Designer Spaghetti

I have been having a heck of a hard time trying to get a review written of the Marc Jacobs show. I don't quite know what to say about it, because I don't quite know what he's trying to say. Reviewers are reporting that Jacobs says he was inspired by the ballet and by musical theater, and also that he's tired of the downtown Goth look of black leather and studs that's been ubiquitous for a couple of seasons now. He wanted to give women more opportunities to express their individuality, he said. He just had fun, he said.

Is all of this designer-code for, "I dunno. I just threw a bunch of stuff out there"?

No, I don't really believe that. Jacobs is too thoughtful a designer for that. I think he's capable of truly great, truly groundbreaking design. I don't think this collection is it.

I couldn't even get a really good handle on how to present it to you. There were some great tailored coats

there were some ruffles,

(LOTS of ruffles)

and there were coats combined with ruffles.

Yeah, the pants... We need to talk about those pants. Because while I've heard my friend Plumcake advocate for the return of the bloomer/pantaloon, I think she's a lone voice in the wilderness here. I just don't see women going for these pants. I can imagine a few second-tier starlets being talked into them by their stylists while their common sense is otherwise engaged by amphetamines of various flavors, but I don't see these flying out of the stores.

These are a slightly less "WTF??" version, but still... I don't see it happening. If there's one thing we've learned in the last few seasons, it's that real-life women (the ones NOT in the fashion industry and over the age of 24) are extremely resistant to funny-shaped pants. You can narrow or widen the leg a certain amount, raise or lower the rise, crop or lengthen a bit, but basically? We want pants that look like pants. Not nappies or bike shorts.

There were several exits that featured the under-as-outerwear thing. Jacobs has played with this before, notably the Spring 08 "Deconstructed" collection, and I thought it was more successful there. Does it need to be explored further? Personally, I don't think so. It's SO hard to do this well. Occasionally someone hits it bang-on and it's marvelous, but most of the time it's just teetering on the edge of tacky and tipping over all too often.

I wanted to like the ruffles, but these

are just not the kind of ruffles I like. This kind of ruffled/pleated trim reminds me too much of tacky polyester little girls' First Communion dresses, or tacky polyester quinceañera dresses. And this dress in particular looks like a fallen tree that's been overgrown with some sort of lichen or moss or something. (Betcha that's the first and last time I ever use the word "lichen" in a fashion review.)

And don't even get me started on the shoes from this show

Yech. Those look absolutely impossible -- proof that just because a shoe is a flat doesn't make it wearable. They do point toward a Japanese influence, however. Often in a runway show you can get a better clue about what the designer is shooting for from the accessories and hair and makeup than from the actual clothes. Jacobs often mentions how influenced he is by Rei Kawakubo and other Japanese modernists.

You can really feel that in the proportion of these jackets, and the piece-y-ness of all the looks.

There were certainly some things I liked. There was a short sequence of looks where I felt like I was beginning to get my bearings a bit.

I liked the long, narrow shape here, the detail without clutter, the really, really gorgeous insets on that skirt. but then he tossed out this thing

and it all went to hell. Oh, lordy, I hate that.

This jacket, however

I do not hate. This jacket I loooooove.

If I were going to pull one thing out of this collection to put into my own closet, it would be that jacket.

I also really liked a section of long, handkerchief-y dresses

Love the suspension neckline on this, and the fabric, and the droplets of pearls around the edge. I think that's lovely. I like them in spite of their asymmetrical hems because the dresses aren't about the hemlines, the hemlines are just part of the dresses, and I like the movement and lightness it gives them. He played even more with the embellishment

I really like this dress, although I think I may like it in theory more than I like the idea of actually wearing it. I can't help but admire the work that's gone into it. Jacobs really went to town with the sequins -- we may be reaching the sequin apotheosis soon, friends, good heavens it must have been good to be a sequin manufacturer the last few seasons.

Again, I think I'm responding more to the cleverness of the way the sequins were used than the actual garment. And even more so here

Wow. That's just... wow. I love open-work, and sequins, and sheerness...

I hate the shape of those pants, and the gimmicky use of underwear. You are going to see a LOT of this in fashion magazines this winter, the editors are going to lose their stiletto-clad shit for this. I do not think you will see it anywhere else.

The editors are right, really, whether or not you want to wear the actual clothes. When the history of fashion for this era is written, Marc Jacobs is going to be an important name, but his influence can take a long time to trickle down into the mainstream. Is he ahead of the curve? Is he just lucky? Or does his influence have more to do with his endless capacity for self-promotion than his design talent? I don't know the answer to that. I do know that I often really love Marc Jacobs' designs. I also often don't like them much at all, and don't understand what he's trying to say with them. You can say, Oh, it's just fashion, why does it have to "say" anything? But if you view fashion design as an art form (and I do), you can't help but look for some sort of cohesion in the artist's vision. The great thing about fashion as an art form is that its artists have a chance to either scrap what they were doing and start off completely fresh every season (Miuccia Prada), spend a lifetime ongoingly refining and elaborating a defining vision (Ralph Rucci) or something in-between. Looked at with a long, looooong lens, Marc Jacobs' trajectory makes sense to me, with a few loops backward and forward as he goes. I think he does have a vision, but I don't think he's necessarily working toward something; I think there's a good deal of spaghetti-against-the-wall stuff going on. That indecisiveness gives me a little aesthetic indigestion sometimes, but that's probably more my issue than his.

This was the last exit in the show. It's a dress I'm not really crazy about as a dress, but I do adore the effect of it.

Like scribbles on tissue paper. Beautiful. As with so many things Jacobs has made, I don't want to wear it, but I do like looking at it.

I'm sorry it's taken me so long to get this review up, and that I haven't gotten more out there about the runway shows happening. It takes me a while to write these silly posts -- longer, I'm sure, than their merit justifies, and I'm having a busy week or two right now. Please bear with me, I'm hoping to get some serious work done over the weekend.

Images: Style.com

Shop Style Spy's Closet -- June 23

More closet purging from Style Spy! And this time I'm busting out some really good stuff... (Click photos for links that have more details.)



Red leather Adrienne Vittadini knee-high boots, size 40.

Gorgeous. Too big for me.

NEVER-WORN Marc Jacobs skirt from his spectacular S/S 2008 collection (size 4).



This is an incredible piece, and an incredible bargain.


Beautiful camel silk Stella McCartney blouse (size 8 or so)


A lovely thing that I never wear because it's just too big for me.



The most adorable leopard-print calf hair pumps EVER:

Giuseppe Zannoti, size 40.

A pair of Jimmy Choo flats (size 39) that will become your best friends:


Seriously, you will wonder how you lived without them until now.


All these things are guaranteed genuine and in excellent condition. Check out Style Spy's Closet and give them a good home!


Images: Style Spy

Films for Fashionistas

Last weekend I watched this:

Marc Jacobs & Louis Vuitton

My denim guru Broc turned me on to this movie and I'm really glad he did. Here's a taste:





If you have any love for or curiosity about fashion and what goes into the creation of a collection and a fashion show, I highly recommend this movie. If your interest in this sort of thing is strictly that of a love of documentaries, ehhhhhh, not so much. The filmmaker also serves as the narrator for the movie, and while he provides a pleasantly casual, slightly quirky tone, I'm not always sure of his point of view of his subject. Nonetheless, there is a lot of juicy footage in here for fashion lovers.

The thrust of the film is preparations leading up to the Spring 2007 collections for both Jacobs' namesake label and Louis Vuitton. It's worth looking at those two collections side by side to get a good feeling for the overlap and intersect that seems to happen with Jacobs and the two lines he creates.

Louis Vuitton, S/S 07

Marc Jacobs, S/S 07

I don't think this is necessarily a bad thing, and given that Jacobs' design seems to come so much from his interior world & imagination, it makes perfect sense. He seems less concerned with making a commercial product than many designers working today, and he truly does seem to pull his work from some personal well of inspiration. Whether his so-far excellent track record of producing Just the Thing That Everyone Has to Have This Season collection after collection is a result of an uncanny ability to read what's in the air or an equally uncanny ability to create something so irresistible that everybody wants it is impossible to determine, of course, and probably not important. The fact of it -- that's what's important.

I've made a lot of cracks about Marc Jacobs on this blog, because despite having no problem giving him props for his amazing talent as a designer, what I read of his real-life behavior makes me think I wouldn't be crazy about him as a person. I have to say, in this documentary he comes off as not such a bad guy. I'm well-aware that skillful editing can create just about any tone a filmmaker desires in his work, but there are an awful lot of people in this film saying awfully nice things about Jacobs, and he has a good many employees who've been with him for a very long time, which says a lot.

And he works those employees -- hard -- in the run-ups to the two shows. There are sleepless nights and blistered fingers and seamstresses & assistants so exhausted they dissolve into helpless fits of hysterical giggles over their work. Garments are being sewn right down to the wire and appear backstage at the very last millisecond and sometimes not at all. This is a great behind-the-scenes look at exactly how much backbreaking work goes into these productions on every side, and suddenly Jacobs' famously-late show starts make sense. The exhaustion is palpable -- even the models can sometimes barely hold it together. There's a scene in which one of them (Tanya Dziahileva, I think) is backstage before the Marc Jacobs show, face blotchy and eyes a positive waterfall of tears -- so much makeup has been troweled onto and then scraped off this poor girl's face by the end of NY Fashion Week that her body appears to have simply thrown in the towel and rejected it in a massive allergic response. It doesn't look all that fun or glamorous from that vantage point.

(She recovers, bless her, and gets to wear one of my favorite looks in the show.)

There's a lot of time spent on the creative process of the collections, which is fascinating. We also get a good dose of "What Inspires Marc," from stories about his impressive personal collection of art and meetings with his heroes and heroines of the art world like Takashi Murakami, with whom he made those famous must-have LV bags.

They appeared on the runway in the S/S 03 shows and spawned a frenzy of frothy-mouthed bag lust, waiting lists as long as a supermodel's legs, and a million counterfeits & knockoffs. After these bad boys, my guess is the PTB at Vuitton basically handed Jacobs the keys to the kingdom and went & had themselves a Pernod. I don't even wanna know how much money those things brought in to that company.

Speaking of bags, if you watch the film on DVD, do not ignore the "Special Features" section, which has some clips that didn't make it into the main body of the movie. My favorite is a long section detailing the construction of this monster

The amount of blood, sweat, & tears that goes into the creation of this bag will blow you away, as will the pride and dedication of the craftspeople in the Vuitton workroom, who struggle for days to build this thing in time for the show. It's a hugely complicated piece of work, and watching this does go a long way to explaining the prices on those dingdong Vuitton bags. (Only 12, I think, of these bags were actually produced, and if memory serves they sold for €35,000 apiece. That roughs out to about 50,000 bucks.)

There is an engaging moment when, asked about his inspiration process, Jacobs comes out and confesses that it's really not anything all that complicated or magical. He takes stuff in, he thinks about it, ideas percolate in his brain, he puts them on paper. To his credit, he doesn't seem overly impressed with his own genius.

It's doubtful this is a perfectly accurate portrait of Jacobs. For one thing, Bernard Arnault, who is Jacobs' boss at Vuitton and makes several appearance in this film, is a guy with a LOT of drag in France. My guess is that a doc originally produced for French television that shredded the prize horse in his stable would have been a notion quickly quashed. And obviously it wasn't Prigent's purpose to make a warts-and-all kind of film. From a purely film-review perspective, I'm not entirely sure what Prigent's aim was, because the tone and the techniques of the thing can jump around pretty wildly. Despite this, it really is a fascinating couple of hours spent looking into the inner workings of some pretty fashion-y goings-on.

So. Style Spy says: Two stilettos up for this film! Absolutely see it if you get the chance.


Photos: Style.com

Marc Jacobs' Revenge

The Metropolitan Museum Costume Institute Ball was Monday, May 4. It was a big deal. It's always a big deal. It's such a big deal that much hand-wringing over invitations and gowns goes on, and also a big enough deal that they always have it on a Monday. My feeling is that having an event this big on a Monday is basically like putting up a banner that says, "No one coming to this shindig has a real job." Oh, sure, there were people there who work for a living, at jobs like modeling and editing magazines, but my guess is there weren't too many elementary school teachers in attendance.

One of the sponsors of this year's event was Marc Jacobs, along with Kate Moss, Justin Timberlake (because someone needs to bring sexyback to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, doncha know) and Vogue Magazine. The theme this year was "The Model As Muse." My theory is that Vogue created this theme to throw a bone to all the models they've snubbed in the last few years by putting nothing but (usually undertalented) film stars on the cover of the magazine.





Marc Jacobs is a busy guy. He designs his own namesake label, plus his bridge line (Marc by Marc Jacobs), as well as Louis Vuitton. I find him by all generally available accounts an exceptionally silly person with a proclivity towards baring his physique in photographs and popping up entirely too often in gossip columns. (You never do see Alber Elbaz in his skivvies in a magazine, do you?) My personal feelings about Jacobs himself aside, however, I do think he's a massively talented designer. I don't always love everything he does, but that's okay. He's thoughtful (about fashion) and experimental and willing to push envelopes, and I think that's very important. I also find it very interesting that his collections for Vuitton and his own line in any given season have recognizably similar DNA, often much more so than I find in other designers with multiple labels, like Lagerfeld with his stable of nameplates.

I really liked both Louis Vuitton and Marc Jacobs collections for Spring 2009, although I was considerably less enamored of Fall 09 for both lines (Vuitton here and Jacobs here). I thought the Spring collections were fun & interesting, filled with a cool mish-mashery of prints, patterns, colors and materials. Most importantly, they were both loaded up with separates, which seems a smart way to go when people may be making more careful budgetary decisions about what they buy. There were a number of really good jackets and skirts that went down these runways, the sort of thing you could buy and work into your wardrobe for several seasons to come.

Marc Jacobs Spring 09

Louis Vuitton Spring 09
(You wouldn't have to wear it with the feather skirt, although I of course would love it if you did.)

Fall 09 was a big ol' 80's re-hash and while there are some cool, clever pieces to be had it just didn't work as well for me. Maybe it's my age. I dunno. It wasn't atrocious, just not my fave Jacobs ever.

Hugely successful and popular as Jacobs is, his is not a name that you hear overmuch on the red carpet come awards season. Think about it -- imagine the parade of vacuum-sealed actresses filing past flunkies with microphones and try to recall how many times you've heard one of them say either Vuitton or Jacobs. It doesn't happen all that much -- mostly we get the spangly excesses of hacks like Elie Saab or the pinch-me-or-I'll-fall-asleep tastefulness of Carolina Herrera. But since Jacobs was "sponsoring" this Gala (and I am wondering what duties exactly that role entailed, besides being available for a multitude of photo ops), he got to dress a lot of famous women. And apparently Mr. Jacobs has felt the red carpet snub, because he took his revenge.

Good googly-moogly. Random starlet, I cannot be bothered to check her name, in Vuitton. You know how in fashion magazines they warn you to avoid dressing head-to-toe in one designer? This is why.

Kerry Washington. Pretty woman in a really bad dress. Seriously, if you are not at least 6 feet tall (like most runway models) what the hell are you thinking putting on something this wide??? (And the giant floppy bows on the shoes sure aren't heping with the stumpy.) Here's a rule of thumb: if you cannot sit in your Prius without closing your skirt in the car door, wear something else.

Oh, Madonna. Ya know, I can't really fault her, because she's, ya know, Madonna. And she does this stuff. I've always admired her fearlessness, and here it is on full display. Nothing I can say about that hat will be funnier than the fact of it, so I'll dummy up. You can tell she's single again, though, eh? I liked it better when she was a proper married English lady wearing all those nice sheath dresses.

Victoria Beckham in Marc Jacobs. What. Ever. She's designing her own line now and honestly, several of the dresses she showed were actually really good. But why look nice when you can piss off Style Spy?

If Rachel Feinstein (in Marc Jacobs) isn't actually pregnant, she should sue his ass for this.

Longtime Marc Jacobs BFF Winona Ryder. Insert obligatory crime of fashion joke here.

Himself with herself. I gotta tell ya (and I'm sorry, dear Plummy) -- the turban is not a look I'm terribly fond of. Unfortunately, it looks like we're going to be having a Grey Gardens moment in the immediate future and Batshit Crazy Impoverished Former Socialite is a look that's going to be popping up. I'm sorry, this whole ensemble looks cheap to me -- even the shoes, which are YSL and we know how much I like that. Some of it, I'm sure, is that I just don't like Kate Moss. She's never been one of my favorite models, and I know it shouldn't matter, but what I know about her private life makes me want to shove her under a bus. My favorite tidbit from the coverage of the Met Gala, from Eric Wilson's article in the NY Times:

Asked how she felt about being a museum-worthy muse, Ms. Moss shrugged and pulled a big piece of gum out of her mouth.

“I’m amused,” she said. “I think it’s quite interesting for somebody to go outside of the box and think that a model actually has had some input into fashion. A lot of the time, the models don’t really get a say."

Perhaps that's for the best, Kate. Now pop your gum back in your mouth and go do another line in the bathroom.

Seriously. Gum. At the Met Gala. My friends, sometimes -- often, even -- it doesn't matter how much your dress cost. "Lady" doesn't come on a hanger.

Here's the one person who was wearing Marc Jacobs who didn't look absolutely dreadful.

Another random starlet -- I'm sorry but I just don't care -- in a color I love. This dress is nice and she looks nice in it. Not stellar, mind you, but nice. Shame they wouldn't let her put up the roof on the convertible when they drove her (like a bat out of hell down the West Side Highway, from the looks of things) to the party.

It might be more charitable to imagine that these were all just missteps on Jacobs' part, but I think he's too talented and too savvy for that, so I'm left with the conclusion that these dresses were some sort of fiendish plot on his part. Maybe he didn't want anyone to be prettier than him. Maybe he wants new friends. Maybe he's off the wagon. Whatever the reasons, I don't care. I was mightily entertained.

More on the Met Gala later this week. Stay tuned, there is more snark (and a few really good dresses) to come!


Photos: New York Times, Style.com

One For Wendy B

Fabulous blogger Wendy B amuses & enlightens me on a daily basis, so this one's for her.

This is Marc Jacobs and someone (frankly, I do not care) at the screening of the film "Defiance" the other night. I run hot & cold about Marc Jacobs' work -- sometimes I really love it and sometimes I find it unbearable and honestly I feel okay with that. I vastly prefer that to someone who consistently bores me. But Jacobs himself? Seems to be a silly, silly man who has caught a particularly virulent (and nudist) strain of the self-promotion virus.

So. Not that I have to tell you this, but -- see what he's wearing? Don't wear that.



Photo: Style.com