Marc Jacobs — erstwhile savior of New York fashion, the man who jump-started the phenomenon that is Louis Vuitton and proved that American designers could hold their own with the best of Paris — hasn’t made clothes that women could wear, at least in real life, in about five years. Not since the pandemic put the show system on pause.
Instead he has offered high-concept constructions in exaggerated shapes and bizarro proportions that play on the idea of paper dolls or Alice through the looking glass or fun house Victoriana. He has treated dressing more like performance art or a thought experiment than, say, something to actually get you through the day.
He shows his collections before New York Fashion Week officially starts, and thus in front of a friendly hometown audience for whom Mr. Jacobs is something of a national treasure, and they are sold only at Bergdorf Goodman. The result has seemed, over the last few years, increasingly irrelevant. An exercise in self-indulgence rather than a good faith dialogue with potential customers.
So it was something of a shock on Monday evening to go to the Marc Jacobs show and see … tweed pencil skirts and trouser suits. V-neck sweaters. A proper car coat or two. Sequined tube tops and micro-miniskirts. A blouse with a ruffle down the front. Even a slip dress.
Sure, he wasn’t entirely playing it straight. The waists of the pencil skirts were cut straight across the hips, so rather than follow the curve of the body, they stuck out at either side so that a model could slip her hands inside — not pockets, but suggestively pocketlike.
The minis were hiked up above the natural waistline, so they looked more like misplaced obis than skirts. Some pencil skirts were sheer; you could see through them to the shirts tucked in beneath. Two coats were buttoned neatly — up the back.
There were obvious debts to Prada, to Helmut Lang, to Yves Saint Laurent. Mr. Jacobs even name-checked those brands in his show notes under the line “credits and receipts.” A nice touch.
But most of all, the references were to his own past: to Perry Ellis, the house where a young Mr. Jacobs designed a haute grunge collection for spring 1993 that catapulted him to fame — and got him fired; to his fall 1995 and spring 1998 collections; even to a Marc by Marc Jacobs collection from 2003, when that line still existed. (It was a forerunner of Heaven by Marc Jacobs, the contemporary brand that accounts for the bulk of the house’s sales.)
It was a reminder of just how influential Mr. Jacobs had once been. More than any other New York designer, he had an ability to sense where the social and cultural wind was blowing and offer a way to dress for it. That talent, rather than any silhouette or style, was the single greatest hallmark of his work, and it gave him and the people who wore him a sense of being plugged directly into the moment, whatever the moment was.
It’s why his shows were such events and why he had the ability to transform celebrities from naff to cool simply by including them in his world. (Some of those given the Marc glow-up include Victoria Beckham, Miley Cyrus and Kendall Jenner.)
He doesn’t occupy that space any more; he gave it up. Maybe he didn’t like the way fashion was going. Maybe he just got tired. Maybe he was less interested in other people’s worlds than his own. But there is a vacuum where he once was, and it was hard not to wish that rather than offer a quasi retrospective, he would try a little harder to re-engage. It seems unlikely.
In his show notes, the designer included a brief meditation on “memory” and “loss,” and questions of “who we are, what we create, what we leave behind and what we carry forward.”
LVMH, the French luxury conglomerate that owns Marc Jacobs, has been trying to sell the label. Negotiations with Authentic Brands Group, the licensing specialist that owns Reebok, Juicy Couture and Frederick’s of Hollywood, recently fell through. For now, it is staying a part of the group, but the label’s future is unclear. That’s bound to have any designer thinking about their legacy.
On the far side of the Park Avenue Armory, where the show was held, was a metal folding table surrounded by four folding chairs on which a small painting stood: an oil by the artist Anna Weyant that Mr. Jacobs had commissioned the week before. It depicted a daisy — Mr. Jacobs’s most successful perfume is called Daisy — with half its petals pulled off and pinned to the canvas. Preserved for posterity or left to wither and die, depending on how you see it.
Vanessa Friedman has been the fashion director and chief fashion critic for The Times since 2014.
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