New York Fashion Week: Marc Jacobs, fashion’s dream maker
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Marc Jacobs embraced his role as fashion’s dream maker, the Wizard of Oz, showing a fall collection with everything a woman would ever want to wear, from a fairytale glitter-flecked clear vinyl raincoat, and a glorious draped gown in a pale daisy patterned taffeta, to a superbly cut double-breasted pantsuit and knife-pleated maxiskirt, all in soothing shades of gray, beige and cream.
There were references to the 1920s, 30s, 40s, 50s, 60s and 70s. ‘I had this feeling, as I think we all do, that I wanted to see something that wasn’t trying so hard to be new,’ Jacobs said after the show. With a front row devoid of celebrities, Jacobs took the circus out of fashion, opening his show by peeling the brown construction paper off of the stage at the back of the Armory to reveal his collection, pure and simple.
It was a greatest hits collection of sorts for the designer (minus the raucous 80s club years). He opened with a cross-back sweatshirt, worn with a gray circle skirt in a below the knee length, worn with pointy ostrich skin shoes of a sensible heel height. Purses came dotted with tiny pompoms, warm and fuzzy like your favorite stuffed animal.
His spin through the classics included timeless coats with fur collars, sweet 1930s-inspired dresses edged in eyelet or with beaded bows at the neckline, long skirts with horizontal slats, and chunky cable sweaters worn with sumptuous panne velvet skirts that swept the floor.
Models were cast alongside ‘real’ women to capture a kind of realistic imperfection. Jacobs chose ‘Over the Rainbow’ for his soundtrack because the song has ‘a promise of something deeper than all this. And that’s what quality, luxury and happiness is all about,’ he said.
It was just the kind of lullaby the frenetic fashion industry needed.
-- Booth Moore in New York
More photos of Marc Jacobs’ fall 2010 runway
For women, a mash-up of classics, menswear
More from New York Fashion Week
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