ANY remaining pretence that New York Fashion Week is about clothes was summarily dispensed with at Marc Jacobs’ show. After almost 20 years as its protégé, Jacobs remains the industry’s darling, except that now it has to share him with every paparazzi-friendly celebrity passing through town.
I had the misfortune to arrive at his show on Monday night (held at the cavernous New York State Armoury – long gone are the days when his presentations took place in intimate showrooms in front of 150 fashion editors) just as Demi Moore and her husband, Ashton Kutcher, materialised from behind the blacked-out windows of a purring limo.
The bouncers at the entrance to the Armoury did their best to part the sea of ordinary(ish) mortals waiting patiently outside with tickets to make way for Hollywood royalty, but it was a precariously teetering termites’ nest of photographers, journalists, sundry bodyguards – and me – that seized its chance and made its opportunistic way up the flight of stone steps and into the building along with Moore and Kutcher. At one point I thought I might actually die in the crush, a humiliating but probably inevitable end to any career in fashion.
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Inside — and here was conclusive evidence of fashion week’s real thrust — was a bank of photographers who, for the first time that I’ve seen, were positioned with their backs to the catwalk, their lenses trained solely on arriving celebrities. This, if you’re a designer who cannot rely, as Jacobs does, on drawing a crowd that included Sophia Coppola, Rufus Wainwright, Emily Mortimer, Kate Bosworth, Lil’ Kim, Victoria Beckham (for truly it was a catholic mix) and Roger Federer, for heaven’s sake, may be a dispiriting moment to be presenting a new sleeve shape.
On the other hand, Jacobs is in artistic mode at the moment, which is another way of saying that his clothes, at least the ones he sends down the catwalk, are unlikely to be pushing his fellow designers’ offerings off the shelves. Spring 2007’s collection, shown on Monday, followed this winter’s theme, namely voluminous layers and what even his kindest critics are calling “tricky” proportions.
The trickiness lay primarily in the trousers, which formed a large part of this collection and fell into three camps (in every meaning of the word): the voluminous jodhpur, favoured by mad film directors in the 1920s and madder dictators, the lunghi (a wardrobe staple of Mahatma Gandhi), or a combination of the two, with ruffles, all in parchment colours with the occasional wild foray into khaki.
Above these wafted or swung, depending on the fabric, gold bomber jackets, scooped out jersey dresses, Pronuptia-style lace and pleated gowns and sunset printed T-shirts, plus some metallic leather visor-cum-Juliette-cap headwear. That Jacobs persisted with the silhouettes of this winter instead of performing his usual volte face proves his confidence in his supremacy.
Besides, the real point of the collection could be found in the accessories with most of the first 15 or so outfits — those glorious leather-quilted boxes that dangled from gilt chains in a host of new colours, from gunmetal to coral.
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Jacobs may be unassailable, but he does have competition. Proenza Schouler, a young duo much lauded in New York, have learnt a thing or two from Jacobs, including how to reference Versace, which Jacobs recently did for Louis Vuitton. If their bandage-tight silk miniskirts (with horizontal stripes) and signature basque-bra tops don’t cause a blood clot, their all-in-one shorts should do it. As I was pondering who among their clientele would buy this, my eyes lighted on Miss Moore and Mrs Beckham in the front row. Mystery solved.