A huge fan of these types of headpieces ♥
It’s quite something when a designer can send an audience tripping out into the night humming a cheerful ditty and feeling they’ve just seen the best show in town. That was exactly the happy sensation Marc Jacobs, fashion impresario, generated in a New York event which merged fashion with theater on a grand but curiously sweet scale. To the tune of “Who Will Buy?” (the Lionel Bart song from the musical Oliver!), repeated in three versions (one of them Nancy Sinatra, another the Mormon Tabernacle Choir), he put on a crazily eccentric show of cartoony Victoriana which oughtn’t to have made sense on any level, but ended up putting smiles on faces and lifting spirits. It was fashion subverted from its usually ruthless clockwork-commercial course: anti-sexy, absurdly styled with outsize wonky fur hats and cumbersomely non-body-conscious shapes—a show made, subversively, for the naive enjoyment of it. And of course that only accentuated the thrill of watching a fifteen-minute parade that reestablished the radical idea that fashion can still be free to be creative and cross over with art.
The artist in question was Jacobs’s friend Rachel Feinstein, who jammed with him on far more than the amazing rickety-house set she built for the show. “We were talking about The Cat in the Hat, pilgrims, American conservatism,” Jacobs was saying, amid a teeming crowd backstage after the show. “The tinsel,” he added, “was from a photograph of Kurt Cobain, wearing tinsel round his neck.” “And what’s with the fur hats?” someone shouted. “Ah! I think every woman should have a fur coat,” Jacobs shot back. “Only now she should wear it on her head!”
If one wanted to squeeze a fashion trend out of the performance, it might be possible to say that the clothes added to the current conversation about the up-sizing of garments. The many coats came with exaggerated bell-shaped skirts and another layer of felted and embellished skirt beneath them, often with knitted or crocheted stoles wrapped around the shoulders and pinned with a giant safety pin. Often the girls took on the look of dolls whose owners had dressed them up in clothes too big for them. At other moments, they seemed to be Victorian urchins, but playfully, theatrically so. And there was nothing at all downbeat about the richness and embellishment going on in the clothes: tweeds woven with plastic and tinsel, bright sparkly lamé, oversize glittery paisley-patterned jacquards, and multiple, playful combinations of greens, lavender, ocher, pinks, reds, gray, and black. Stripped down to its individual pieces, there’s no doubt there will be a wealth of things for girls to wear in their own combinations. But that pragmatic fact wasn’t the main lesson here: It was that Jacobs put the fun back into fashion, and that was elating to see.
