Marc Jacobs Fall 2012 Show

It’s quite something when a designer can send an audience tripping out into the night humming a cheerful ditty and feeling they’ve just seen the best show in town. That was exactly the happy sensation Marc Jacobs, fashion impresario, generated in a New York event which merged fashion with theater on a grand but curiously sweet scale. To the tune of “Who Will Buy?” (the Lionel Bart song from the musical Oliver!), repeated in three versions (one of them Nancy Sinatra, another the Mormon Tabernacle Choir), he put on a crazily eccentric show of cartoony Victoriana which oughtn’t to have made sense on any level, but ended up putting smiles on faces and lifting spirits. It was fashion subverted from its usually ruthless clockwork-commercial course: anti-sexy, absurdly styled with outsize wonky fur hats and cumbersomely non-body-conscious shapes—a show made, subversively, for the naive enjoyment of it. And of course that only accentuated the thrill of watching a fifteen-minute parade that reestablished the radical idea that fashion can still be free to be creative and cross over with art.