When Marc Jacobs guest edited the December 2025 issue of Vogue, he invited artist Anna Weyant to contribute a romantic cover. When Weyant was invited by the Cultivist and Capital One to create a Fashion Week fantasy—which became The Dollhouse—she brought in Jacobs, who created staff uniforms and dressed the “models/dolls” who are currently inhabiting her creation in pieces from his 40th anniversary collection. Together, this dream team created a much needed benign alternative reality, one that has little to do with news headlines or even the frenzy of New York Fashion Week. Still, in this world, as in much of Weyant’s work, things are not quite what they seem—and that’s the point.
“These are pretty dark and uncertain times, and I just wanted to do something fun that would amuse people and bring them joy and entertain them in a bit of an escape from reality,” Weyant said. As The Dollhouse “started to develop, I realized I was so inspired by Mark’s work and asked if he would be willing to partake in it.” Jacobs’s spring 2024 show, Weyant noted, “lives rent free in my head”—as it does for many others. The clothes were as striking as the set, featuring ginormous sculptures of a metal folding chair and table by the late Robert Therrien. “I try to stay with themes or objects or sources I can trace back to my personal history. The further back I can trace something as being meaningful to me in some way or another…the more I am attracted to it,” he wrote at the time.
Weyant seems to follow a similar path, often referencing her own personal history. Growing up in Canada, “I had a room off my bedroom that was called my Barbie room and had all the dollhouses and the Ferris wheel,” she said. Welcome to the Dollhouse was the title of the artist’s first solo show in New York, in 2019. While not depicting a haunted house, the suggested narrative in those paintings has a sort of scene-of-the crime, open-ended eeriness. In contrast, one wouldn’t be surprised to run into Alice (as in Wonderland) or Belle (the future Mrs. Beast) on 63rd Street. Weyant hasn’t created a completely spin-sugar world. Knocked over chairs, puddles on the bathroom floor, a two-headed teddy bear (a reference to a Jacobs logo), and a painting of a pair of earrings, one broken, hint at haste or lived-in-ness.
There’s also a deliberate sense of unreality created both by the scale of the furnishings and the use of materials like cardboard and plastic. “It’s almost like translating a sentence into French, for example, and then translating it back to English in the way that things get distorted,” said Weyant. “When you blow up something that’s really tiny, you start seeing the seams and the places where the joints don’t quite fit well together or the drips in the paint. And a lot of these objects are just 3D printed objects that I loved. It’s all miniatures that we blew up, and so the objects are really thick and they’re really weird and they don’t quite function.” There was a delicious sense of (deliberate) offness, too, to the black Marc Jacobs ensemble Weyant wore. Made of heavy silk twill bonded to neoprene, the top extended into the space around her body, in paper-doll fashion.
In recent collections Jacobs has been playing with flatness and dimensionality in exciting ways. “I think I’m just looking at fashion in a way that doesn’t have to do anything, it just needs to be something one sees and experiences,” said Jacobs. “I think sometimes you just do things because you’d like them to be, and that’s it. The dollhouse thing, I think there’s always something very haunting and bizarre about them. And those miniatures, I don’t know enough about them, but I mean I know people are super, super obsessed over the tiniest, the most detailed, perfect representation, and I just find the fetish quality of all that to be really incredible. I admire people who take things to that end, and with a dollhouse there is also that need to create this little tiny world that is a version of some other real world somewhere. But somewhere in the translation, it does go really bizarre.”
For her part, Weyant is fascinated with dollhouses because, she said, “they sit at the intersection of so many things that interest me in my work; domesticity and memory and the wonkiness of it.” At a time when there is a glaring unbalance between male and female creatives, it’s worth noting that 40 blocks uptown from Weyant’s magical abode, the Stettheimer Dollhouse, created by Carrie Walter Stettheimer in the years between 1916 and 1935, resides in the Museum of the City of New York. That artwork depicts the Roaring ’20s in miniature while Weyant’s dollhouse, located in the Academy Mansion, built in 1920, speaks to a wider audience and represents a different, digital era, which Weyant is keyed into. “Sometimes I have fun playing with the ‘Instagram meets old painting’ type of clash,” she said in a past interview.
Yet part of the appeal of The Dollhouse is its physicality. “It’s almost like you’re going inside Anna’s mind here,” observed Cultivist cofounder Marlies Verhoeven. “And that behind-the-scenes moment in her mind is what I think people are looking for. People are so overstimulated digitally, so having real experiences in real life has become more meaningful. I think the right brands have grasped that and are trying to create moments of calm where you can sit down and actually learn about something or experience an artist’s world in real life and aren’t just inundated with images that flash by you every minute.”
The Dollhouse, presented by The Cultivist and Capital One Entertainment at the Academy Mansion, 2 East 63rd Street, is open to the public September 10–12, from 1–4 p.m. There will be daily beauty masterclasses, one featuring doll-like makeup, another with Marc Jacobs’s go-to manicurist Mei Kawajiri, and a hair session with Dimitris Giannetos, who will teach looks inspired by those seen on the designer’s runways.
.jpg)
.jpg)
.jpg)
.jpg)
