then along came Marc Jacobs tonight, polishing things off with a fabulously irreverent show that took us on a trip to the 1890s. The set looked like a bombed-out beach, with cigarette butts, Big Gulp cups, a tumbled-over Frozen Treats case, and destroyed fashion magazines strewn in the black sand. A giant Adirondack chair, the mast of a wooden ship, and a bus on its way to Black Hollow numbered among the bigger props. Giant fans in the corners seemed to be blowing hot air on the audience. The handheld fans that ushers handed out on the way in were hardly a match for the stifling temperature inside the venue.Were we shipwrecked? In some sort of post-global-warming desert wasteland? Neither, said Jacobs backstage afterward, rattling off a few random talking points: "It's more of a weird frat party, Burning Man, shores-of-Gotham City sort of beach scene. It's a lovely nightmare, or it was for me anyway." And this, more interestingly: "I didn't want the cliché of Spring and Summer, I wanted it to be about girls who have no problem coming to work in a Victorian gown and Birkenstocks." (For the record, Jacobs' sandals this season owe more of a debt to Tevas than Birks.) Rejecting the received wisdom of other runways, he went on, "I don't have one friend who dresses in all white."Zing! Take that, New York. Jacobs' clothes, in contrast to the prevailing Spring currents, were printed, appliquéd, embroidered, and tasseled. And dark. There were large hibiscus prints in red and white on a coat and maroon and white on a shirt and shorts set, but black, navy, bottle green, and brown were the dominant colors here.Even a bellwether like Jacobs might have a hard time getting twenty-first-century gals into the passementerie-laden sailor's jackets that he started with. Blame the out-to-there shoulders, not the cute hip-slung shorts that accompanied them. But his printed and embroidered dresses were another story entirely. Cut like exalted sports jerseys and worn like they were no big deal with wrestler's boots, they had an unprecious cool—exactly the kind of thing an It girl like Sky Ferreira, who made a surprise cameo on the runway, might wear for a stroll through the Lower East Side. Widow's weeds dresses marched by on flats, too. It was hard not to love this show's attitude.
Georgia May Jagger sported a sweatshirt embroidered in red and white with the wave on a Coke can. Just what Jacobs' point was we don't know, but he's the real thing—out in front of the rest of the town without hardly breaking a sweat.
11 September 2013
Love him tender? Of all the designers under the sun, Marc Jacobs might have been the least likely to look to Elvis Presley. Yet, in keeping with the pervasive fifties fascination that's run through many of the men's collections for Spring, he did. There were enough florals here—slight nod to Elvis' Hawaiian trilogy, perhaps?—to justify the first-time-ever creation of a seasonal Marc Jacobs badge, complete with bloom, that was stitched to many of the collection's pieces. To match, there was tropical-colored linen suiting, higher-waisted trousers, and a series of shawl-collared tuxes that telegraphed Las Vegas loucherie. The mix was peppered with allusions to workwear, sneaker fetishism (hand-painted versions, made in collaboration with the label's longtime graffiti artist of choice, Bast, will be limited to one hundred pairs), and hokey Americana. Odd as it seemed, it made for a peppier collection than usual. But word to the wise, a healthy dose of attitude and a heavy spattering of tattoos—both in evidence on Marc model of choice Cole Mohr—may be required to leaven any musty vintage vibes these clothes will have on the hanger.
24 June 2013
Deauville was our takeaway from Marc Jacobs' Resort presentation. But not the Deauville Coco Chanel made famous—this was too irreverent for that. Yes, there weremarinierestripes, but here they were picked out on sumptuous fur coats and pullovers. An early-twentieth-century bathing suit morphed into a tiny little black-and-white shift, and a traditional sailor's costume was tweaked so that a good six inches, maybe more, of midriff flashed between the top and the cropped, slightly flared pants.Afterward, Jacobs' design director, Joseph Carter, said they were after a "relaxed, casual feeling." So how to explain those furs? Carter pointed out that the blue coat with white edging was cut like a bathrobe and paired with shower shoes. And what about all the sequins, which decorated not only cardigan coats worn over drop-waist silk print thirties frocks but also slinky striped dresses and separates? "Embroidered onto rib knit," he said. "It's all very easy."In that sense, this charming collection felt a lot like a continuation of the designer's work over the last couple of seasons, which has explored ideas of the familiar and has focused on the comforts of home. Considering this is Jacobs we're talking about, that can mean only one thing: Bye-bye, Deauville. We expect we'll be seeing big changes on the runway come September.
3 June 2013
A giant sun was suspended from the ceiling of the Lexington Avenue Armory for tonight's Marc Jacobs show, postponed from his usual Monday night slot due to delivery issues. The orb turned your seatmates' faces a startling shade of yellow, but when you looked across the enormous concrete stage, everything was in shades of gray, almost like an old sepia photo. It had the same desaturating effect on the clothes Jacobs sent out. You could make out patterns, like the microplaid of a simple shirtdress, and you could see texture, such as the mohair of snug tops, the fox fur on coats, or the flash of sequins, but you couldn't really determine their color beyond guessing whether something was light or dark. If he had left it at that, it would have been an intriguing though ultimately frustrating experience. But then Jacobs turned up the house lights and sent all 55 models, who wore matching shag wigs, out again to repeat the circuit. It was then you noticed that some of the plaid actually sparkled and that from dress to dress the sequins changed from navy to burgundy to rose to shimmering gold.This isn't the first time that Jacobs has fiddled with the traditional runway show format—several years ago, he staged a show back to front. But why send the clothes out twice, first colorless, then not? Jacobs lifted the low-frequency light idea from Olafur Eliasson'sThe Weather Projectat the Tate in London, a show that resonated with him after his newly rebuilt West Village house was badly damaged by Hurricane Sandy. "Last season was all black and white, and life unfortunately isn't that way, it's all the shades of gray," he said backstage. "I've felt out of sorts, and I wanted to see things sort of dismal and then still show the optimistic side." "Somewhere Over the Rainbow," a song we've heard at an MJ show before, was the other obvious reference point.As for the clothes themselves, they were stripped down and irony-free: cable-knit sweaters, tailored blazers and vests, silk pajamas, fox chubbies, scads of high-waisted briefs—all familiar from Jacobs' oeuvre. The fact that the designer came out for his bow in pajamas of his own (Prada, for the record) offered a clue. He was after the comfort of the familiar. In a New York season strong on real-life clothes, the straightforwardness of that approach resonated.
Partially led by Jacobs himself, fashion has been dominated these last few years by high-concept and often overelaborate clothes, and tonight's new direction felt right. There were terrific coats here for days, as well as neat little office-bound sweater and pencil skirt sets. For after-dark, Jacobs layered on those sequins: the most striking looks a pair of evening coats in oversize paillettes with plush fox fur draped around the neck. When the models came out for the finale, they assembled themselves into an orb of their own. Only Marc could turn a bout of melancholy and such simple clothes into the show of the week.
13 February 2013
This May, punk comes to the Costume Institute. What the original punks would've thought of a museum enshrining their rebellion the music historians will have to divine, but suffice it to say, 2013 may well be the year punk returns to fashion. If so, Marc Jacobs and his team got a running start. Johnny Thunders, erstwhile New York Doll and bandleader of The Heartbreakers, was the stated inspiration. His particular shred of traditional sartorial garb led the way for the collection, which drew on his Western rockabilly moments as much as on the Edwardian styles of the earlier Teddy Boys. He's a fitting genius for Jacobs, whose mainline men's collection has always kept a foot in both Italian-made tailoring tradition (not for nothing do visiting editors see his collection at Staff's showroom) and New York punk (just think of the line-standard fine cashmere "pilled" sweaters, say). Here, punk's influence was diffused rather than cranked. There were smart suits in bright colors and prints, fur-collared coats, and Western shirts, and more glamorous items, too: a midnight blue velvet tuxedo, and even fur stoles—eerily similar, you'd have to admit, to the Prada women's versions Jacobs often swaddled himself in a few years ago.
13 January 2013
Here's how the program notes stripped the first outfit to its bare bones: "Ruby Jean, T-shirt, short." Thinking back to last season's surreal extravagance, it was brutally clear that speed was of the essence for Marc Jacobs this time round. The show started at eight on the dot. It was over five minutes later. With her blond hair and dark brow, her T-shirt and ballet T-bars, Ruby Jean was a twenty-first-century spit of Edie Sedgwick. On the soundtrack, The Fall did their more than passable imitation of the Velvet Underground's glorious racket. Jacobs was arrowing back to the Factory, the icy pinnacle of New York cool where Edie reigned as the archetypal It girl, and the monochrome, amphetamine-sharp brilliance of the designer's vision cut a precise swathe through all the uncertain murk that swirls around pop culture right now.It was so simple. Back to those notes: T-shirt, coat, slip, skirt, suit, bra, etc., etc., etc. No embellishment needed. Jacobs distilled a radical moment of transition in style, between the suited young ladies of the early sixties and the free spirits of the later part of the decade, the kind of woman Edie was, passing from preppy-proper to pilled-out style icon in her patent leather and leopard spots, petaled hems and smudgy mascara-ed eyes. And stripes. So many stripes, parallel lines, black and white and sequined, like Lou Reed lyrics coming to life. But it's the genius of Jacobs that something that was so powerfully evocative of the past didn't seem retro or nostalgic. This is partly because his approach to anything that came before is so obviously cavalier. Look at the ease with which he renders his own immediate past—as in last season, with its OTT headgear—quite literally old hat.More to the point, it's also because the stripped-down nature of these clothes just looks rightrightnow. Ruby Jean's T-shirt? Obvs. But Jamie Bochert's jumpsuit of sequined stripes had the kind of linear immediacy that would surely generate a why-didn't-I-think of-that? moment for other designers. And, as far as radical moments of transition go, all those skewed suits with their visible bras and hip-slung skirts felt like the slyest assault on Republican propriety that fashion is likely to mount this election year. Change from within? It wouldn't be the first time Marc Jacobs insinuated subversion into the heart of high fashion.
9 September 2012
Our review will be posted shortly. See the complete collection by clicking the image at left.
22 June 2012
Cindy Sherman's clown series was the starting point for Marc Jacobs' Resort collection. Proportions were either oversize or shrunken, polka dots clashed with plaids, and platform sandals were affixed with gumball-sized rhinestones. "Boldness, gaudiness, butterflies, and deli carnations" were the terms being tossed around in the backstage area. Not for team MJ is Resort a season for play-it-safe clothes.If some of the pieces had the feel of costumes—the stiff A-line dresses with lace overlays come to mind—there were looks here that have serious retail potential. We're talking specifically about the silk crepe dresses that hewed to thirties-by-way-of-the-seventies lines. The most charming of the lot came in a mint green floral with three-quarter puffed sleeves, a keyhole neckline, and a scooped-out back, but there were several versions of them on the mini-runway and even more hanging on the racks.Jacobs continues to experiment with the layering ideas he started working on for Fall both in New York and in Paris for Louis Vuitton. But whereas his February shows played on Edwardian-meets-Advanced Style silhouettes, the vibe of his sweatshirt over an A-line skirt over flared pants (all covered in florals, by the way) was more youthful, energetic. This three-for-one look just might be the one that takes the trend wide.
3 June 2012
Marc Jacobs earned his reputation as New York fashion's consummate showman and then some tonight. The set was spectacular and huge. Dreamed up at the designer's request by his friend, the artist Rachel Feinstein, the construction paper folly looked like a broken castle. "Marie Antoinette's version of ruins," she said. A pretend fountain was perched halfway down the curving runway.But we weren't in eighteenth-century France. Seventeenth-century Plymouth Rock meets the twenty-first-century street-style scene is more like it. Jacobs' models wore pilgrim shoes, of both the flat and stacked heel variety, affixed with giant rhinestone buckles. And their wild outfits, the designer said backstage, were inspired by the likes of Anna Piaggi and Lynn Yaeger, fashion eccentrics of the first order and mash-up artists long before the Sartorialist arrived on the scene.Piaggi has never gone anywhere without a hat, and Jacobs had some doozies on the runway. Made of multicolored mink, they tilted this way and dipped that, like something out of Dr. Seuss. The getups were just as off-kilter: Wool stoles were buttoned over wool coats worn on top of patchwork skirts above cropped pants. Colors were all over the map; prints ranged from oversize paisleys to floral pencil doodles, and holographic appliqués dripped off dresses. Tinsel turned up everywhere. And volumes, in marked contrast to his strict, severe collection of a year ago, were turned up, too.Padded hips? Prepare yourselves, ladies.It was fearless, just like Piaggi, Yaeger, and co. And it made you fall in love with fashion and Marc Jacobs all over again.
12 February 2012
Marc Jacobs' menswear line is every bit the designer collection—produced in Italy, full of specially developed fabrics and hand-finished details, and investment-priced—but its attitude is anti-precious. The label calls this approach "weird luxury." Maybe "flip" is closer to the mark. Train a gimlet eye on Marc and the luxe pops out. Sometimes it's hidden, as in the nylon bomber jackets that turn out to be lined in cherry red beaver, and sometimes it's hidden in plain sight, like the thrift store flannel shirts that turn out to be cashmere. Even Marc by Marc, the designer's contemporary secondary collection, rarely plays it so cool.Jacobs and his team drew their inspiration this season from the unlikely marriage of nineties skaters and Istanbul. The former provided the technical details, like reflective sheens on track pants and bags, and the vintage-seeming, often slightly militaristic shtick (many pieces look straight from the army navy store, until, of course, that beaver lining pops out); the latter, the scorched-earth palette of mustardy brown, khaki, and terra-cotta red. Jacobs treats the finest stuff with a here-today, gone-tomorrow irreverence, like cashmere sweaters felted or pilled, sweatshirt-style. Whatever, dude! If you're devil-may-care, you might care quite a lot—especially about the standout-as-usual shoes, with gold nail-head details.
16 January 2012
Marc Jacobs is at the center of one of the biggest fashion stories in years. His prolonged negotiations to assume the design mantle previously held by John Galliano at Christan Dior have been making headlines for weeks. If and when he signs on the dotted line, Jacobs will become a couturier, fashion's fastest-dwindling subspecies.Tonight he proved once again that he's one of the industry's consummate showmen. The Lexington Avenue Armory was decorated like a dance hall far removed from our current circumstances in both time and place. Old-fashioned lightbulbs were affixed to wooden beams. As the Philip Glass operaEinstein on the Beachgot underway, a sweeping gold curtain parted to reveal his entire cast waiting to hit the runway. The models worked it—straddling, reclining, even leering over their bent wood chairs,Chorus Line-style, eyes fixed on the audience.Once it was their turn, they hustled toward the cameras wearing kerchiefs in their hair and see-through plastic cowboy boots on their feet, and in between: drop-waist flapper dresses, denim workwear, sporty sweatshirts, and techno-gingham that was practically reflective. Some of the silhouettes echoed last season's clingy lines, but just as many had the boxy, drop-waist shapes of the 1920's. There was plenty of fringe, even more bold-colored sequins and paillettes, and most perversely, loads of that clear plastic cut and sewn into skirts or dresses worn over buttoned-to-the-neck shirts.Backstage, Jacobs said, "I didn't want it to feel real." The show, in other words, was the thing. This definitely wasn't one of those Marc collections that sends his fans into a tizzy about all there is to wear in their real lives, nor was it as thought-provoking as his bravura performances have been in the past. Maybe he was preoccupied with his talks with Dior? If so, can you blame him? Despite all their shiny surfaces, the clothes here fell a little bit flat. What will linger: the flash and filigree of the gorgeous set.
14 September 2011
Our review will be posted shortly. See the complete collection by clicking the image at left.
4 July 2011
There wasn't a pencil skirt in sight at Marc Jacobs' Resort presentation. The designer, who will receive the Lifetime Achievement Award from the CFDA tonight and is in the running for Designer of the Year, made another 180, trading in the precision and severity of Fall for a collection of easy, washed, and bleached-out separates with a youthful feel.It could give you a case of whiplash, the alacrity and enthusiasm with which Jacobs makes his switcheroos. Still, this one feels very much in keeping with the general direction of the Cruise collections we've seen so far. He's not the only designer who seems to be chasing the sun. To achieve the worn-in and faded look of the clothes, Jacobs and his design team printed wallpaper motifs and daisies on the reverse side of fabrics. And to capture the relaxed vibe they were going for, they focused on T-shirt and sweatshirt silhouettes, luxe-ing them up in laser-cut metallic faux leather or sequins. Oversize crystals likewise dotted the collar of a button-down, and cabochon studs decorated the front of a short tank dress. The accessories, too, tread the unstudied yet polished divide. Flat sandals trimmed with those same studs, in particular, looked like a lot of fun.
5 June 2011
Walking into the Marc Jacobs show tonight, a retailer remarked, "We have to come here in order to find out what we'll be seeing next season." His point: The lush colors and Lurex that have been everywhere this week were inspired by the ode to the 1970's Jacobs delivered last time out. Well, come next fall, you'd best prepare yourself for plenty of polka dots, a good deal of latex and lace, and a much more fitted silhouette. Backstage, Jacobs himself said the new collection was a reaction against the loose, fluid feeling of his Spring outing. "I wanted something strict and severe," he said.And not without a healthy dose of kink, it would seem. Jacobs worked with the British company House of Harlot on the show's latex button-downs and "rubber to look like sequins" dresses. With all that plastic—not to mention the taut chin straps attached to Stephen Jones' vinyl berets, and Marilyn Manson screaming about "The Beautiful People" on the soundtrack—it was tempting to think Jacobs was making a comment about our contemporary fixation on self-betterment.The idea of personal improvement played out in another way, because many of the things the designer put on this runway were redos of his own oeuvre. Take the polka dots, for instance. The first collection he showed in New York 20-odd years ago was covered in spots. Here, they appeared large and small, even in three dimensions on a ponyskin sweater and skirt studded with plastic cabochons. Jacobs is always playing with high and low, and he was back at it tonight, cutting a sweater in Shetland wool on the front and cashmere on the back, or trimming a mock-croc bomber jacket in real fox fur.When he dipped into his own archives for his Fall show of a year ago, the results were nostalgic and romantic. With its stride-defying hobble skirts and wedge-heel patent boots, this offering demands a little more commitment from the wearer. It was provocative and somehow more precise, and all those slick surfaces had a hard allure. Backstage, Jacobs talked about the discipline of fashion, pointing out the rigor of fitting 63 girls in one day. Disciplined is a good word for it. He had his uncomplicated fun last season, and now he's prepared to get sweaty in a latex shirt buttoned up to his throat. Give the rest of us a few months and we'll be right there with him.
13 February 2011
Marc Jacobs reprised the fashion show-in-the-round concept of his Fall presentation for Louis Vuitton tonight. But when his party pack of models emerged simultaneously from different parts of the giant burnished gold cylinder he'd installed in the middle of the Lexington Armory, they had left the fifties and sixties of that Vuitton show behind and walked out into the louche, liberated seventies. Make that the seventies by way of one very hedonistic night in the summer of 2010. "I was at Naomi Campbell's birthday party in Cannes," Jacobs said backstage, "and all the girls wore these long dresses, and after dancing all night they hitched them up to the waist." He went on to mention the New York Dolls and Yves Saint Laurent as references—"the usual faves"—plus Naomi's pal Marpessa and other big runway girls of the day. Remember fun? If Jacobs has his way, it could be back.First and foremost, this collection was about color. In other words, it was one of Jacobs' signature 180s—an exuberant departure from the neutrals of his serene Fall lineup. He opened with an Eastern-inflected coat in an electric orange print, with belled sleeves and an obilike belt. The model, newcomer Luisa Bianchin, wore a huge fabric flower in her red frizz and heavy eye makeup that called to mind the imagery of Guy Bourdin. More prints, on silk now, followed for halter dresses and strapless jumpsuits slit high enough on the thigh to reveal the models' briefs. (Sorry, breast men, the bust's brief resurgence as the reigning erogenous zone looks to be over already; 2011, we promise you, will be the summer of the hot pant.)There was a satin interlude, an ode to Missoni's zigzag knits, and voluminous peasant dresses with a Rive Gauche air. The girls wore gold glitter platforms, and carried clutches or chain-link shoulder bags small enough to fit comfortably in their hands. Their wide-brimmed straw hats were straight out ofTaxi Driver. And yet Jacobs was mostly in control of his potentially lurid subject matter.The seventies have been in the air for a couple of seasons now. You can already find long dresses and denim flares here and there on Broadway's fast-fashion strip, but none in the materials Jacobs uses—double-face voiles, gauzes, etamines. And none that are half as seductive.
12 September 2010
Marc Jacobs may not have shipped his Resort collection to Saint-Tropez for a deluxe seaside fashion show à la Chanel—he was too busy accepting his third Womenswear Designer of the Year Award on Monday night for that. But the French vacation destination—or, more specifically, a 1960's Technicolor version of it—was a starting point of sorts for his 38-look lineup. Long on joie de vivre, it boasted pastel-pretty tweed jackets and coats trimmed in iridescent plastic paillettes, a colorful and shiny lamé halter dress, and embroidered lace flowers whipped up into frothy micro-mini frocks.This wasn't necessarily about destination dressing, though. Elaborating on some of the tailoring he highlighted for Fall, Jacobs included a spongy crepe shorts suit and a lacquered, dotted trench as practical (it's actually waterproof) as it was whimsical. Still, at the end of the day, he was feeling more strongly for the latter. The polka dots were plentiful in this upbeat collection; on one flippy, midriff-baring bandeau dress, those spots were actually creamy cabochon stones.
7 June 2010
Just last week, Marc Jacobs president and recent Twitter convert Robert Duffy tweeted a request for set ideas for the label's Fall show. That apparently spurred Jacobs himself into action, and he more than rose to the challenge: As the show began, spotlights picked out the designer and Duffy tearing the brown construction paper from a wood frame structure at the back of the Armory. The paper duly removed, all 56 models were revealed, standing in formation on the raised platform and staring back at the audience.With "Somewhere Over the Rainbow" ringing out from Frederic Sanchez's soundtrack, the first girl took to the runway in a gray sweatshirt with a crisscrossed back; full, tweedy gray culottes; ankle socks; and pointy-toe, low-heel croc pumps—for Jacobs watchers, all items more likely to provoke a somehow affecting sense of déjà vu than the shock of the new. From there, the designer riffed on many different elements of his nearly two-decade repertoire, playing with proportions, changing the buttons, but never deviating from a sweetly romantic palette of soft neutrals and pale pastels.There were, in no particular order, trompe l'oeil bows, sequin-front/knit-back sweaters, sheer lingerie layers, sumptuous Mongolian lamb-collared shearlings, clear plastic trenches, panne velvet dresses, a Prince of Wales check three-piece suit, echoes of his Japanese idols, and vaguely seventies-ish knit dresses. Adding to the familiarity, insiders could even recognize Camille Bidault-Waddington and Susanne Deeken, "real girls" who work on the Marc by Marc Jacobs collection, amid the parade of largely unknown models.As dreamy and serene as any Jacobs show in recent memory—and how typical of him to intuit that the world is craving serenity right now—the show played like a nostalgia trip, one so lovely it was quite easy to be seduced. "It's refreshing to see something that isn't trying so hard to be new," Jacobs, subversive as ever, said after the show. "There's so much striving for newness now that newness feels less new."Cynics might argue that he took the easy way out this season. Let them; Jacobs would probably argue right back. These clothes are money in the bank not because they're "safe," but on account of their built-in resonances for the house's many followers, Twitter and otherwise, around the world. For all our technological advances, it's the emotional connection that makes the sale these days.
14 February 2010
Style.com did not review the Fall 2010 menswear collections. Please enjoy the photos, and stay tuned for our complete coverage of the Spring 2011 collections, including reviews of each show by Tim Blanks.
8 February 2010
Marc Jacobs is tired of seeing young girls wearing black and studs. "It's not such an individual expression," he said after his terrific Spring show, the underlying message of which could've been, duh, be an individual. "If last season was a trip back in time to the eighties," he continued, "this was a trip to the theater, the ballet, the opera." But which shows?Some sawThe King and Iin the models' topknots, pointy upturned-toe platform sandals, and Aladdin pants, but it could just as well have been something else. The references, as usual, came at head-spinning speed. There were touches of Zandra Rhodes in the petal-y handkerchief dresses dotted with pearls, and nods in the direction of Jacobs' beloved Japanese designers, especially Rei Kawakubo, in the form of brown and navy suits tweaked with curlicue ruffles. And don't forget the all-Americanisms; Jacobs loves sportswear, both the twisted and the traditional variety.The show opened with an example of the latter, an almost conventional raincoat belted high above the waist, made strange by the model's Kabuki makeup. Later, Jacobs teamed trim military jackets with long, full skirts and others so short they looked like tufts of ruffles. But there were also zany lamé dresses; lace openwork coats and suits in white and black sequins; a retro silk satin underwear-as-outerwear moment; and sparkly, leg-baring evening numbers that looked like they'd walked right off the stage of a Broadway production and onto the street.The girls carried big woven bags on long straps, some with foot-long fringe, and a fanny pack made an unlikely appearance, too. That's what's so genius about Jacobs. He can take the most uncool accessory, spin it around, and give it instant fashion cred. Likewise, he can pull references from everywhere and nowhere, and, filtered through his febrile imagination, they have the shock of the new. This show didn't hold together the way his brilliant collection of a year ago did, but that may have been the point. In any case, Jacobs might say, it beats another tired lineup of black leather and studs.
13 September 2009
As ever at Marc Jacobs, the references and ideas came fast and furious. You could see Old Hollywood in the cropped jackets worn with bathing suit tops and high-waisted satin shorts, a touch of chinoiserie in the silk lamé pajama sets, perhaps a bit of Carmen Miranda in the toucan-print wrap dresses, and even a little of his home away from home, Paris, in themarinièretunic sweaters accented with flowers at the shoulder. The overall effect? Bright, upbeat, and equally suited for island or city. Jacobs also reworked the gold lamé micro-mini toga dress that Kate Moss wore to the Met gala. And why not? If there was ever a frock more likely to sell out, we can't think of it. As for the shoes (super-high wooden platform T-straps and sandals, some with floral appliqués) and the bags (including ones trimmed in semiprecious stones the size of gumballs), the covetability factor was plenty high, too.
3 June 2009
Leave it to Marc Jacobs to deliver a neon-hued, big-shouldered, crimpy-haired eighties antidote to the gloom and doom of 2009. "I was thinking about the good old days in New York," he said after the show, "when getting dressed up was such a joy." By the good old days, Jacobs means the nights he spent at clubs like Area, the Palladium, and Paradise Garage. Maybe it was the recent Stephen Sprouse project he completed at Louis Vuitton, or perhaps it's the fact that he now lives in Paris full time, but his Fall show was a big, juicy nostalgic kiss to a city that doesn't really exist anymore.The show started simply enough, with a gray cardigan sweater and charcoal trousers, but when the model walked past, you saw the back half of a kilt and braces—Jacobs' new uniform—and knew it was going to get personal. He worked his way through little silver-and-black A-line shifts; party dresses in metallic leathers and floral brocades with flaring, full skirts and monster shoulders; velvet bustier tops and high-waisted over-dyed jeans; and Crayola-bright jackets, capes, and hooded coats. The only filter that separated these clothes from their East Village forebears was the expensive, luxury fabrics they came in. Every girl had a different hairdo, shellacked into Mohawks, flips, and bouffants, and the makeup was straight off the album cover of Duran Duran'sRio. The cumulative effect of all that color, volume, and optimism? One editor called it "A Flock of Seagulls meets Alexis Carrington."Will fashion as outrageously ebullient as this—in some cases, make that just plain outrageous—sell in the harsh reality of the late aughts? (And talking about harsh: More than 1,000 people were nixed from the invitation list this season in a cost-cutting slash and burn.) Jacobs insists that he wasn't thinking about the economy when he was working on the collection, and maybe he wasn't. These days, wagering that women will splash out on feel-good clothes is as good a bet as any.
15 February 2009
Mary Poppins goes to Dubai.The King and ImeetsThe Postman Always Rings Twice. Yves Saint Laurent's Ballets Russes collection redux. There are as many meanings to derive from a Marc Jacobs collection as there are crashers at his shows. But listen to the litany that Jacobs himself provided after all 53 of his Spring looks—each one more colorful, more multilayered, and more zanily accessorized than the last—had circled his Stefan Beckman-designed Hall of Mirrors runway: "America, womanly, Broadway, Perry Ellis, country, naïveté…"It was a mash-up to end all mash-ups, and as an American in Paris—that was Gershwin's "Rhapsody in Blue" cleverly playing on the soundtrack—Jacobs is better situated than most to deliver it. He's developed an expat's eye, and could it be that he actually misses the States? In any case, he sees a certain beauty here. Take the fourth look: There was the prairie skirt provocatively bustled turn-of-the-century style, a gingham shirt, a Lurex-shot plaid sash that winked at both the frontier West and his own grunge collection for Perry Ellis, a metallic tweed motorcycle jacket, and, for accessories—ka-ching—a crushed-straw hat, a chunky necklace, and a quilted chain-link bag. Athletic references appeared elsewhere in the form of wide stripes on a pair of sundresses and Lurex-ribbed knit sweaters with baseball jersey-style contrasting sleeves. And mixed in among all the electric colors and the shiny bits were peaked-shouldered black jackets and vests worn with wide-leg trousers cropped below the knee.This season, nothing escaped Jacobs' roving eye or his melting-pot mentality. And in his hands even a thing like a farm-girl apron gets tweaked and reinterpreted until, impossibly, it becomes the very definition of contemporary chic. "It's about the joy of dressing up," he finally said backstage. And how.
7 September 2008
"Unfortunately, it's extremely timely," Marc Jacobs said of his Yves Saint Laurent-inflected Resort collection. Nods to the master were evident in the piped robe-style pieces—offered in a deep, exotic palette of magenta, green, and royal blue—as well as in the outsize heart necklaces. (There were heart prints and appliqués, too: For resort, Jacobs is clearly a lover, not a fighter.) The collection wasn't an homage per se, as everything was filtered through Jacobs' sensibility, which is ever on the pulse and not without humor. "If Yves Saint Laurent designed Escada, it might look like this," he joked.
2 June 2008
For fall, Marc Jacobs envisioned what he calls the Modern Urban Nomad, a man who's never in one place too long and is able to ship out quickly. You know, the type whose nationality takes a backseat to his business card (though Mr. Jacobs seemed to be looking even farther afield, to the day when a tattooed bar code will replace that business card). Jacobs' basics-heavy set gave classics a mix-and-match approach—a topcoat in mustard-yellow with cotton twill sleeves—and proportions were playful (think oversize jackets paired with skinny long john–style sweatpants). Those sweats were met mid-calf by lug-soled, zip-front combat boots produced in LVMH compatriot Berluti's factory, and they exemplified the collection's rugged elegance. The outerwear continued the theme, especially the smartly shrunken boiled-wool army field coat, an extra-wide-lapelled peacoat, and a very roomy nylon parka. Another notable group featured "recycled" knitwear, including cashmere sweaters whose ribbing was adorned with spray-paint-like effects, and pieces with duct tape–like appliqués along the seams. Both were meant to look reappropriated—a fitting trait for our uncertain moment.
6 March 2008
"We're ready, we're ready to start the show." That was Marc Jacobs himself, addressing the audience from the stage (stage, not runway) at 7:11 p.m. At 7:17, as Kevin Federline was still taking his seat in one of the makeshift, nightclub-style VIP booths not far from Selma Blair, Gretchen Mol, and Helena Christensen, Sonic Youth struck the first dissonant chord of "Jams Run Free," and Jacobs' first model walked out past the band. She wore a shawl-collar pouch-back coat in a shade that looked like camel, although we can't say for sure, concert lighting not being the best kind to illuminate such details. (One thing was immediately clear—whether he shows on a Friday or a Monday, it's always going to be an event.)The day switch and that revolutionary mere-17-minutes-behind-schedule start time weren't the only changes since last season. If Spring was all about sex, overt sex specifically, this show—his old friend Kim Gordon's gyrations notwithstanding—had a willfully sedate quality.Afterward, when asked about his inspirations, Jacobs replied, "I really wasn't very inspired this season. I just live my life." OK. When pressed, he offered a few more words: "Calm. Glamour. Casual. Beautiful women." Vague as that sounds, it was in fact an apt description for a collection that hinted at the eighties of Jacobs' early days in New York. It was there in the puffy headbands the models wore around their foreheads and the clubby atmosphere inside the Armory (some said it gave them Regine's, though the set's menacing scaffolding and the unsettling black-and-white images that played on a screen behind the band also suggested a more downtown environment). And it was there in the palette of soft pastels and grays and the relaxed (in terms of shape, not sensibility), somewhat masculine cut of the classic clothes.Jacobs showed plain-front button-downs with straight skirts; almost preppy popcorn-knit sweaters with narrow shorts; a cashmere sweater that spelled out HARDCORE paired with baggy leather pants; and a thigh-length bomber over a full, shin-grazing skirt. But his big focus was jackets and coats, many of which came with vertical folds of fabric gathered in the back above wide, hip-slung sashes. Dresses, too, came with pronounced volumes at the back. For evening, their stiff folds were replaced by gold or silver lamé pantsuits (paging Loulou de la Falaise) and drippy bias-cut velvet gowns.
Was this collection, in its relative tameness and intriguing air of sexless safety, a rebuff of sorts to last season's detractors, who reprimanded Jacobs as much for his off-the-wall collection as for his perennial lateness? Could be. These clothes are challenging for different reasons than were the difficult transparent pieces he featured for Spring, but they'll be no less coveted. As for the show's accessories, women everywhere will have Jacobs to thank when other designers follow his lead and start producing a lower heel. That's the power of Jacobs' mystique.
7 February 2008
At 11 p.m., precisely two hours after his official starting time, Marc Jacobs surprised his audience by running out onto his Stefan Beckman-designed set for a quick bow. Next came the music, Ravel'sBoléro, and out filed the models in finale formation. Then here was the first girl (or rather the last, because by now it was clear this extraordinary show was unspooling backward, starting with look 56 and running down to one). She wore a "silly-string guipure gown," her satin under-things peeking out and her heels perched on top of her "too-small pumps." Behind her, an image of the model in nothing but the bra and panties she wore underneath her outfit was projected on two large screens.Jacobs collaborated with the video artist Charles Atlas to create the film that played simultaneously with the show. They shot the piece Sunday evening, and Atlas spent the whole night in the editing booth finishing it. As for the clothes and accessories, they were just as off-kilter and knock-your-socks-off as the production, with a bonkers surrealist streak. Trompe l'oeil underwear decorated georgette slipdresses, the heels of pumps protruded not from the heel at all but from the ball of the foot, and three-dimensional quilted leather bags were grafted onto square totes. Transparency was a key theme, too: Cashmere sweaters were inset with sheer panels at the waist, and reconstructed black bugle-bead evening dresses came suspended from their nude linings. Gimmicky? You bet. But also fascinating. If you want normal or tame, you're going to have to look on a different runway. Even the suits came with hip-high slits—though, this being Jacobs, the effect was just as often gawky and awkward as it was provocative.So what was it all about? With most of the models in varying stages of dishabille, Jacobs appeared to be saying something conceptual about the process of getting dressed—or getting undressed—but he was typically vague backstage. "It's cartoon versions of all the women I know—conservative types, vamps, everybody," he allowed. From the looks of two number-emblazoned team-jersey T-shirt dresses that appeared on his runway, there are footballers' wives in the designer's inner circle along with all of those rockers and artists. One thing's for certain: He's moved on from last season's bourgeois austerity. This sublime performance was about sex, which is one of the reasons why we couldn't look away.
9 September 2007
The seventies, a favorite Marc Jacobs reference, were the designer's touchstone once again for resort. A bold geometric print in mustard, orange, and purple was one part Marimekko, another part folk, and Jacobs' flapper dress owed as much to the "Charlie girl" as Clara Bow. A series of floaty chiffon tunics, meanwhile, evoked Halston in his heyday and Studio 54.
28 June 2007
When the red velvet curtain finally opened, Marc Jacobs' 56 models were arrayed tableau vivant-style in front of an enormous set of French doors—the kind you might see in a Paris salon. What you noticed first were the hats. Multicolored, with knit crowns, and short or wide brims, they made the gangly teenage girls onstage hold themselves like proper ladies. Yes, fashion's favorite change agent was at it again.Last season's billowy layers were nowhere in sight. The collection began with a long coat, ribbed sweater, and trousers with loose stirrups that gave them a clean, sharp line. Moving on, Jacobs showed printed satin and matte jersey shirtdresses to the mid-calf, and belted alpaca tunics over slim cropped pants and knee-length skirts. There were jumpsuits straight out of the seventies. "I wanted something narrower," said the designer, describing the show's new silhouette. Duchesse satin minidresses were cut trim and A-line with a fringe of pleats at the hem, or they came draped, wrapped, and sashed from the shoulders.This was American sportswear, but with a European sense of impeccability. Some might call it "grown-up." Jacobs, explaining that the collection is a reflection of what's going on with him personally, called it restraint. (Though the term can hardly be used to describe the show's stacks of plastic bangles and Bakelite-heavy handbags.) One look at the designer and you're reminded that he's been spending time at the gym—those were pecs beneath his crisp blue shirt. The experiments with volume that he's been focused on in the last several collections have now gone the way of his extra weight. It might take a season for designers who've followed his lead before to catch on. But less, when it looks this chic, really is more.
4 February 2007
Pachelbel's Canon, even Brian Eno's version, isn't the sort of music you expect at a runway show. And a bucolic backdrop of rolling hills behind a catwalk that, in turn, was painted lawn green and elevated over a river of mint candies isn't the kind of setting you see every day of fashion week, either. But Marc Jacobs has such a surfeit of cool, he got away with both—and then some—at a spring show that was strangely beautiful (as ever), if a little esoteric.Backstage, he was mum on literal inspirations, speaking instead of "light, kindness, peace, and generosity." The light part made a sort of sense. Jacobs' palette consisted of white, cream, black for contrast, and ombréd grays, with flashes of brilliant holographic sequins. And from a shirred tulle bomber jacket with a furlike appearance to a drop-waist tiered lace dress that evoked Poiret, there was a certain romance to the collection. Layered jersey tees, billowing brushstroke-stripe silk dresses, and deconstructedà la japonaisecashmeres had an appealing softness.But was there substance beneath the whimsy? Many of these clothes—theArabian Nightsharem pants, for example, or the tulip pants that he showed unbuttoned up the side—will be a hard sell. On the other hand, the trio of understated-by-comparison T-shirt dresses and the bags—metallic leathers and exotic skins studded with crystals as big as the bulbs on an old Times Square marquee—should keep the faithful happy. Those items are the grounding forces that allow Jacobs to indulge his flights of fancy.
10 September 2006
You know this much about Marc Jacobs: You never know what he'll do next. Replacing the Nittany Lions marching band and his spring parade of high-school good girls gone bad were Philip Glass' symphonyHeroesand a troupe of vagabonds in muted layers of plaid flannel, oversize knits, skirts worn atop pants, legwarmers, and tams whose cumulative effect was paradoxically chic.When pressed for details backstage, Jacobs was vague. "It's about the places I've been, the people I know, world leaders, and winter," he said. The one word he didn't use, though it was uttered by many in the audience, was grunge. Was this a reprise of the seminal collection that lost him his job at Perry Ellis back in 1992? Jacobs wasn't saying. But you saw elements of it in the flannel that was repurposed as strapless dresses, the sweaters that dragged along the knees, and the pants that were so puffy they looked as though they required their own hand pump. (Somewhere, Kal Ruttenstein, the man who famously championed that controversial collection and to whom Jacobs dedicated this show, was smiling.) Come evening, the designer's gorgeous urchins wore black net and metallic sequin dresses distressed to the point of tatters. In the midst of all this were eminently functional, not to mention desirable, coats, capes, shawls, and jackets. And, of course, superluxe bags; this wouldn't be a Jacobs runway without them.Jacobs is making a habit of 180-degree reversals—gloomy one season, polished and upbeat the next, and now, for fall, disheveled once again. It's remarkable how a man who claimed post-show that he "didn't know what to do" can be full of such captivating ideas.
5 February 2006
When the clock struck 8 on Monday night, Marc Jacobs, his clothes, and his models had been in the ready position for a good half hour. As waiters passed around chilled bottles of Perrier, the designer's publicists joked that, in a break from tradition, it would be the editors and retailers who held up the show (for this season, at least). And what a show it was. At 8:25, after the last of the fabulous and tardy scooted in (yes, Lindsay Lohan and Lil' Kim, we're talking to you), the Penn State Blue Band marched onto the runway and broke into a rendition of Nirvana's "Smells Like Teen Spirit" that had everyone dancing in their seats.It's the fifth time the designer has included the iconic song on his runway soundtrack. Why the repetition? "Because it's the anthem of teenage angst," he said backstage. The designer, well beyond his teens, doesn't have much to be angsty about these days, but he's never met a girl who smoked in the school bathroom who he didn't like. The show started off with a series of uniforms, and if Snejana's black gabardine jumper and white cotton shirt spelled teacher's pet, Anouck's windbreaker and pleated skirt with net slip peaking out from underneath spelled troublemaker. From there, he moved on to what he called "blown-up American classics": Pea jackets, cashmere sweatshirts, and cuffed shorts were, like his voluminous Fall clothes, quite literally blown up, and looked puffed with air.After his directional fall collection, this Spring show could've been deflating. But Jacobs seemed determined not to let that happen. Showing slow-dance-appropriate silvery party dresses (several falling in tiers of lace or lamé to the floor) and then releasing a cascade of glittering confetti made everyone in the house—jaded front row included—feel like prom kings and queens for a day.
11 September 2005
Backstage after his show, in between greeting such well-wishers as Rachel Feinstein and Debbie Harry, Marc Jacobs rattled off quite a list of talking points, from T.J. Wilcox'sGarlandsinstallation at Metro Pictures to Violet, the sullen superhero teenager ofThe Incredibles, to Edward Gorey. Toss in some "fashion editors in their minimalist black periods and Romeo Gigli shoes," and you have an approximation of his wide-ranging fall collection. It was quite a ride—made all the more surreal by a one-and-a-half-hour delay—and a much darker one than last season.The show started off on a somber note with nubby black jackets and midcalf-length navy skirts that floated mysteriously around the models' legs, as if they'd been pumped up with air. Volume, and experimenting with it, became a recurring motif. Trapeze coats swung from shoulders; floral-print dresses ballooned behind Vlada and Lily as they tromped down the runway; and one moiré dress tented out beneath a chevron-striped mink coat. Another theme was embellishment. Rosettes adorned everything from the bust of a strapless velvet dress to a tweed muffler; tattered collars decorated jackets; and cardigans and knit caps were veiled with lace. But despite the parade of party dresses, some in black point d'esprit and others with flashes of colorful silk, it wasn't all girly, all the time. There's room in Jacobs' story for a tomboy or two, and they were dressed the part in rugby-striped sweaters that brought his grunge collection to mind.Overall, however, these were clothes for girls who lead fairy tale lives, and quite a few of them—Uma Thurman, Drew Barrymore, Lisa Marie, and Lil' Kim included—were on hand to enjoy the spectacle.
6 February 2005
Jennifer Lopez, Lil' Kim, Steven Tyler and daughter Liv, Perry Farrell, Kate Hudson, a few off-duty models, andbothOlsen twins. Marc Jacobs may have the most exciting front row of New York's Fashion Week, but he doesn't let it distract him from the work at hand—as his electric Spring collection proved.Jacobs sent out supersaturated, eye-delighting tones like parrot blue, azure, yellow, hot pink, and royal purple, often in the same outfit. With his irrefutable confidence, Jacobs can make colors that might ordinarily be at odds seem perfectly natural and a perfectly chic combination; an azure cardigan with a deep-navy brocade skirt, or a navy and white polka dot cardigan over fuchsia trousers. And in a season of hues that sometimes border on the anemic, it felt like a trip to the tropics.Jacobs put those shades to work in first-rate sportswear that's destined to influence the look of the streets next spring. He showed extra-full trousers worn low with wide white belts, rolled to mid-calf and paired with teetering spectator pumps. Those, and the swirly, swinging skirts, were balanced on top with boxy jackets and coats, or skinny little knits layered in various color and pattern combinations. His dresses, which hung loose from the shoulders and barely grazed the body on the way down, were shaped with meandering seams and often worn atop fluffy petticoats. And for those party moments, he reprised the shredded-and-stitched organza ruffle dresses of last year, this time decorated so densely they looked like the plumage of a bird of paradise.
12 September 2004
Sending Gisele Bündchen out to open and close your show is not the gesture of someone who shies from the spotlight. Coming from Marc Jacobs, it seemed a declaration of a new direction: After spending the first ten years at his own label as the indie/artsy crowd's favorite designer, he’s itching to move over into the multimillion-dollar mainstream. And why not? If knockoffs are the opinion polls of fashion, he’s won by a landslide, season after season.Adept as he is at reading his customer's mind, Jacobs knows she doesn't take well to dictates; her closet is her playground. For spring, she's got a proper/naughty thing going on: sort ofMona Lisa SmilemeetsSecretary. (Wait, isn't that Maggie Gyllenhaal in the front row?) The proper showed up as elegant fit-and-flare tweed skirts, printed and pin-tucked silk blouses, lace-covered dresses, and great tweedy coats with just-so mink collars, all in superb fabrics and whispery soft colors like cream, mint, turquoise, and icy blue. And the naughty? That would be the earsplitting Distillers soundtrack, the saucy plunge necklines, and the teetering Vargas Girl pumps that gave the models' runway walks a hip-swiveling come-hither attitude. Jacobs' eveningwear gets more sophisticated each season, and this time he recalled Hollywood at its height; his gowns were tumbling cascades of chiffon or charmeuse in jewel tones that polished off the show, literally.
8 February 2004
Packed onto metal bleachers, waiting late into the night in a sweltering auditorium, fanning themselves with damp program notes—it would have taken quite a presentation to lift the weary spirits of the audience members at Marc Jacobs. Instead of rousing the crowd with a high-energy sequel to his color-packed, tightly constructed Fall show, however, Jacobs soothed the savage mood with a sweet confection of a collection, full of pretty clothes and gentle colors.It didn’t hurt that the first model out was the rarely sighted Gisele (greeted like a returning rock star), or that Beyoncé was on the soundtrack, or that the clothes were easy to like. Jacobs started his design career at Perry Ellis, whose insouciant take on sportswear and relaxed tailoring defined an era, and tonight he scattered references to Ellis throughout. Loose, menswear-tailored linen trousers and rolled-up seersucker shorts were worn with soft ballerina-wrap cashmere sweaters, or striped silk shirts feminized with scraps of ruffle. Deep-blue chenille was knitted wittily into “denim” jackets and coats, sometimes worn with slim cropped tuxedo pants.Of course, there was plenty of present-day Jacobs, too. Lovely floral sundresses came in pinks and aquas, panne velvet skirts in muted blues and greens. There were gauzy sheer dresses with pintucking and stacks of rough-edged ruffles, a wonderful gilded trench coat, and a few saucy, sequined minis. And when Gisele closed the night in a swishy pink gown, the roar of applause showed that all was forgiven.
14 September 2003
The Marc Jacobs collection is a high point of the show calendar, and not just because the designer's front row is always packed with celebrities (this time: P. Diddy, Liv Tyler, Kristin Davis, Claire Danes, and regulars like Michelle Hicks, Anna Sui, and Helena Christensen). Jacobs has firmly established himself as fashion's bellwether, with an audience that looks to him to pluck out the prevailing trends and decree them relevant.This season, Jacobs is clearly feeling very mod. His show, set to churning punk rock (X-Ray Spex's "Oh Bondage" kicked off the soundtrack), was a color-splashed paean to pop, with overt references to the sixties space-age designs of Courrèges, Paco Rabanne, and Rudi Gernreich. Minidresses and jumpers in various patchwork combinations of orange, blue, beige, white, pink, violet, and red came dashing down the runway, detailed with felted seams and circle pockets and worn with contrasting hose and sweet little pumps. His silver fur-trimmed parka and boxy wool jackets are destined to displace the peacoat as next season's must-have outerwear.Even the evening looks kept the beat. Jacobs showed black and white satin minis with piped seams, as well as a few literally swinging dresses featuring ropes of giant sequins or slashed fabric sewn into a drooping bell. It was cheerful and chock-full of energy and color; but all the literal references to past fashions verged on re-creation, rather than the renewal for which Jacobs is justly famous.
9 February 2003
Hard and soft, past and present, good girl and bad girl—Marc Jacobs loves to play with opposites. For Spring, he worked all those elements together into a collection that was sweet but with a hint of a hard edge—like a debutante who knows the bartender's name, or like Exene Cervenka, the lead singer of L.A. punk band X, whose songs made up the bulk of the night's soundtrack.Part of the season's interesting dichotomy came from the silhouette: Jacobs cut a more frankly feminine shape than he has in the recent past, with deep necklines on full-skirted dresses, body-hugging sheaths under boxy jackets, and snug pencil skirts or cigarette pants paired with sexy camisole tops. And part of it was his flower-garden color choices: soft pink, lavender, pale yellow, orange, chartreuse, and ivory. For even greater contrast, he manipulated soft, airy fabrics like satin, lace, and cashmere against dense ribbed ottoman, nubby, Chanel-evoking tweeds, and silk shantung.Jacobs brings in retro references both obliquely and directly; this season, he picked up bits from the cocktail-shaker days of the fifties and sixties: tiny bows and rolled collars, woozy polka-dot prints, "cocktail" dresses made from lace and satin. But despite its knowing dalliance with the past, this was a collection rooted very firmly in the here and now.
17 September 2002
For many at Marc Jacobs' show tonight, it was hard to forget that the last time this gathering took place was September 10. And while some of the outer trappings were the same—the star-studded front row included the likes of Anthony Kiedis, Sofia Coppola, and Kirsten Dunst—a sense of how things have changed permeated the event. The colorful high spirits of Jacobs' Spring collection have gone, replaced by subdued, achingly beautiful designs that are bound to be among the season's most coveted.This was a delicate, even ethereal collection that made judicious use of Edwardian touches—seen in the velvet skirts and sheer black tea gowns—and military details like reverse lapels and piping on tailored trousers. The silhouette was long and lean, and most looks were made up of multiple layers—a dress over a T-shirt and trousers, with a waistcoat, for example. But Jacobs balanced his fabrics perfectly, ballasting the featherweight chiffons, cashmeres, crinkly lamé and satin with velveteen, crisp cotton, brocade, and cavalry twill. The palette was limited to shades of ivory and khaki, with occasional shots of azure, wine, or crimson—mostly looks for women, with about a quarter devoted to his growing menswear line.Like a sunny Sunday morning after a long Saturday night, the collection was lovely, if slightly tinged with melancholy. But if the silver-sequined dazzler of a dress that closed the show is any indication, Jacobs is more than ready for all tomorrow's parties.
10 February 2002
After Marc Jacobs' high-powered presentation, it's official: Spring is all about color. Designers are staging a backlash against fall's somber mood, and Jacobs is spearheading it.Using a long pier off Manhattan's Meatpacking District as his runway, Jacobs presented what is sure to become one of the season's most influential collections. Lilac shirts, marigold pants, dandelion sweaters, and sweet tulip-print dresses brought to mind a Berkeley student listening to Donovan or the Strawberry Alarm Clock in the late sixties—if flower children had ever displayed such a witty way with proportions and chromatic combinations. Mack-daddy suits with wide lapels, plenty of topstitching, and generous bell-bottoms were worn with pale plum shirts; a folksy collage jacket was trimmed with vivid printed bands and paired with a blueberry suede skirt. Rainbow jersey dresses, floral-print halters, and petal-embroidered shirts were simultaneously sweet and mischievous.When the show ended to thunderous applause, a faux backstage wall magically parted, allowing guests like Sarah Jessica Parker, Gretchen Mol, Hilary Swank, Lisa Marie, Donald Trump, and Monica Lewinsky to venture into the backroom. Jacobs had created an elaborate party space overlooking the Hudson River, complete with grass-covered floors, picnic tables overflowing with fresh fruit, and even a fire boat that sprayed jets of water in the distance.
9 September 2001
Gone were all of Spring’s campy, sugar-coated references to the clubby ’80s at Marc Jacobs. In their stead, Jacobs went for quirkily tailored clothes that gently touched upon—and promptly subverted—fashion’s recurring ladylike motifs with playful details and an unforced spirit of innocence.With a knowing wink to Patrick Kelly, that other famous American Francophile, Jacobs gave a lively twist to his boiled-twill suits, silk jackets, and cashmere coats using oversized, childlike buttons. The effect was that of a young girl trying on her older sister’s clothes, yet somehow making them all her own. Colorful trompe l’oeil lapels, ribbons, collars, and trims on simple georgette tops and dresses all added to the general feeling of naive elegance. With bunny-and-flower-print dresses and a stunning yellow mohair and sequin coat, Jacobs provided welcome relief from the self-consciously glammed-up evening looks that dominate most runways.
11 February 2001
It was a treat to see Marc Jacobs having a blast with his signature line, which cheekily referenced his early so-hip-it-hurts Danceteria days.To a blaring soundtrack, a gaggle of giddy, '80s-inspired homecoming queens strutted their stuff: ruched jersey drawstring tops with punky poplin skirts, wide belts with studs and pastel appliqués, twill baggy shorts, and mile-high mesh stilettos. One-shoulder striped tees in fuchsia and black, which could have been worn by Pat Benatar circa '83, looked fresh once again; leather bustiers and jackets with bright piping and pastel shell-shaped appliqués were campy, lighthearted and fun.Then again, if you already lived firsthand through the stylistic excesses of the early to mid-'80s, you may not be ready for a full-blown Fiorucci revival. Relax, you need not hunt for your collection of neon bows and gummy bracelets. Look past the Valley Girl styling and you'll discover plenty of wearable, grown-up pieces in Jacobs' collection, like sharply cut cotton trousers, double-layered skirts and a beautiful canary-yellow silk paper taffeta dress. A flocked-tulle confabulation could be worn with equal ease by a daring prom queen or a fashion-savvy girl-about-town.
17 September 2000
Marc Jacobs continued doing what he does best: reinterpreting classic favorites with a refined, self-effacing skill. This time around, '70s wardrobe favorites—head-to-toe looks that call to mind a sophisticated feminist art dealer with a penchant for the organic—underwent his skillful surgical treatment. Jacobs turned out a series of accurate tweed suits with leather trim, cashmere-starved schoolgirl double-faced shift dresses, and sporty jackets embellished with buttons, oddly reminiscent of a subdued, time-warped Patrick Kelly. For the final portion of the show, Jacobs departed from his easygoing motif and ventured into a series of delicate, grown-up mille-feuille organza skirts, textured silk shirts, and ultra-light faille dresses in brick, grape, salmon, and rust.
6 February 2000
Marc Jacobs has long been a fashion-insider favorite, and with his collection, shown late Monday night at the New York Armory, he once again proved why. His Spring 2000 line is sure to become one of the most important collections of the season. The mood of the clothes was evocative of a California surfer girl on holiday in a Parisian discotheque circa 1979: canvas trousers with green and red piping were paired with poor boy cashmere T-shirts; Nimes denim pants, sundresses, and skirtsuits looked crisp and fresh with striped gauze tops. The clean and simple lines were thrown occasional accents—like paillette trimming on green cotton satin pea jackets, spotted dresses, and striped trousers. The overall feeling: effortless, understated chic.
12 September 1999