In the crowd after Marc Jacobs' show on Monday night, one fashion editor turned to another and said: "Wow. So many changes." And it was true.
If last season was about the over-sized coats and eccentric layering, Marc Jacobs' Spring collection was about the thin straight line. There were low-slung skirts, exposed midriffs and jutting hips, column dresses, and every kind of stripe you could imagine.
There were vertical stripes and horizontal stripes; thin stripes and thick stripes. There were black stripes, red, tan, and navy. It was enough to feel, as one model came down the runway after another, a state of hypnosis coming on.
The show opened with a model in a striped t-shirt over a pair of black hotpants. Then came light sundresses with scalloped edges, a sea of skirt suits with shrunken blazers, and finally striped and beaded eveningwear.
The accessories were particularly stand-out, with shrunken striped purses, and striped kitten heels, each coordinated perfectly with each other -- so the bag matched the dress, which matched the shoes.
As Jacobs told his friend John Currin in an interview earlier this month, Jacobs hinted that he was taking his collection a sexier way for Spring. "After last season, when everything was wrapped and layered, I'm thinking, how am I going to make this sexier?"
Well, he answered it on Monday night: "There's nothing sexier than a girl covered up," he told Cathy Horyn. And she agreed: "For the first time in a while," she noted, "A designer has successfully pushed the sex button in a compelling way."
