Marc Jacobs can do anything he wants now. He's even feeling confident enough to open up about a troubled private life that he once kept very private. And one expression of that confident spirit is the injection of willfulness he's given to his collections. It's a definite boon to the menswear in his second line, which can occasionally seem a little too close to the contents of College Boy's closet. Nothing wrong with that, of course, but Jacobs has proved himself a virtuoso at distilling the talents of his various collaborators, and he has some keen ones at M. by M. We could rightly expect a little more. With this latest effort, we got it.
The menswear took the mixed-up, mumbled-up, shook-up world that Marc presented for his signature Spring collection and toned it down to one key discombobulation: asymmetry. A windowpane-check jacket was half blazer, half blouson. The gray of another jacket shaded from light to dark as it traversed the torso. A V-neck and a cardigan met somewhere slightly left of center. A military jacket was mostly tan, bar one sleeve of polished cotton. If it sounds arch, it was actually subtle enough to register in such a subliminal way that the clothes looked merely desirable. And clearly, pieces like a sateen trench and a chambray blazer didn't need that extra twist. Nor did the shiny sneakers.
