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| Storm clouds move into the West Village but make way for a beautiful few days. Photo: JH. |
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| Fashion Week ended with a bang, thanks to Marc Jacobs, the American designer who is also the creative director for LVMH, the French luxury conglomerate. Mr. Jacobs’ show was scheduled for 9 pm last Monday night at the Armory on Lexington Avenue and 26th Street. It did not begin until 11 pm. This annoyed more than a few who went to the show and Suzy Menkes, the fashion editor of the International Herald Tribune let him have it in her column: A bad, sad show from Marc Jacobs, running two hours late, high on hype and low on delivery, symbolized everything that is wrong with current fashion.
Jacobs seemed to be lost in a dark and none-too-original vision of vintage clothes cut up to reveal satin underwear and worn by deranged women with surreal, deliberately ill-fitting shoes. ... In Jacobs's Alice in Wonderland world, the end was at the beginning, as the designer ran out whooping while the parade of models marched in reverse order down the catwalk. She then more or less said he’d lifted his “new” ideas from other designers’ earlier work. Ouch. Reading about the wait, I was thinking about what it’s like to cover a fashion show in a week of covering endless fashion shows, and running a hectic schedule, and waiting ... because they’re almost all late in getting started. A week of shows having piled up behind you, two hours is a long time to wait for anything or anybody. Think flight delay at the airport. Furthermore, 26th Street and Lexington Avenue is very possibly not near where you are staying; and you won’t be out til midnight which means you won’t be in bed before ... whatever. These things must have crossed Suzy Menkes’ mind waiting for Marc Jacobs to show his stuff. The whole thing kinda made me laugh. The wait, in a folding chair at that hour in that part of town. And then for that show. Have you seen the pictures? It’s kinda funny, made me laugh. But good laugh, where something sorta tickles/amuses. The clothes made me think of the stuff your mother stored in the trunks in the attic when you were a kid. A wide variety and yet everything distinctly proletarian. And smelling of mothballs. Or the old country, if it were on Mars. That is funny, you must admit. Mr. Jacobs is a highly regarded fashion designer, a big deal, and very cool. He created the grunge look in the 1990s. Remember that one. Like it or not, it’s still everywhere, even looking a little retro. He designs for self-confident women.
Delayed by two hours but destined to be debated for months, Mr. Jacobs’s spring show expressed perfectly the dislocating values of our culture. From the obsession with celebrities like Ms. Beckham, a Spice Girl and the wife of soccer star David Beckham, to the bizarre trash-bin styles of designers, Mr. Jacobs, the most watched American designer, found the right contemporary notes and sounded them clearly. Despite the wait, there was the sense backstage after the show that people thought they had witnessed something special from a designer who in recent years has pushed himself harder and harder. Mrs. Horyn also wrote that she thought the audience was watching something historical. Cathy Horyn is an excellent writer and partly because she is genuinely a very smart woman. I was reading this, thinking about what these three people looked like. I mean, if we’re gonna talk about fashion. I mean what they look like on the street. Mrs. Menkes, who lives in Paris, is a very pleasant woman, British, somewhat stout and matronly and not very tall. Her hairdo distinguishes her because she wears her brunette hair with a roll of the coif on the top of her head. She’s always well dressed and sensibly. There is a hint of French chic to her ensembles. But they are simple. And she always has a pad and pencil. |
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| From MARC By MARC JACOBS Spring 2008 Collection. |
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| Mrs. Horyn dresses in a very undistinctive style. You could almost guess that she has no interest in clothes. She dresses like a serious literary woman, very intellectual and very uninterested personally in self-ornamenting. In conversation, she too is very pleasant, as well as very smart. I like to read her columns because of the way she personally looks compared to the way she writes about clothes where the interest is vivid and observant. Mr. Jacobs I do not know. He was on a flight we were on to Venice last June. He looks to be a man in his forties, small, wiry and on that day sporting one of those three days brushes that are very much the fashion. He’s very youthful looking although sprouting a touch of grey. For years when I’d see him around, he wore his long hair pulled back in a ponytail and usually dressed like an Upper West Side prep school kid. On the plane to Venice, he was wearing jeans and a little tee shirt, and except for the fact that he was flying First Class, he could have been a maturing West Hollywood twinkie circa 1988. Except for the three days growth. Meanwhile, the Menkes column created a major stir on Fashion Avenue yesterday. Evidently there were quite a few there that night who weren’t thrilled to wait. There were also those who agreed with Mrs. Menkes’ fashion assessment.
WWD reported that Jacobs felt the problems they had with the guests waiting all began with Mrs. Menkes being annoyed. Asked what she thought of it all now, she told WWD, “I would like to murder him with my bare hands and never see another Marc Jacobs show in my entire life.” Heavy stuff. Mrs. Menkes doesn’t exactly look like the murdering type. Calling Miss Marple. I’m laughing while writing this. I hope you find it funny. The fashion business is nothing if not temperamental. And it’s full of creative forces, however you may like them. It’s a business driven more by ego than anything else these days. Designers are big deals. The big ones can really rake it in, money-wise. They often live in rarefied circles not unlike rock stars or movie stars, and often take themselves very seriously just like so many other people who are highly paid these days. However, as I believe fashion portends, and if Marc Jacobs is the man of the moment that Cathy Horyn claims he is, his creative force is portending drastic changes with an adjustable aesthetic for the American consumer. Adjustable to the elements. Now that is interesting. And probably not funny. Meanwhile, from the sound of Marc Jacobs ranting about how hard he works, etc., it seems as if Suzy Menkes may not have killed him with her bare hands, but surely gave him a little mauling. |
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