Marc Jacobs and Thom Browne: A Tale of Two Designers

The intriguing and complex thing about Marc Jacobs’s new collection is Jacobs himself. He’s not merely showing us suits and dresses that look distorted in scale or that appear to jump away from the models’ bodies like paper-doll clothes. He’s also rendering how his mind works, its jumpy rhythms. This is Jacobs’s 40th anniversary in business, and the shapes are certainly familiar, but they’ve been exaggerated and blurred to suggest the effects of memory.

To further illustrate how memory throws things into wacky proportions, he borrowed artwork by the late Robert Therrien — an oversize table and chairs — for his set. As Therrien once said of his process, “The further back I can trace something as being meaningful to me … the more I am attracted to it.”

I’m reviewing Jacobs’s collection now because I wasn’t in New York for his February 2 show. He follows his own runway schedule, typically in late January and June, and for the moment he only sells the collection through Bergdorf Goodman, though that may soon change. (A store in Japan, where Jacobs has a sizable following, has expressed an interest in the same kind of exclusive arrangement.) Jacobs spoke during the pandemic of wanting to find a new way to reach high-end customers and be creatively free, on his level. His idea may just be working. Creatively, he certainly seems to be operating without a net, which is great for fashion.

Thom Browne closed the New York shows on Wednesday night, and he and Jacobs make for ideal bookends. Both are maniacs when it comes to fabrics. Browne developed his tweeds with a French mill and created, in New York, a “tweed” using ribbons and fabrics in embroidery or intarsia. Both have a tremendous curiosity about historical dress and personalities. This season, Browne drew on the characters illustrated by the French artist George Goursat. Known as SEM, Goursat sketched the fabulous creatures of the Edwardian era — the era known for fantastically feathered hats and narrow hobble skirts — and he rendered them as insects.

Well, Browne did much the same with his silhouettes, trimmings, and hair. Tailoring was generally as sharp and emphatic as an exclamation mark, and he did his version of the hobble. But big cinched coats over dresses, with peel-away necklines, evoked an insect. Multiple black velvet bands that ran around some coats and jackets, and which dangled down the front like ribbons, were inspired by centipedes. The models’ hair, often trapped by black veiling or with braids wired or molded into ecstatic, wind-blown shapes, suggested birds’ nests.

Edgar Allan Poe’s poem “The Raven,” read by the actress Carrie Coon in a recording, gave more drama and ambience to the nature theme, though with Browne it isn’t necessary to understand the story. In the center of his set — “a snow-clad field,” after Poe — was a 30-foot-high black puffer jacket, with a man at its neckline, or summit, waving his branchlike arms. Several young boys and girls emerged, Harry Potter style, from the base of the tree, er, coat. A child would probably say this makes perfect sense.

Browne uses dreams as effectively as Jacobs does memory; perhaps both are trying to land on the stuff that happens in the unconscious to convey that feeling. Many of Jacobs’s clothes get their stiffened shape by wool or knitting being bonded onto a material and, as well, through patternmaking. The shoulders of pullovers were intentionally brought forward, for a hunched-over look. The sweaters are actually lighter in weight than they might appear in photographs. In other garments, Jacobs constructed an interior that allows them to sit securely on the body yet appear detached from or floating on it. It’s an extraordinary illusion, which also relates to how we sometimes perceive clothes on celebrities — as just one more body in a hazy-dress parade.

As for Browne, he has really surpassed himself with this collection — not only in his handling of a striking silhouette and its original details, like those cool “centipede” bands and the long knitted braids that adorned some knitwear but also with the convincing number of looks that are wearable. That hasn’t always been clear from his shows, but this time they were radiantly inspiring — and led by the tailoring.

Cathy Horyn , 2024-02-15 22:06:49

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