Marc Jacobs Dolls Up the American Girl
by PIA CATTON
Mon, 8 Sep 2008 at 10:28 PM
As if to counter the severity of his last collection, Marc Jacobs's entry for spring 2009 was a crazy quilt of extreme fashion. Ruffles, belts, hats, and bracelets were piled on each model. No one single design theme emerged -- except excess.
 AP Photo/Louis Lanzano |
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Instead, the models looked like a parade of dolls from the American Girl line. There was the prairie girl: plaid shirt, ruffled skirt wrapped around her waist, and little hat. There was the Russian girl: hair under a scarf and a full swingy skirt that glittered with gypsy gold. There was the Jamaican girl dressed in a sun dress of loud purple and yellow. There was the librarian, the bank teller, the maiden aunt -- the entire cast of "The Music Man" was on this very runway. Sort of.
And they would be lucky. Because this was a collection to top it all. The level of aggressive design on display here puts it in the category of collections that make people wild with excitement for fashion. Mr. Jacobs's use of Gershwin's "Rhapsody in Blue" gave the show an explosive power — and associated the designer with an artist of extreme genius. For anyone else to use this music would have been obnoxious. But Mr. Jacobs has the sort of thrilling talent that should always be set to Gershwin.
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