ANDREA JANKE Finest Accessories: Pencil-skirted Dior-era Sirens By Marc Jacobs

Wednesday, February 16, 2011

Pencil-skirted Dior-era Sirens By Marc Jacobs

Overscaled Polka Dots - Marc Jacobs!

"I'm tired of all that easy stuff out there. I wanted something strict and disciplined," said Marc Jacobs. So Jacobs looked to different visions of cartoonish feminity, from hourglass-waisted, peplum-hipped, pencil-skirted Dior-era sirens to sex-shop secretaries and dominatrices - this latter source hinted at by the tufted white patent columns that lined the mirrored runway. House of Harlot produced the show's inventive rubber garments; sheat dresses and skirts worked in fish-scale tiers that took the material to a new level of sophistication.

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'Marc Jacobs - The New Level of Sophistication'

Jacob's clothes had tremendous boda, achieved with stiffly bonded or double-face fabrics, rubber, or even lacquered alligator. When they weren't molded-to-the shapely-body - in silhouettes that evoked early Alaia and even Gaultier - they were dramatically standaway (think fifties Balenciaga).

And like a Roy Lichtenstein heroine, or perhaps the fabled performance artist Leigh Bowery, most of the pieces were covered in overscale polka dots, from their defined berets with chin straps (by Stephen Jones, inspired by Adrian's designs for the fashion-show sequences in George Cukor's iconically campy 1939 movie The Women), to their hose and the ankle-length pop socks that were tucked into wedge-heeled snow booties. Shiny dots were embossed on bonded wool, printed fur, or linked in Paco Rabanne-like formation on plastic skirts, as though the clothes had all fallen victim to some wildly fashionable epidemic disease.

It was all very antic and playful - "Well, you know ... we get bored!"said Jacobs , but each piece revealed the mastery of cut and of invention that we expect from the provocative, protean Mr. Jacobs.