Editor’s Note: In honor of Vogue Runway’s 10th anniversary, our writers are penning odes to the most memorable spring 2016 shows. Today: Marc Jacobs’s Ziegfeld Theatre extravaganza.
Anticipation, suspense, and (when he was late, as he often was back in the old days before he became the promptest designer in the business) impatience—Marc Jacobs could stir up feelings like no one else on the New York calendar. It never hurt that he held the week-closing spot, rendering everything else a mere prelude. Even still, this Marc Jacobs show stands apart.
Instead of the Lexington Avenue Armory, his show venue going back to the 1990s, we were at the Ziegfeld, one of the last single-screen theaters standing in New York. Befitting the location, there was popcorn and fountain drinks, cigarette girls dispensing candy, show merch in the form of souvenir T-shirts, and even Playbills. Before the Ziegfeld movie palace, there was another Ziegfeld, a playhouse famous for its musicals, the most famous of all being Show Boat. It will surprise you not at all to learn that there was no little showboating this September evening in 2015.
Outside, the marquee announced “Marc Jacobs: One Night Only!” and a red carpet stretched halfway down the block, lined with curious locals and tourists alike, who really were in for the evening of their lives. Emily Ratajkowski, Irina Shayk, and Alek Wek numbered among his models, and they worked the carpet while inside the invited audience watched the goings-on on the Ziegfeld’s legendarily big screen. This was a good half decade before Balenciaga’s Demna did something similar at his Simpsons show in Paris, by the way, but only Jacobs had the Brian Newman Orchestra.
The collection was really something too. A red-white-and-blue ode to Times Square, the movies, America itself, with Maria Callas as Medea singing on an opera cape, Janet Leigh doing her Psycho screech on a pantsuit, and a Fiorucci angel alighting on a lacy slip dress. There were movie usher suits trimmed with gold braid, Letterman jackets festooned with pins, and kitschy flag tees. Beth Ditto herself sashayed down the runway in a 1930s Jean Harlow gown.
“That’s entertainment baby,” Jacobs pronounced after the show, and, boy, did we have fun. We’ve seen many shows in the decade since that have blended fashion and spectacle, but Jacobs wrote the playbook. I still have the T-shirt. It’s holey and hanging on by a thread, but I’ll always have my memories.
