In June 2021, Marc Jacobs returned to the New York runway by building up shapes with puffers and twills and layered knitwear and then, magically and methodically, stripping them away. His elongated, bulbous silhouettes turned rail-thin models into monoliths, statues of a hulking beauty that was all lashes and platforms.

 

With just 10 looks modeled by a veritable A-list, from Bella Hadid to Anok Yai, the collection hung on the idea of destruction. Cargo pants were cut up and remade into skirts. Jacobs’s new monogram was shredded into fringe that spiderwebbed around torsos and trailed along the floor. Plastic paillettes, worn by Meryl Streep on the red carpet, were strung into belly chains and adornments. This interstitial collection was not intended to introduce new ideas but rather to further the message lurking in Jacobs’s mind of late: one of looming, semi-threatening models with a post-apocalyptic edge.