Wow, things have really gotten out of proportion. Inflation is everywhere.
That’s often how life seems in the morning. On Monday evening, at the New York Public Library, Marc Jacobs simply gave some shape to the situation and put it on the runway.
In the third of what might be called his show series of extreme silhouettes, he molded tops so they pinched in at the shoulders and turtled out at the back, and then cropped them just above the waist. Paired with oversize pants that jutted out as if they had flying buttresses inside, they foreshortened the torso and lengthened the legs. It seemed as if you were peering up at the model from below, their tiny heads miles away.
Skirts puffed up like storm clouds about to blow, coats and jackets in leather and leopard resembled trompe l’oeil insulated life vests, and party dresses covered in giant sequins were more akin to party blobs. Pumps were elongated into duckbills, and platform boots turned up into rhino horns at the toes.
Inside the protective structures (let’s call them that), the models seemed like little dolls wearing bigger dolls’ clothes. The fact many of them had a giant sequin glued to their mouth resembling both a pacifier and a button was even more unsettling. It went with the soundtrack, Philip Glass’s hypnotically jarring “Einstein on the Beach,” which has pretty much become Mr. Jacobs’s theme song, he uses it so often.
Mr. Jacobs stepped off the New York Fashion Week calendar about five years ago and now treats his runway more like a lab than a business venture. No, he’s not expecting you to wear this stuff — it’s sold only at Bergdorf Goodman — though guests like Tracee Ellis Ross did, and she looked as if she was having fun with it.
Instead, he has been exploring these ideas, which essentially take the American sportswear tradition and filter it through a heavily (sometimes too heavily) Rei Kawakubo-influenced lens. But while in the past his work had a sort of Betty Boop playfulness, this time it looked dystopian. You can understand it.
In his show notes, Mr. Jacobs called the collection “Courage” and wrote about the freedom to “imagine without limitation.” It wasn’t exactly a clarion call, but coming three days before the start of the official ready-to-wear shows, it may turn out to be a pacesetter.
Not to mention a useful reminder of just how much your perspective depends on where, exactly, you are sitting.
The post Valley of the Dystopian Dolls appeared first on New York Times.
