Karl Aberg, the archly entertaining actuator of Marc Jacobs’s vision for Marc Jacobs menswear, acknowledged this evening that next Spring’s collection was as closely aligned to women’s Resort as it has been recently. You only needed to recognize the MTV logo to see that, and it was here in sequins with a sub-pattern of palm trees on a purple sweatshirt. An awesome picture of Keith Richards looking absolutely in the zone from 1974 was the visual kernel of Aberg’s particular vision for this collection: Like Richards, it featured animal, stripes, and a wide-eyed dissolute raffishness.
Shots of bright color, pink and orange predominantly, fired through a multigenerational palette of street-sourced grunginess. So the checkerboard prints on open-necked shirts and pajama suits bore the faintest mark of bleach-spatter. There were ’90s raver pants and pink leopard shirts, skinny-ringer logo tees, tumbled-stud denim, stitched-in-pleat tracksuit pants in lovely tropical-weight wool, broken-stitch knits in cashmere silk (also strong for Resort), and some nice check shirts whose slightly drab check was happily zhooshed by the faintest golden hit of Lurex thread. A panne velvet tuxedo in black with ribboned pockets and a killer olive and gold sequin tiger-print jacket were the most winning evening pieces. A military section featured oversize ripstop olive cargo pants, an authentically drab M-65 (with a palm-tree pin), and nylon pieces with tiger-camo paneling. And there were rainbows, too. Yet again this was a collection that merited the scrutiny of lying bare on the rail.
