marc jacobs resort 2011
(images via wwd)
marc jacobs’resort 2011 show was filled with his typically diverse, vintage-y references, with some sixties mod looks accompanied by the frilly and overly girlish. also surprisingly featured in the collection were several tweed looks which, like the pink coat below, drew obvious inspiration from chanel, a house he wouldn’t particularly be expected to pay homage to, partial as he is to differentiating himself from everyone else.
now, there were a lot of nice single looks here, with something for everyone, really, from the more conservative, for whom a silhouette something like the one below would be just fine, to the notice-me type we shouldn’t kid & just freely admit most fashion people are, likely equally pleased by that other dress jamie bochert is wearing, the polka-dotted corset top dress with the extremely high & likely panty-flashing hemline.
this was a very strolling-the-boardwalk kind of beachy collection, or spending several days at some obscure resort town that’s barely kept afloat by tourists during the season (kind of like jaws), and while one is whisked away by those reveries, it would be easy to overlook the obvious. how, exactly, is this collection pulled together as one? below, we have a british mod uniform-y outfit, while the bottom dress, were it paired with some black-and-eggshell flats, could easily have stepped off a contemporary chanel runway. in other words, i’m completely unclear as to what the tie-in is.
without an obvious point of view, the show becomes what it is; a lot of cute dresses and shorts (where, by the way, are all the pants?) with little more to pull them together than whatever marc cleverly pulls out, which will no doubt hypnotize the people into seeing his point of view. that sounds harsh, and i don’t mean it to be, rather, simply that sometimes his reputation helps shape critics’ perception of the collections, instead of judging them from the perspective of a blank, an unknown designer. yes, i know preceding collections are important for evaluations of the next, but only so far as one might see the designer evolve, and not for the purpose of pre-supposing his/her genius before the next curtain has ever been drawn. in that sense, today i would say he has some good ideas, but it needs to be tightened, and that he needs to put down his chanel biographies.
