Two years ago, Marc Jacobs pitched out a through-the-looking-glass collection of doll-proportioned clothes under a gargantuan iteration of an everyday folding metal table and bunch of chairs, a work by the artist Robert Therrien. On Monday night, over to one side of the vast, bare-bones space of the Park Avenue Armory, there was a standard-issue, human-scale setup to match. Not art, just furniture, incongruously normie. It looked as if maybe someone had forgotten to put it away before the Jacobs show started. Maybe they simply had.
It’s an interesting connection between that table and these clothes, because Marc Jacobs has been in Wonderland for a few seasons, making garments swollen with great buboes of fabric and wadding that distended and deformed the body, like majestic mutants. They were wondrously otherworldly, outscale and, to most people, unwearable. Intentionally so. This collection, by contrast, brought Jacobs literally down to earth, taking his models off teetering platforms and into plain old high heels. They looked like sneakers in comparison, bottoming out models who marched in paucity rather than shuffling in cumbersome excess, hurtling by the audience in strict pencil skirts and little blouses, slim belts, zipped jackets, bag on the shoulder, ugly scrunchies in their hair.
That is kind of where Jacobs started out, as a kid designer dressing real people in timely iterations of New York cool. Memory was something he was connecting with for this collection – “memories shape, influence and inform”, Jacobs wrote to introduce the show. Later, a few phrases leapt out: “Who we are” was one. “What we create” was another. Jacobs cited a selection of past collections as influence, mostly stemming from the latter half of the 1990s – by Helmut Lang, Miuccia Prada and several of his own. All hewed close to an idea of American sportswear that we also all remember, clean lines and sharp colours and Kate Moss in an A-line skirt from about 30 years ago. That memory has only grown stronger.
But of course, memory is imperfect and gets twisted. So these clothes weren’t a precise redux. There were weird quirks and strange fits, and while nothing quite inflated to the velvet hunchbacks of Jacobs’ recent seasons, there was a discomfort to the normality of these clothes, their squared, off-the-body proportions, waistbands rising and falling but always jutting stiffly from the figure. Jacobs has always been an instinctive and entirely honest designer, reacting to his moods and the moods of the times. And normality seems pretty weird, right now.
Really, it all made you think of America – then and now. Of American icons and American iconography. One exit – a superb black slubbed tweed suit, below the knee, its shrunken jacket peeling away from the purest Persil-white shell-top (it had a sister, in blunt green and teal) flashed back to a fairly famous picture of Patsy Pulitzer (sister-in-law of Lilly) in a 1956 Chanel ‘after five’ suit lined in pristine pale satin. Jacobs was inspired by Helmut Lang’s version of that suit – after all, who dresses for ‘after five’ anymore? But even via memories of the French original, and an Austrian translation, it winds up distinctly American. You thought of Jackie Kennedy’s Chanel-ish suits, of Carolyn Bessette Kennedy’s ceaselessly regurgitated 90s cleanliness, even of Robert F Kennedy Jr – insomuch as that name has become a synonym for the weirdness that passes as normality right now, values upturned and truths challenged. The known, becoming unknown.
“What we leave behind and what we carry forwards,” was another Jacobean phrase. Maybe Jacobs is thinking of legacy – of what his name stands for, what it resonates with. In a sense, it felt like this collection had been flayed, stripping away the literal bloat of the recent past, those gorgeous yet gorged clothes, to the essential. It was satisfying. Back to life, back to reality. It’s one we’ll all want to remember.
