Fashion week is almost nine days long, but before I get too far ahead of myself here, I want to backtrack to two inspired “happenings” from last Thursday. The first was Loïc Prigent’s Marc Jacobs & Louis Vuitton documentary previewed to select members of the fashion world. I had the honor of working with Marc Jacobs when he took over the reins at Perry Ellis in the early 1990s. We shot fashion stories and covers over at Mademoiselle. (Do you remember grunge? That was Marc! But he did pretty, sophisticated grunge!)
Anyway, the documentary gave the world a behind-closed-doors glimpse of the frenzy and fever of creating a Fashion House show. And in Marc Jacob’s case, it was double duty! Skipping from New York to Tokyo to Paris, the film followed Jacobs and his team as they conceptualized, refined, and executed two spring ready-to-wear collections, one for Jacobs’ eponymous American label, and the other for the venerable French luxury house, Louis Vuitton.
I think the most important thing the audience learned and now respects is just how crazy it is behind the scenes to create the magic of a show—and we will now understand when the next Marc Jacobs show starts really late! Design houses spend hundreds of thousands of dollars for one show—a show that lasts no more than thirty or forty minutes. And the second after the applause dies down, the music fades way, and the audience filters out, the lone designer starts, once again, designing. Designing for the next season—with a few colors, images, and pictures for inspiration.
Even though this magic is so very far away from what we end up wearing in the “trickle down” effect of fashion to the masses, it is interesting to consider just how much work we never see. Not everything on the runway of Fashion Week will make it into the stores, but the colors, the energy, the point of view of a season, and the magic will inspire us all for seasons to come.
I also saw the coolest eco-friendly show on Thursday. It was pure inspiration, again. The show? Earth Pledge Future Fashion. The designers recruited by the organizers were culled from both continents—Donna Karan, Marc Jacobs, Jil Sander, YSL, as well as Versace. The assignment? To create clothing—a runway look—that would stand the test of “environmental time.”
