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    Marc Jacobs’s Latest Fall Collection Is Delightful Delusion

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    The designer’s fall collection, inspired by “personal transformation,” was wholly cartoonish.There is a scene in the new documentary “I Am: Celine Dion” in which Ms. Dion describes her dedication to designer heels.“When a girl loves her shoes, she always makes them fit,” the singer said, spreading her fingers to demonstrate how she has contorted her toes to accommodate shoes ranging from size 6 to 10. Asked for her size while shopping, she said, she would respond to sales associates: “What size do you have? I’ll make them work. I’ll make them fit.”It is a feeling well-known to women who relish playing dress-up: determination so great it pushes up against delusion.That was certainly the feeling at Marc Jacobs’s runway show Monday night, held at the New York Public Library. Fashion is determined to be a joyful medium, even or especially when the world seems joyless. And Mr. Jacobs was determined to dress his models like surreal dolls of 20th-century American iconography.A heavy white Marilyn Monroe dress opened the show. Its bodice was oversize, with pointy bra cups and a skirt sculpted in permanent half flight. Marilyn walked in white sandals made to appear about an inch too large in every direction, like a girl insistent on wearing heels from her mother’s closet. (“I walk the shoe, the shoe don’t walk me,” as Ms. Dion would say.)The proportions were a continuation of Mr. Jacobs’s February runway show: big and cartoonish, like a joke we’re all supposed to be in on. Models seemed to be tensing to keep their thick clothes in place, though of course they fit just as Mr. Jacobs intended. Necklines were lifted by invisible fingers off the shoulders of Peter Pan-collar jackets, preppy V-neck sweaters, voluminous floral cocktail dresses. Saccharine bikinis — one in white pointelle, pinned with a photorealistic daisy brooch, and the other in yellow polka dots — swung and jutted off the body.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      How A Fashion Critic Mentally Catalogs Fashion Week Shows

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      Theater and dance critics can’t own the subjects they cover, but a fashion critic can — at least imaginarily — by making a hits compilation as the clothes go by.If fashion is a storytelling business, it should follow that runway shows are narratives.Yet they can’t be. For starters, they lack a plot. True, designers can be relied upon to spiel about inspirations, travels or philosophies as a listener’s eyeballs roll back in his head. The truth is that most fashion shows are best consumed, as everything else now is, in fragments. They are elements of an ongoing internal scroll, as continuous, algorithmic and addictive as Instagram reels.That, anyway, is how this critic began viewing the collections in Milan and Paris this season, with the result that the following is best thought of as a mixtape, not anchored to specific nationality or geography or context, random and in some sense impressionistic and probably also solipsistic in the way everything is fundamentally forced to be in an attention economy.Take Hermès. The designer Véronique Nichanian is anything but a household name, probably not even among those in the economic stratosphere this label was created to serve. So what? She’s as consistently fine as — and in many ways better than — other fixtures in the pantheon of men’s wear, people like Giorgio Armani or Helmut Lang. There is a reason you don’t know her.“We don’t do marketing,” Axel Dumas, the Hermès chief executive, said at the company’s show. “We don’t even have a marketing department.”Véronique Nichanian’s jaunty looks for Hermès whispered quiet luxury. Vianney Le Caer/Invision, via Associated PressWhy bother when you are producing jaunty collections for those people whose own initials are enough, as the old Bottega Veneta tagline once held. So-called quiet luxury generally tends to make a racket. Ms. Nichanian’s is a muffled version and whispers wealth.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Dries Van Noten Retires From Fashion With Final Paris Runway Show

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      As the Belgian designer ended his career with one last runway show in Paris, he left a reminder of why his is a storied legacy.“I tried to make things people would cherish,” Dries Van Noten said on Saturday evening, during a cocktail party and dinner preceding his final runway show. Mr. Van Noten held his first show in Paris back in 1991; now, at 66, he is stepping away from his namesake brand. His retirement was a shock to many in a business in which careers tend to be abnormally truncated or else to exceed their expiration date.The decision to retire was not taken lightly, Mr. Van Noten said. Whose is? And it was destined to be a disappointment to fans of this gentle Belgian’s presence on the scene. And they are many. Why? There was his evolved craftsmanship. There was his singular gift as a colorist. There was his ability to skew pattern and tweak silhouette without compromising wearability. Perhaps alone among the designers of the vaunted Antwerp Six group he belonged to, Mr. Van Noten produced, for 150 collections, commercially accessible, cherishable clothes.Fans and designers gathered at a pre-show party in a warehouse on the outskirts of Paris.GORUNWAYA pre-show dinner party of a kind the French term a cocktail dînatoire was held in a warehouse on the outskirts of Paris. Fans from throughout the decades — among them, the designers Pierpaolo Piccioli, Thom Browne, Glenn Martens, Stephen Jones, Harris Reed and Diane von Furstenberg — floated about a vast space as waiters poured Champagne in abundance and circulated with trays bearing tiny bowls of beet soup, white asparagus with poached egg, foie gras and shrimp on skewers.As a waiter passed with a flight of beef tartare snacks, Edward Buchanan, the designer and Milan fashion director of Perfect Magazine, waved them away. Raw beef at parties is iffy, he said.Asked about his relationship to Mr. Van Noten’s designs, Mr. Buchanan told a story. “Two years ago in L.A., all my things were stolen,” he said. For months after the theft, he spent every spare hour obsessively combing the internet for replacements — not of his personal mementos but of his lost Van Notens.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Gucci Debuts Cruise Collection at London’s Tate Modern

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      Turnarounds are hard, especially when the stakes are high. Can Sabato De Sarno deliver the goods with his debut cruise collection at the Tate Modern?As the sun set over the River Thames on Monday night, London’s favorite supermodel Kate Moss struck a pose for the mob of paparazzi gathered outside the soaring industrial heft of the Tate Modern. A stream of stars soon followed, including Dua Lipa, Paul Mescal, Debbie Harry, Solange Knowles and Demi Moore, her tiny Chihuahua Pilaf tucked under her arm like a handbag. They had gathered for Gucci and its creative director, Sabato De Sarno. The budget — and the stakes — could not have been bigger as he presented his debut cruise collection.Gucci is one of the most recognizable fashion brands in the world, generating almost 10 billion euros (about $119 billion) in revenue last year. But Gucci has been scrambling to recover after a sobering drop in its fortunes in recent years. The impact for Kering, its parent company, is considerable given that Gucci is responsible for half of the organization’s sales and two-thirds of its profit. Last month, Kering reported that Gucci had a sales slump of almost 20 percent in the last quarter, leading to a rare profit warning and sliding share price.This is not the fault of Mr. De Sarno, who was appointed 15 months ago and whose designs have only recently started arriving in stores following his Milan Fashion Week debut in September. However, the critical reception of his men’s and women’s wear collections — with a pared-back focus on crisp, contemporary silhouettes and accessories — has been muted, the concern being that he is too safe and straightforward. Certainly, they are less flamboyant than those of his predecessor, Alessandro Michele. But will the fashion industry and its increasingly jittery investors give Mr. De Sarno and his more minimal-leaning vision more time to rebuild the Gucci juggernaut?Dua Lipa and Paul Mescal at Gucci.Tristan Fewings/Getty ImagesFrançois-Henri Pinault, the chairman and chief executive of Kering, and Salma Hayek at the show.Tristan Fewings/Getty ImagesIf the ideas that emerged from the cruise collection, called “We’ll Always Have London,” are anything to go by, they should. The house of Gucci has longstanding roots in London — its founder, Guccio Gucci, worked as a baggage porter at the Savoy hotel, observing the luggage and lifestyles of the international elite. In his show notes, Mr. De Sarno wrote that he had found himself inspired anew by a city that “has welcomed me and listened to me.” The Tate Modern’s vast underground concrete caverns known as the Tanks had been decorated with more than 10,000 verdant plants that blossomed from the ceiling, floor and pillars. Models made their way through the rooms in clothes that felt lighter and more covetable than those in his debut collections — short suede coats and capes, immaculately tailored denim, and shifts and skirts lavishly embroidered with paillette daisies. There were plenty of nods to British fashion woven through the show, especially the pearls, knee-length pencil skirts and slouchy and sensible beige anoraks that could have been worn by Queen Elizabeth II. Dresses and coats covered with squares made of a shimmering bead fringe were a reference to Scottish plaids.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More