That beast Marc Jacobs: he's gone and turned the fashion world upside-down.
In his spring 2008 collection, which showed a few nights ago here in New York City, he managed to gall and thrill his audience with an onslaught of half-finished dresses covered in silly string and shoes with heels protruding from the ball of the foot. Oddly-placed sheer panels revealed underwear and bras.
"An unmitigated disaster," declared the New York Post. "This collection and the screw-you attitude with which it was presented, were just begging for harsh criticism. Sorry to oblige." Other reporters agreed. "Dreck," sneered one. "Pointless if not incomprehensible."
But the fashion intelligentsia was quick to come to his rescue. Vogue's Grace Coddington called the collection "really amazing and daring," and The New York Times asserted that the show "expressed perfectly the dislocating values of our culture."
The point, apparently, was to squelch clichés about sexiness and "offer an antidote to the cartoonish Jessica Rabbit sexuality that has dominated women's fashion for more than 20 years," said the Times. "From the obsession with celebrities to the bizarre trash-bin styles of designers, Mr. Jacobs found the right contemporary notes and sounded them clearly ... [his] stripped-down dresses break the hold of flagrant sexiness."
And what did the reigning prince of fashion have to say about all of this?
"It's the Emperor's New Clothes," Jacobs told Women's Wear Daily. "Which is what fashion is."
It seems peculiar to me that he'd concede this point just before showing a huge collection -- but hey, at least he's honest. And under most circumstances, I tend to agree with him. Most trendy fashion is much ado about nothing -- and is fueled by a great big machine to make you drool over that expensive piece of nothing. My beloved idol, former Vogue editor Diana Vreeland, was the first to acknowledge this.
"Give 'em what they never knew they wanted!" she once crowed.
But even I am willing to concede that in some cases, fashion is not entirely a case of Emperor's New Clothes Syndrome -- especially in largely conceptual lines like Jacobs' odd offering.
People love to be appalled by conceptual clothing when it's introduced on the runways. There is much moaning about the unwearability of certain items, the ugliness, the preposterousness ... many accusations about minds being lost and careers being dead.
And then there is a watershed.
Take the early 1990s grunge movement, for example. Inspired by the Seattle music scene, many prominent designers -- from Calvin Klein to our man of the hour, Mr. Jacobs -- developed, showcased and popularized the hell out of the look. It was forward-looking and reactive at the same time, rebelling against the corpulent, shoulder-padded excess of the 1980s.
A few editors nearly threw up into their handbags when the first grunge-laden models skulked down the runways. But many people -- a great deal many -- adjusted their sensibilities, borrowed plaid shirts from their grandpas, and sent Doc Martens stock through the ceiling.
Quite a few of the design houses that are emblems for good taste today were considered wildly avant-garde in their earlier incarnations, and not always in a good way.
For example: Christian Dior's "New Look" was initially derided and rejected when it was introduced in 1947. Characterized by a mid-calf length full-skirt, large bust, and small waist, the look eventually gained mass popularity and revolutionized the way that American women dressed.
Like grunge, the New Look phenomenon was a sharp response to the immediately preceding era: in this case, the austere World War II years. Cloth rations, uniforms, and unadorned clothing gave away to plush, excessive proportions. What looked wrong at first eventually began to look right ... and desirable.
Before that, when Coco Chanel introduced her famous stream-lined little black dress look, one of her contemporaries, designer Paul Poiret, witheringly commented: "Until now, women were beautiful and architectural ... Now they resemble undernourished telephone operators."
And what woman today doesn't have at least one LBD?
It's definitely worth remembering that initially-shocking fashions aren't just trickle-down from the fashion elite, but are also seep-up from the streets. The "gangsta" style of dressing, with its baggy pants with the crotch dangling at the knees, probably seemed deeply improbable when it first appeared in rap vids in the 1990s. A strong political statement, gangsta style was meant to mimic the attire of prison inmates -- who were not allowed to have belts, lest they be used as weapons or nooses.
Gangsta style is now ubiquitous. In fact, it's so visible that some cities are passing laws banning it, under the guise of curbing a mass epidemic of indecent exposure.
The point: while much of fashion is designed to give you what you don't want or don't need, under certain circumstances, it can serve important functions, too. It can be reflective of the needs and mood of society, it can be a commentary upon society, it can develop into a badge of identity on a mass level.
It is indeed a wearable canvas, and can be as reflective as a Jackson Pollock.
It's hard to say how much of an impact Marc Jacobs' weird collection will have, if any. It may yet be heralded a new signpost, or it may not. After all, Pollock had bad shows, too.
I personally don't think that Jacobs has done anything terribly groundbreaking, at least not this time around. It's not as though every designer has been churning out trashy collections that bare women's breasts, Victoria Beckham-style, for the last five years. I've found women's high fashion to be quite demure and intellectual in recent cycles. Other, more classical, designers could just have easily been claiming "an antidote to flagrant sexiness" if they chose to do so.
No matter how history judges the collection and its intentions, it's still worth remembering that despite its excesses, its sillinesses -- fashion is, indeed, a barometer of sorts.
But then the question becomes whether American society really needs Marc Jacobs to remind us that our values suck.
And: do we really want to wear our guilt?