This was a Marc Jacobs show that was over before it began. The models did two finale laps and then Jacobs was out taking his bow. It was all over in about three minutes. A comment on the relentless pace of fashion? The grind of modern life? A swipe at our tendency to consume “content” that takes days, weeks, and months to create in mere seconds and then swipe up to move on to the next? Or was he taking the piss?
With Jacobs you don’t always know, but he left some clues. The clothes themselves looked indebted to the 1980s, the last analog decade before the internet went wide, and the one when Jacobs came of age in New York City, but the show notes were written by the newly launched Open AI Chat GPT in a noticeably bland, monotonous style. Sample line: “The Marc Jacobs fashion show mesmerized its audience with an awe-inspiring fusion of masculine tailoring and feminine elegance.”
In truth, the clothes moved by too fast to inspire awe, but you have to hand it to Jacobs for his audacity. Few other designers have the brio to stage a fashion show and then not give the audience time to actually see the fashion. The surprise of the experience, a rewriting of the show rules, made you wonder if Jacobs is onto something. People could move on quickly to dinner dates, to their families, to flights out of town. There’s the internet for examining each look in detail, after all.
As brief as they were, the back and forth of the two finale walks colored in the broad strokes of the show notes. The models’ cyberpunk bowl cuts conjured Pris, Daryl Hannah's pleasure model replicant from Blade Runner, which seemed like another clue about what Jacobs was up to. They wore the masculine tailoring the Chat GPT described with overscale shoulders and high-waisted deeply pleated pants, as well as femme minidresses that showed off lots of leg–black stockings sliced at the calves over white ankle socks, and pointy-toed flats.
Fashion-wise, it was a sharp about-face from Jacobs’s two previous June-time shows at the New York Public Library and their outsized layers, as well as a scaling back of the 1980s references of his recent ode to Vivienne Westwood. The black-and-white palette and the body-conscious attitude of the little nipped waist dresses made it seem more essential, more New York than that tribute show.
It’s not the first time Jacobs has referenced the ’80s (see: fall 2018 and fall 2009, for starters), and he’s also made a habit of breaking runway conventions (his spring 2008 show, the one that was infamously two hours late, unspooled backwards), but it may be the most authentic to the look and feel of the downtown streets he knew. Clubby, where the others were couture-ish or more curated.
Is Jacobs feeling nostalgic for his own past? At 60 that sort of comes with the territory, but he’s not one to indulge in sentimentality. He’s always preferred to shock, more than aim to please, and that appears to be what he was up to here with this short, sharp show (it was just 29 looks). In Blade Runner, it’s a battle to the end between the replicants and the humans, just as it may be between AI and its human creators. Though it’s sure to be a tough fight, Jacobs has the advantage he’s always had: that singular talent for provoking discussion and for making us feel.
