It’s almost in slow motion, the models walking out with impassive dead faces looking pretty glum. It’s so teenage melancholy. They’re worried about something; are they walking into the Principal’s office to be punished? Are they about to lose their virginity? Most models look glum, but these are particularly so. It’s as if they are self-aware mannequins, realizing that their only purpose is to display clothes that some rich person is going to buy.
Holy Mother of God, these are models on a murderous prowl and they’re icy calm about it - and they’ve got sharp, gleaming things around their necks.

The clothes they’re wearing might even be made by these animated mannequins. They are all exaggerated shapes, dressing gown fabrics and headbands that are so home video VHS aerobic instructor that it’s almost endearing. This is chic by being anti-chic. Nothing here looks in the least bit showy, fabulous, sexy. It doesn’t look like fashion. The colours comprise those that adorn grandmother hats and matronly skirts; browns that cling to the tattered suitcases of tired men. I hated those colours the first time I saw them and I still do. They evoke memories that just aren’t chic. These memories are warm and fuzzy - very homely. What they really make me want is some pumpkin soup and homemade bread.

There’s no dream in this collection. It’s not something you want to dream about. It’s a dream within reality, within a dark room where there is no inspiration; a harsh reality from a walk in a park where a rich boy is being beaten by a thug with a family to feed and all the trees are burning down. It’s cold, concrete reality. This collection is about proles - think 1984 - infesting the establishment and changing the way the establishment dresses. One can imagine the lords and ladies of the city arriving in their carriages of steel and Italian leather to a function held by one of these proles: Marc Jacobs.
He doesn’t so much dazzle them as infect their collective minds with subversive takes on their own aristocratic uniforms. Here comes the white coat, over sized. Here’s a dress with a toothpaste top. Here’s a dress that’s grey, uniform grey. Not “Perl grey” or any other glamorous colour that may inhabit the wardrobes of these lovely ladies and gents. It is the grey of smoke vomiting factories. The real genius of this ruse is that it’s a fusion of two polar opposites: the proletariat and the bourgeois.

This feeling of adolescent tragedy lingers throughout the show - perhaps it’s the headbands. It’s in the sullen faces of the models. It rings out in the Sonic Youth playing too loudly. “Revolutionary” teenagers changing the world from the inside. Teenagers like (forty-five year old) Marc Jacobs. Maybe Jacobs is trying to change fashion from the inside. Change what, though? It’s still expensive as hell so if you want to make a rebellious statement in Mr. Jacobs’s latest you better be rich - revolution for the bourgeois!

So, I guess the question is: Do I like this collection? I don’t think you can like it, even though some pretentious figures of the fashion establishment will undoubtedly say they do, because it’s Marc Jacobs and oh my God doesn’t everyone just love him? Because it is Marc Jacobs you are almost forced to like it, if only to save face. If it was some unknown designer, well, the collection probably would’ve been trashed, burned, and buried.

I don’t like it, but I do respect it. This collection is about ideas rather than clothes. They’re integral in presenting said ideas, but at the end of the day you’re missing the point if you judge the clothes by accepted fashion standards. It’s a necessary collection. For Marc Jacobs it is a sort of evolution of his ideas, not a growing up as much as it is a twist to the left and a hop to the right. It’s not necessary for fashion but someone would’ve made a collection like this at some point. It was inevitable.

This is the collection of an outsider.