In his show notes Marc Jacobs riffed about beauty, calling it, “a quality or combination of qualities that gives pleasure to the mind or senses and is often associated with properties such as harmony of form or color, proportion, and authenticity.” That’s almost a dictionary definition, but trust Jacobs not to give us anything quite that obvious or basic or first degree.
Since returning to the runway after the pandemic, exaggeration has become one of Jacobs’s most persistent and powerful leitmotifs. Ego Nwodim turned up tonight in a little leather pea coat and tweed mini skirt from last season that looked inflated with air, a pair of witchy pumps with surreally extended toe boxes on her feet. Other guests were in equally hyperbolic outfits, their just-this-side-of-cartoonish proportions producing a sort of uncanny valley effect. Do they have it right in their retro-future cocktail dresses and platforms, or do we in our t-shirts, jeans, and Birkenstocks?
We know which side of the valley Jacobs leans towards—he’s the guy posting ASMR videos of his bejeweled nails with the caption “twenty-seven seconds of blissful artifice.” But blissful artifice doesn’t quite sum up this 19-look show. It opened with a pair of cargos, their pockets (four, not two) amplified completely out of the ordinary, followed by a pair of white denim jeans came next, with darts at the pockets that gave them a squared-off, boxy volume. Familiar pieces made exceptional by overstatement—and by the special pieces they were paired with, a lavender lace blouse with ultra-pouffed sleeves in the first case, and a going-out top made from collaged bra parts dripping in glass beads and pearls in the second.
More often than not though Jacobs was working in a higher register, amplifying a model’s assets by adding padding to the backside of a hobble skirt, twisting puffed sleeves into the shapes of hearts, bedecking an evening gown in hundreds of bows—there were a lot of bows, typically shown in trompe l’oeil two-dimensions, rather than three, another way he played with perception. The last look could’ve been Victorian widow’s weeds—flashes of Lily Rose-Depp in Nosferatu—but Jacobs twisted it all up, inflating a bustle here and deflating it there, and adding a split to the long skirts.
Even the highest of high fashion designers are making a virtue of simplicity and straight-up sellable pieces in the midst of this luxury slowdown. Not Marc Jacobs, not ever, it’s fairly safe to say. He’ll always keep seeking and finding beauty. This season’s exemplar was a long black lace dress that skimmed the body like a glove, save for those exaggerated hip darts and a 2D bow at the back of the knees—very pleasing.