Marc Jacobs wasn’t in the mood for interviews or greetings after his wildly applauded show on Thursday afternoon in New York. Sometimes you’ve just got to let ’em simmer, and the ovation more than did the talking. In a superior sweeping spectacular at the Hammerstein Ballroom, to the epic fanfare of Underworld’s Born Slippy, his collection – a clubwear mash-up of 70s’ hippies, 80s’ sexpots and 90s’ grunge and techno girls – totally summed up the spirit of now. “You know, you’re walking around New York and all the girls are barely wearing any clothes, and they’ve got really good shoes on,” Jacobs’ partner in crime, Katie Grand, said after the show. “It was kind of a cliche, but it’s what girls are wearing at the moment–in stupid colours.” Jacobs and Grand had started out framing the look, creating the animated platform boots that were raised to eye-height by the ballroom’s stage, and the rainbow-coloured dreadlocks that served as their crowning counterpart. “Normally when people work so hard on something the middle bits seem a bit irrelevant, but Marc kept saying, ‘It’s gotta be really strong. We can’t have many clothes on, but they have to be really, really charged’.” The result was skimpy – very skimpy – and it needed to be, Grand explained, as a reaction to last season’s goth patrol of black, floor-length gloom. “I think we just kind of thought, let’s do something clubby and giddy with a lot of colour. We started looking at silhouettes and it was just obvious that we had to go super, super short.” In a time of Kardashian curves and pop stars who go on stage in a bra, the collection hit the nail on the head. It was a welcome – and unexpected – return to the accessory power dressing of the previous decade where girls would build an outfit around a shoe, a handbag, or indeed a hairdo, and not the other way around. And in that respect, it wasn’t just beautiful and awesome, it was something new.
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Text Anders Christian Madsen