The moment you face your public—literally—with your visage on a shirt front may be the moment you've really arrived. Armani did it; Lagerfeld does it; now, here's Marc. For a few limited-edition tees and sweatshirts for the Marc by Marc Jacobs Resort collection, the designer borrowed a moody, smudgy portrait of his younger self by Elizabeth Peyton. Not that you'd need the reminder where you were. The latest Marc by Marc range rummaged through some of the great hits of the designer's history, tweaking or twisting them at will. Stripes and dots are standbys. Here they rippled across puffers and spotted, shredded jeans. A mint green leather tee and short-short set were covered with tonal dots, too, like a younger, friskier version of the dotted latex skirts from the Fall '11 Marc Jacobs line. A few military coats and capes, in a prettily abstracted camo, remembered MMJ's swipes at army chic. The mouse-eared flats from the label's past turned into mouse-eared pumps. There were nods at every decade from the sixties through the nineties, and a thrifted, mix-and-match approach to styling ran throughout. (That, with the stated inspiration of Portland, helped explain the punky blue hair the models wore.) All those plays on the past made you think of the future. It's appealing to imagine a time decades hence when Marc by Marc lines the rails of vintage shops, awaiting a new generation of fans. But don't expect those Marc-face tees to turn up on the racks. They're collector's items.
