As is his custom, Mr. Jacobs ran a tight ship for his runway show Monday evening at the New York Public Library. Doors closed, guests settled in hushed expectation, and at 7:30 sharp the first model emerged in a lavender lace top with protrusive sleeves that fanned out around her like the petals of an Imperial poppy.
Over the course of five minutes, another 18 looks followed, each more elaborate than the next. Mr. Jacobs titled the show “Beauty” and, as always, offered only the barest-boned notes. One gets the sense that, like an artist, Mr. Jacobs is as interested in what the audience sees in his work as anything he may have intended. He provides the dream, we are left to do the interpretation.
For several seasons now, Mr. Jacobs has been toying with proportions, often distorting historical fashion designs past the point of recognition. The two-dimensionality he explored in his fall 2024 collection, where models looked almost like paper dolls wearing flat dresses that hung from their frames, has now swollen into a bricolage of shapes and textures. The dolls had bulged into unruly, decidedly three-dimensional women.
Take Look 3, an astonishing top made to resemble a bra with cleavage and a fleshy stomach spilling out. The sumptuous, built-in muffin top and fake-abundant bosom worn by a waif seemed to spit in the eye of Ozempic culture — like a black mirror version of the corset couture most recently canonized at the Sánchez-Bezos wedding.
Models took short, deliberate steps in their platform shoes, as if their ankles might not hold them. To call these shoes “heels” would be inadequate. They are more like stilts made from blocks sculpted with a French curve. But if they feared toppling, the girls betrayed nothing. Solemnly they marched as the plinking notes of Nick Cave’s “Song for Jesse” reverberated through the long marble hall. The effect was eerie and mesmerizing, as if the ballerina from a child’s music box had spun off her pedestal and escaped into the night.
The remixing continued. Edwardian puff sleeves appeared on dresses with high Victorian necks and 1950s movie-star hobble skirts. One gown looked to have been sewn from a translucent shower curtain. Pale flowered dresses might have been plucked from the bedspreads of a 1960s suburban horror movie. Grotesquely sweet and comically oversize trompe l’oeil bows appeared as hair clips, on bustles, and as trains.
Rather than pad his runway with variations of the same dress in different colors, as many designers do, Mr. Jacobs and his collaborator, the stylist Alastair McKimm, chose to edit, edit, edit.
“We wanted to do something that showcased the individual within the group,” Mr. McKimm said backstage after the show. “It was about how everybody is different, but they all work in the same world.”
Outside the site, as the show emptied into the humid night, a throng of 15-year-olds visiting from Uruguay had gathered by the steps, forming an impromptu receiving line. In their near identical cotton tank tops and denim shorts, they cheered departing guests. The teens clapped without guile, without a sense of hierarchy or purpose — they even clapped for a maintenance worker who was leaving his shift for the night. Like moths they were drawn to the spectacle of flashbulbs and dressed-up strangers emerging from a public building.
Though they said they didn’t see anybody they recognized, the fabulousness of being young in New York in the sweaty dusk was cause enough for celebration. “Iconic!” one of them shouted when she learned it was a Marc Jacobs show.
One can only imagine that Mr. Jacobs, who left the vicinity shortly after his show ended, would have appreciated the spontaneous joy of real, three-dimensional girls encountering his work in the wild.
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