#TBT: The Ideal Fall Wardrobe From Marc Jacobs, 10 Years Later
It was Valentine’s Day 2010. Judy Garland began to warble over the soundtrack in the Lexington Avenue Armory and Marc Jacobs and his business partner Robert Duffy stepped out to tear away cardboard paper from a wood frame box. Behind the cardboard were his models, hair mussed, black eyeliner carefully tracing the outer-corners of their eyes, and streaks of highlighter on their skin. Just one season earlier, they had been vampish ballerinas; before that high-haired Princess Glorias; and before that Arabian Mary Poppinses. Few can create a collection of characters quite like Marc Jacobs—check out his Spring 2020 outing for the ongoing proof—and yet for Fall 2010, Jacobs put pizazz on the back burner in favor of a soulful, simple collection of timeless wardrobe basics.
Inside that giant wooden box were 56 models in varying shades of gray, greige, beige, sky, and lemon-lime dressed in iconically quirky Jacobs shapes. Tati Cotliar opened the show in a gray knit sweatshirt that, from the front, looked perfectly normal, and from behind revealed itself to be backless, harnessed with a sexual subversion. Jacobs’s bracelet-sleeve coats were worn with midiskirts, socks, and mary janes, and models super and street cast sported voluminous fur collars or bookish glasses. Long before the idea of everyday essentials became a direct-to-consumer buzzword, this was a collection that presented wooly coats, tea dresses, and three-piece suits as anything but boring.
And then there was the eveningwear: Enormous shearling gilets with velvet pants, prairie dresses that dripped in muddy sequins, Jenny Sinkaberg in an Oscars-worthy red carpet column worn with a shrugged on chartreuse mock neck. It was Jacobs’s wallflower glamour at its bizarre best, a palette cleanser that still resonates today. “I got tired of the whole idea of modernity and what’s new in fashion, so we just kind of revisited a lot of our old stuff,” Jacobs said backstage. The shapes he revived for Fall 2010 might have been antique at the time, even more so today, but damn do they look right for this season. The good news is many of these pieces will have a second (third, fourth, fifth) life on sites like TheRealReal and Vestiaire Collective. Happy hunting!
Originally Appeared on Vogue
