After the blinding Marc Jacobs show last night, one could but hope that some of that insane, celebratory energy would spill over into his other collection. Soundtrack-wise, Marc stayed in the same era, but he replaced the raging eighties-style new wave with Roxanne Shante. The obvious sartorial equivalent would have been styles transmuted from Jamel Shabazz's hymn to hip-hop, Back in the Days, but there hasn't been anything obvious about Jacobs for years now. Sure, he showed high-tops and voluminous, side-zipped track pants, but the precise layering of the collection still felt more like his Mudd Club buds. And the models, with their quiffs and glasses, looked a bit like Hal Ludacer, Most Beautiful Boy at the Mudd (though I guess they could have passed for Morrissey, too). The layers ran thus: a long tank under a checked shirt under a cardigan under a jacket, with a rumpled silk tie and scarf as accessories. Any piece might have been freshly plucked from a vintage trawl. But even though the brickwork was classic—tweed, flannel, paisley, herringbone, velvet—the building felt all new. Though that's often the way with this collection, here it was so polished and confident that it played like one more supernova in Marc's ever-expanding universe.
-[[Tim Blanks]]
