If Miuccia Prada had a school where a young designer could learn from her how to borrow and remix ideas, garments and accessories from other times and collections in a convincing way and if Marc Jacobs had ever attended such an academy, well, he would have surely been the best pupil and the teacher's pet as well.
For his show that closed New York Fashion Week, Jacobs decided to strip things back and arranged a single row of folding chairs around the Park Avenue Armory. The show (unusually) started almost on time and progressed in complete silence.
Jacobs explored for the next season his archives and came up with a mix of different inspirations and a rich palette of colours.
The collection opened with trouser suits and separates in bright and bold colours including acid orange and emerald green.
Technical sport and casual clothes such as light ample coats and oversized cardigans followed and the casual mood also extended to evening sequinned dresses matched with cellophane boleros, elbow-length gloves, rubber soled sandals and bags of all sizes and shapes.
Jacobs played with contrasts and on the ugly chic dichotomy (games Prada likes to play…), combining elegant harem-pants with retro flight bags and bumbags with a sunrise-like logo reminiscent of ellesse's half tennis ball graphics, going for sporty shoes in one look, overdoing the slippers in another and covering them in sparkling tassels.
Sometimes the jumpsuits and harem pants looked cosy, in other cases their oversized proportions made them quite ridiculous as if Jacobs was suspended between untouchable divas and decadent characters à la Little Edie in "Grey Gardens".
Most of the looks were accessorised with headwraps and turbans by British milliner Stephen Jones, who may have been inspired for their shapes and volumes by Vogue vintage headdress patterns or from books about costumes from all over the world.
But, according to the fashion designer, the idea for the turbans allegedly came from his muse Kate Moss who donned a metallic Marc Jacobs creation with a matching turban at the Met Gala in 2009; Jacobs also mentioned a cinematic muse, Sofia Coppola, recently portrayed in a turban by photographer Steven Meisel.
The show notes revealed that Jacobs used this collection to reimagine the "seasons past somewhere beyond the urban landscape of New York City."
Yet quite often, rather than evoking his own archive (well, the Fanta top was the equivalent of his Coca-Cola one in the S/S 14 collection…), the designer seemed to be remixing somebody else's: his more casual clothes were at times reminiscent of Prada's Resort 17 trekking collection combined with Miu Miu's Resort 18 dynamic moods, and the shoes, in particular the sporty slides and bejeweled Birkenstocks also echoed Miuccia's exercises in ugly chic footwear.
When matched with suits, the turbans unleashed visions of Jean Paul Gaultier's transcultural styles; when paired with evening gowns, they echoed film divas from the '40s (Joan Crawford, Great Garbo, Maria Montez…) with a twist of '80s Yves Saint Laurent; and when they accessorised designs characterised by swirling prints, they pointed at Emilio Pucci's mid-to-late '60s creations.
The colourful tropical paradise that Jacobs imagined in his head seemed indeed too often borrowed from a Gian Paolo Barbieri shoot of Emilio Pucci S/S 68 collection that featured a lot of harem pants, bold colours and turbans (an "inspiration" that was maybe combined with an image of Lauren Hutton in Pierre Cardin Pajamas, photographed by Arnaud de Rosnay in 1968 View this photo).
Not everything was Pucci, though: one plaid coat seemed a crossover between Vogue's 1962 cover, Marisa Mell coat in Lucio Fulci's "Perversion Story" and Miu Miu's faux-fur coat from its A/W 2017 collection.
But the real plagiarism came in the form of an abstract print for two sporty and dynamic outfits: the motif was indeed entirely lifted from a Geoffrey Beene design from 1967 (see the first image in this post, showing a picture by Irving Penn).
The aria "Ebben! Ne Andrò Lontana" ("Well, then! I shall go far away") from Alfredo Catalani's opera "La Wally" (borrowed from the 1981 French film "Diva" directed by Jean-Jacques Beineix) marked the return of music and the end of the show, but surely not the end of Jacobs career.
In the last months rumours spread about Marc Jacobs's business problems and the possible decline of his brand. The positive reviews he got for this collection confirmed instead that he may still be the king of New York.
It is easy to understand why he got such positive reviews: now that the NYFW schedule has become chaotic, yet stripped of many major significant collections this escapist dream verging between the exaggerated and the decadent struck the few reviewers left as the only brave and electrifying experience on the NYFW runways.
The sad truth instead is that the scattered plagiarisms in this collection simply prove that Jacobs remains a great stylist, but not a uniquely gifted fashion designer. That said, it would be a total shame to see him go and hand over creative control especially now that he has fully mastered the remixing techniques of Miuccia Prada.
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