Marta Jakubowski (Q3316)
Jump to navigation
Jump to search
Marta Jakubowski is a fashion house from FMD.
| Language | Label | Description | Also known as |
|---|---|---|---|
| English | Marta Jakubowski |
Marta Jakubowski is a fashion house from FMD. |
Statements
Marta Jakubowski’s notes told of a strong woman striding out “with determination in her step.” Making the best of a bleak situation is self-evidently the theme of our times. This young feminist’s recommendation is that we might do it while armed with lavender power-shoulders, multi-draped tailoring, and minds fixed on Marlene Dietrich. It’s always good to think about Dietrich at any time, but especially now: a self-invented goddess of high glamour and gender transgressor who rose above the horrors of fascism and war in Europe. For Jakubowski, who is Polish but was raised in Germany before coming to finish her education at the Royal College of Art in London, Dietrich might have a special resonance; her reinterpretation of Dietrich’s classic movie star gowns concluded the show.Technical cutting skills are very much a strength of German fashion education, and Jakubowski has always used hers to subvert generic wardrobe templates. Sometimes that can lead her into a state where there’s just too much going on to offer her peers the easy solutions needed for getting on with life. When she calms it down—as she did with a white tuxedo coat-dress, for example—the clarity shows her potential. What so many designers miss is the wide-open goal which yawns in the space Phoebe Philo once occupied at Celine. Disenfranchised Philophiles have money and very few young places to spend it. As soon as designers like Jakubowski wake up to the fact that they could fill in some of that gap, the better all round. In her case, trying just a little less hard could help her make her own strides forward.
14 September 2019
Marta Jakubowski quoted from the French feminist writer Hélène Cixous in her program notes, which caused some postshow scrambling to catch up on her post-structuralist theory. It seems, though one may stand corrected, that the reason Jakubowski’s models had exotic flowers in their mouths was tied to a line from Cixous’s “The Laugh of the Medusa”: “She spits Anthuriums. She will not be silenced.”Truth told, you wished she hadn’t felt the need to go that literal, because it was a distraction from some of the interesting, layered, wrapped cutting that was going on. It acted as London’s first commentary on the much-anticipated comeback of tailoring for women, a mirroring of the movement that has gained momentum in the men’s shows. So does she feel it’s a time for tailoring? “I always feel it’s time for tailoring!” She laughed. “I wanted to go back and concentrate on what I like and enjoy.”Jakubowski, who is Polish-born, received her first training at a highly technical German fashion school before finishing her studies in form at the Royal College of Art. German-trained pattern cutters have a reputation for excellence and precision—and that skill has given Jakubowski the ability to take her shears to reinventing coats, jackets, and pantsuits. In a way, it puts her on the same page as some of the designers in New York who’ve been slicing coats into panels, and of Kim Jones, who swathed a sash across his men’s coats. She said she wanted to “show that women can’t be stereotyped”—a pushback, no doubt, against the cliché of career power-suiting.Some of it erred on the side of too much complication—ease of wear is a prime source of empowerment, after all—but Jakubowski is to be commended for turning to explore this long-neglected subject.
15 February 2019
Marta Jakubowski was running around backstage looking healthy in a strappy black dress, her summer tan still with her. The Polish-born designer in London is a millennial, and with this collection, she went all out to reclaim the fun parts of what that means: “I was thinking about being a teenager in the summer in the 2000s, the feeling of wearing those clothes back then.” Dancing and partying clothes, then—a collection equipped with plenty of devices for accidental-on-purpose flashes of flesh.Capri pants and stretch bootlegs, a camisole top and a corset, and plenty of body-con dresses pretty much summed it up. No one would want to be a killjoy of that kind of nostalgia. For all kinds of reasons, there’s a millennial hunger for escapism now. Still, anyone who’s tracked Jakubowski since she graduated from the RCA might be confused by her pivot to playful pastiche. Where she began, her work stood out for its strong, slightly conceptual cutting with subtly erotic, feminist undertones. That connection evaporated this summer. Perhaps it was the heat, but it would be nice to see Jakubowski getting back onto that forward-looking track next season.
15 September 2018
The unstoppable march of the power woman just hit London in its Wonderbra-beneath-executive-tailoring, high-’90s phase. Marta Jakubowski dealt with full-on supers-throwback wattage—inasmuch as a designer who was a girl at the time can romanticize it. “It’s the way my mother liked to dress when I was a kid,” she said. “That’s probably when I realized what fashion is.” And then, she suddenly almost started sounding like a mini Donna Karan as she considered the implications of designing for empowerment from the inside, “I’m a woman. We are casual, but we also work. So sometimes we need clothes that are practical, chic, and feminine.”She’d seen it through with the casting and the choreography—all bouncy hair, lipsticked smiles, and hands-on-hips eyes-to-camera old-school “modelly” modeling. That’s precisely the opposite of how models have been instructed to behave for roughly 25 years, so kudos to these girls who pulled it off, presumably after intensive YouTube immersion in some of the great super-sisters performances at Versace, Chanel, Ferré, and the like. A pair of girls, maybe channeling Pat Cleveland in their big-shouldered beige coats and jackets, really hit that mark.But what about the resonance of the clothes? Can reclaimed executive-feminist uniforms have a second life in the era of #MeToo? Well, at a moment when hidden pay discrimination against women is coming to light—a fact impacting ’90s moms as much as their daughters—it’s going to take much more than the raised voices of fashion to sort this out. Nevertheless, the retrofitting of “uncool” fashion ideas by and for a new generation is one of the established methods du jour. At some point, working women actually believed things had been sorted out. It is, at the least, encouraging to see the battles of 30 years of non-parity being reflected in the mirror of fashion.
16 February 2018
A single spotlight, picking out a vixenish girl with a short, tight skirt and stilettos at the end of a runway: What can that possibly evoke, other than the show-style of Tom Ford in his Gucci years? Marta Jakubowski’s show—her runway debut—was the first in London to go there with the aughts revival. Through her eyes, though, there’s no parody or campness about it. In this reverb of that lost time of fabulosity, it’s a young woman who sees a need to bring sexy back, and that’s a bit different.If you think about it, who has put any belief into evening tailoring for women in the past decade? It’s been printed or lacy cocktail and evening gowns for as long as 25- to 30-year-olds can remember, and that must mean it’s getting old. Meanwhile, the token alternatives, sporadically offered, have been variations on Le Smoking, perhaps in jumpsuit form, but more ordinarily, as jacketed pantsuit two-pieces. Classic is what it’s called. Even women who resort to nighttime tailoring know that masculine-feminine is a cliché which hasn’t been fundamentally renewed since Saint Laurent coined the style in the second half of the last century.No big claims that Marta Jakubowski is a fledgling Saint Laurent, or a second Tom Ford here, but nevertheless, the technical and emotional validity of her merging of drape and tailoring in the same garment is an eye-opening possibility. She’s the first woman designer in a long time to tailor with enthusiasm—the last were Jil Sander and Ann Demeulemeester, and they’re retired now.Jakubowski, like both of those predecessors, comes from a European background—born in Poland, part-educated in Germany, she finished her schooling at London’s Royal College of Art. Her emergence as a new-generation feminist designer who is dealing with suiting and pencil skirts—not in a retro banker uniform way, but as something to go out and possibly dance in—is something to watch.
17 September 2017
Marta Jakubowski’s collection got an upgrade this season. With her slightly conceptualist bent for cutting coolly sculptural forms from jersey and velour, it’s not as if she has ever been neatly classifiable as a streetwear or club kid designer. This time, though, her decision to concentrate on tailoring more suited to eveningwear can be read as part of young London’s definite migration away from the realm of hoodies and track pants. Instead, the club that Jakubowski’s girl might be more likely to go to is Annabel’s in Berkeley Square—or, at least, the satin trousers backed with bustles puffed up with tulle would get her past any West End members’ club door policy.It’s a move that could win Jakubowski more customers. As one of the designers at the center of a group of fellow London graduates (she came from Germany—where she learned her pattern-cutting skills—to earn her master’s degree at the Royal College of Art), she subscribes to the city’s dress-up-and-be-damned resistance tendency in these hard times. Still, it was quite apparent on walking into her presentation that Jakubowski has not exactly turned to the right. Her set was a rainbow of satins, cascading from wall to floor: Symbolism impossible to miss.
22 February 2017