Marc Jacobs S/S 2026 New York

[chiccestlavie]

This is awful, makes the girl look so thick and rectangular especially as it is not even low waisted. Like her hips start at waist level…
Would look better on a man i supppose.

I actually really enjoyed the collection/return to form from Marc but with this specific look this is all I can see 😭

 

[hamburgers]

The way I see it, he enjoys a similar authority as Miuccia Prada given to him largely due to the fact he is a darling of the fashion press (which gained him a top 5 collection/designer position practically every year since the establishment of style.com). It's without a doubt he put Louis Vuitton RTW on the map and evolved the perception of the brand from a leather goods house to a 360* fashion brand - Certainly a big achievement when I consider the Stephen Spouse and Murakami collaborations' success in the 2000s.

But then I look at his work purely as a designer of fashion, the collections for his own brand that constantly got him the esteem of one of the greats of today, and I can't help but think (much like Prada) he did mostly digestable, commercial fashion - For the most part derived from vintage. It feels weird to me that his Perry Ellis grunge collection has gained him a place in contemporary fashion history while the designs of Ann Demeulemeester of the same time were largely overseen by Vogue and other parts of the mainstream fashion press in the late 90ies.

The impact of that collection wasn't the clothes so much as it was about the idea that a new designer can come in to work for another house and burn down the image of the brand for their own POV guided by the zeitgeist and be culturally rewarded for it. Before that most social transgressions in fashion were coming from designers at their eponymous labels- Poiret, Chanel, Dior, YSL, Courreges, Gaultier, Rei, Yohji, Ann, Margiela, etc.

Karl was already questioning the sensibilities of the original Chanel and injecting pop culture beforehand, but he blew up the house codes like tweed, the camelia, etc. for ballast. Marc's grunge collection didn't have any anchoring signals to show that his collection was visually or sensibly Perry Ellis. You can make an argument that the publicity from his showing paved the way for the iconoclast approach to creative director appointments and rebrands in the late 90's and still today. I mean who do we remember more Ferre or Galliano? Thimister or Ghesquiere?

Also yes, he has always had a strong biased push from the American fashion indsutry. He's like Anna's original pet project. America has always had an inferiority complex about its place against high brow European culture even at a government level. Back in the 1950's the CIA funded projects to maintain the momentum of the abstract expressionism movement so that America would have its place in the art world against Russia. Marc was supposed to be like a one man Battle of Versailles.

Filmmakers like Abbas Kiarostami (Iran), for example, didn’t grow up or work in a particularly open-mindeu Western European environment that naturally encourages pushing cinematic boundaries. Japan is another interesting case — it’s a fairly conservative society, yet many of its designers end up moving in strongly avant-garde directions anw 😀.

Kiarostami was like pushing 40 when the revolution happened so his POV wasn't dulled by conservatism. The Japanese favor the avant garde as a direct reaction to being a hyper traditional hermetic monoethnic island country not despite it. How else are you supposed to rebel when everything and everyone else looks the same.

 

[MulletProof]

@tricotineacetat Hmm, I don’t think environment really shapes a person’s taste. You can build those fashion’s perspectives through research, observation, comparison, and reading alone, I mean it’s 2026. Whether someone lives in Miami, Houston, Denver, Vegas or somewhere on the edge of the world like Magadan in Russia or Perth in Australia or in the middle nowhere in China doesn’t really matter.

Filmmakers like Abbas Kiarostami (Iran), for example, didn’t grow up or work in a particularly open-mindeu Western European environment that naturally encourages pushing cinematic boundaries. Japan is another interesting case — it’s a fairly conservative society, yet many of its designers end up moving in strongly avant-garde directions anw 😀. Japanese designers are just as commercially ambitious as Americans (commercial lines and collaborations), even though their aesthetic expression on Runway and brand’s concepts can be radically unique.

So I think judging someone’s fashion perspectives based on their background or where they live can come off as a slightly elitist viewpoint often associated with parts of continental Europe.

I want to reply to this in more depth but I'm in a rush 💀, but I think you're mixing up the impact of a socioeconomic context (time, place, etc) and how that regulates creative expression in youth (incentivising radical thinking or conservatism, you name it), with the fixed hierarchical elements that take unique shape in every society based on culture, traditions, class and all that (Distinction by Bourdieu is a great read!) and that directly inform what we discriminate against and consider aspirational, shaping 'taste'.

Back to this, that cartoon was the first thing on my mind.. horribly unflattering. And I just can't see the Marc Jacobs brand recovering from its current status as the default supplier of accessories that denote, well, poverty. The Tote Bag is really a phenomenon and not the kind he experienced at LV in the early 00s. I wish he'd create a dogmatic secondary line that could make him escape from the level of pedestrian, low budget commercialism his name is automatically associated with now, but I just can't see that happening because.. look at him, look at how he's fangirling all over ig, he's too desperate..

 

[Lola701]

Ann Demeulemeester is a Superfuture relic - not necessary. You don’t need Ann to be stylish, you need Marc to be stylish.

Do we?
His clothes have such a transformative power?

 

[yslforever]

Do we?
His clothes have such a transformative power?

Barely,
As far as I am concerned, he was already out of his breath by 2010.

 

[hamburgers]

A Requiem for Marc Jacobs (and the 1990s)​

The designer revisits his heyday — and makes clothes you can wear.

By Vanessa Friedman
Feb. 10, 2026

Marc Jacobs — erstwhile savior of New York fashion, the man who jump-started the phenomenon that is Louis Vuitton and proved that American designers could hold their own with the best of Paris — hasn’t made clothes that women could wear, at least in real life, in about five years. Not since the pandemic put the show system on pause.

Instead he has offered high-concept constructions in exaggerated shapes and bizarro proportions that play on the idea of paper dolls or Alice through the looking glass or fun house Victoriana. He has treated dressing more like performance art or a thought experiment than, say, something to actually get you through the day.

He shows his collections before New York Fashion Week officially starts, and thus in front of a friendly hometown audience for whom Mr. Jacobs is something of a national treasure, and they are sold only at Bergdorf Goodman. The result has seemed, over the last few years, increasingly irrelevant. An exercise in self-indulgence rather than a good faith dialogue with potential customers.

So it was something of a shock on Monday evening to go to the Marc Jacobs show and see … tweed pencil skirts and trouser suits. V-neck sweaters. A proper car coat or two. Sequined tube tops and micro-miniskirts. A blouse with a ruffle down the front. Even a slip dress.

Sure, he wasn’t entirely playing it straight. The waists of the pencil skirts were cut straight across the hips, so rather than follow the curve of the body, they stuck out at either side so that a model could slip her hands inside — not pockets, but suggestively pocketlike.

The minis were hiked up above the natural waistline, so they looked more like misplaced obis than skirts. Some pencil skirts were sheer; you could see through them to the shirts tucked in beneath. Two coats were buttoned neatly — up the back.

There were obvious debts to Prada, to Helmut Lang, to Yves Saint Laurent. Mr. Jacobs even name-checked those brands in his show notes under the line “credits and receipts.” A nice touch.

But most of all, the references were to his own past: to Perry Ellis, the house where a young Mr. Jacobs designed a haute grunge collection for spring 1993 that catapulted him to fame — and got him fired; to his fall 1995 and spring 1998 collections; even to a Marc by Marc Jacobs collection from 2003, when that line still existed. (It was a forerunner of Heaven by Marc Jacobs, the contemporary brand that accounts for the bulk of the house’s sales.)

It was a reminder of just how influential Mr. Jacobs had once been. More than any other New York designer, he had an ability to sense where the social and cultural wind was blowing and offer a way to dress for it. That talent, rather than any silhouette or style, was the single greatest hallmark of his work, and it gave him and the people who wore him a sense of being plugged directly into the moment, whatever the moment was.

It’s why his shows were such events and why he had the ability to transform celebrities from naff to cool simply by including them in his world. (Some of those given the Marc glow-up include Victoria Beckham, Miley Cyrus and Kendall Jenner.)

He doesn’t occupy that space any more; he gave it up. Maybe he didn’t like the way fashion was going. Maybe he just got tired. Maybe he was less interested in other people’s worlds than his own. But there is a vacuum where he once was, and it was hard not to wish that rather than offer a quasi retrospective, he would try a little harder to re-engage. It seems unlikely.

In his show notes, the designer included a brief meditation on “memory” and “loss,” and questions of “who we are, what we create, what we leave behind and what we carry forward.”

LVMH, the French luxury conglomerate that owns Marc Jacobs, has been trying to sell the label. Negotiations with Authentic Brands Group, the licensing specialist that owns Reebok, Juicy Couture and Frederick’s of Hollywood, recently fell through. For now, it is staying a part of the group, but the label’s future is unclear. That’s bound to have any designer thinking about their legacy.

On the far side of the Park Avenue Armory, where the show was held, was a metal folding table surrounded by four folding chairs on which a small painting stood: an oil by the artist Anna Weyant that Mr. Jacobs had commissioned the week before. It depicted a daisy — Mr. Jacobs’s most successful perfume is called Daisy — with half its petals pulled off and pinned to the canvas. Preserved for posterity or left to wither and die, depending on how you see it.

 

[rivegaucheface]

I don't like it at all... I can appreciate as presentation but I don't want to wear any of it. I'm sick of square-shaped clothes. There is not a single right angle on my entire body.

 

[susseinmcswanny]

I know I’m feeling like a bitter cynamon latte right now but idk how I feel about this. Some looks at face value I like, but I kind of find his past few collections more honest for what they were. This isn't 2003 anymore. He's no vanguard, just talkin and no walkin. Where he’s coming from, a 60 y/o celebrity on social media kiki-ing with Alex Consani et al., feels fake. He should just continue to embrace himself and his ice spice cosplay. I liked the sequin blobs better. Sorry!

 

[Grets]

He was one of the many that wanted Chanel and has past few collections prior showed those bold exaggerated attention-grabing silhouettes. But he was never the heir to Chanel, maybe closer to being a Karl heir but the brand does not want to do another Karl.

 

[Caffeine]

MJ quoting TR? Bring it on!

 

[Caffeine]

He was one of the many that wanted Chanel and has past few collections prior showed those bold exaggerated attention-grabing silhouettes. But he was never the heir to Chanel, maybe closer to being a Karl heir but the brand does not want to do another Karl.

As we have established, they wanted a corporate yes man, and they've got him
I hope Marc gets triggered by the critics and come back stronger. (I still have an old piece by him from 20 years ago!)

 

[charmedp321]

Best show of NYFW. Marc is considered and still thinking forward. There were a few new ideas that I have not seen before, and it was still traditional enough to digest. I’m still rooting for him at a larger brand again.

The soundtrack and pacing are perfect 😮‍💨🙌🏾