Marc Jacobs S/S 2008 (theme and influence)

Although a number of designers have used lingerie and minimal draping to impart a softer sex appeal, none have the authority of Mr. Jacobs’s stripped-down dresses to break the hold of flagrant sexiness. His skimmy, bugle-beaded evening dresses and tweed skirts, with undergarments casually showing through sheer panels at the side or back, are erotic. Yet, because of the sensibility of the designer, they are respectful of women in a way that Britney Spears’s fishnets are not.

Despite the wait, there was the sense backstage after the show that people thought they had witnessed something special from a designer who in recent years has pushed himself harder and harder. This is the fourth season that Mr. Jacobs has asked Stefan Beckman to design the theatrical set. For Monday’s show, the multilevel set included a film by the video artist Charles Atlas. The music throughout was Ravel’s “Boléro.”

Over the last few seasons, Mr. Jacobs has touched on such themes as futurism and retrospective fashion, taking what he needs from the work of other designers, like Yohji Yamamoto, to express his ideas. This time, he said, “I just decided to get involved in where we are now: the obsession with reality TV shows, the red carpet, footballers’ wives like Victoria Beckham.” He added: “There’s this two-dimensional, three-quarter-portrait quality to all the pictures you see in every magazine. They’re of nobodies, somebodies and half-somebodies.” That was a starting point.

“And people always say to me, ‘Oh, you’re not known for doing sexy.’ So I wanted to think about that.”

The show was done in reverse of the typical order. It started with Mr. Jacobs’s bow and the finale of models and then progressed backward from the evening clothes. Not only did this approach help convey the exceptional emphasis placed on evening clothes, especially in magazines and on Web party pages, but it also allowed Mr. Jacobs to immediately challenge the conventional view.

In a way, all fashion is a case of the emperor’s new clothes, and Mr. Jacobs has been a designer long enough to enjoy the game of occasionally hoodwinking his audience with see-through evening trousers or a loose one-shoulder white gown with smudgy print and a sheer panel in the back, with a beige bra and panties underneath.

Nonetheless, there was something beautiful, as well as realistic, about a black beaded T-shirt with a stole draped over the bust that was paired with black silk shorts. Or a beaded transparent tank dress shown over a lavender bra and underpants. Although such looks may ultimately be worn by a select few, Mr. Jacobs is influential, and women will take cues from his ideas. There is more beauty and modesty in the way Mr. Jacobs exposes a bra strap than you see most days on the subway.

Many people who follow fashion have been waiting for a designer to deal openly and imaginatively with sexuality without exploiting it, to find shapes more in concert with women’s lives than another humdrum bustier. With his cutaway dresses, seductive capes and sly color-block tops, including a varsity jersey, Mr. Jacobs convinces us that it is possible.


reference:
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/12/fashion/shows/12FASHION.html?_r=1




The big theme here was underwear-as-outerwear (call it peek-a-boo chic), though this was less an in-your-face "I'm too sexy for my shirt" display and more a thoughtful meditation on our culture's current obsession with baring all – figuratively and literally – via daytime talk shows, tell-all memoirs, the rise of Burlesque stars and never-ending pap shots of celebs (and celeb genitalia). And the clothes – with an exposed granny panty and bra strap here, a nude slip sticking out there, a flesh toned body stocking with glittering red stripper's pasties over the nipples elsewhere - spoke of how this constant overexposure has dulled, rather than sharpened, our sense of what's sexy or provocative and how, as a culture, we've become desensitised to the very things that should turn us on and entirely lost our desire for privacy – or propriety. (Ironic, isn't it, that Victoria Beckham, who recently posed in her scanties for a faux post-coitus spread in W mag, was on hand to watch the proceedings unfold?).

The styles themselves hop-scotched the decades, from quasi-Victorian mourning outfits to Rita Hayworth-worthy bias cut slip dresses to prim Babe Paley suiting to slinky, vibrantly hued jersey numbers (next stop: Studio 54!), to flower-sprigged gowns that suggested Galliano and Westwood to sporty numbered mini dresses reminiscent of an athlete's jersey and Y-3. It was as if Jacobs was saying to his detractors: "Yeah, I borrow liberally from outside sources. So what?" It's a valid question, given the thought provoking, firebrand results. Let's not forget, however, that self-consciously staged photos of the designer himself, making out with a much younger guy, recently surfaced on Myspace. So maybe this show was more self-referential than we realise.

reference:
http://www.vogue.co.uk/fashion/show.aspx/catwalk-report/id,5351









THEME OF 2008 S/S COLLECTION:
WOMEN'S SEXINESS & TRANSPARENCY