Fear was on everyone's minds last night after editors and socialites at the Marc Jacobs show read the single-sided A4 sheet of paper that the American designer left on their New York Public Library chairs. “Fear is not my enemy, it’s a necessary companion to creativity, authenticity, integrity, and life,” the sheet noted, toned with equal measures of hope and trepidation. Many have affiliated Jacobs’ fear with the polemics circulating the world: the re-election of Donald Trump, the fires in Los Angeles, the newly imposed DEI regulations, and the imminent tariffs, oh but to name a few. Not only did Jacobs comment on our current climate, but also on the role clothes and fashion at large play in stirring us forward. He did so by stretching our imagination, as Rei Kawakubo did with her 1997 Comme des Garçons collection ‘Body Meets Dress, Dress Meets Body,’ or “lumps and bumps” as it was widely referred to, which Jacobs presumably drew reference to.

He also referenced three decades of himself, with rounded big MJ buttons, tweed sweaters, and two-piece sets. Clothes, in Jacobs’ instance, can be seen for exactly what they are: jubilant items that manipulate our perception and instill pure fun. These merits were proven with bulbous bubble boat-neck T-shirts, ballooning ankle-length trousers, patent leather boots with over-ten-centimetre platforms and pointed toes that look at once like horns and winkle pickers, gigantic down coats with pillow-like collars, and baby-doll dresses that looked as if Alice accidentally drank her shrinking potion only to dwindle in her silk dress.

The madder red and electric purple sequinned frocks near the show’s close nod most to Jacobs’ affinity for pleasure. On the internet, some commented on the unwearable nature of these garments, or their “Mars-like” qualities, as Lynn Yaeger pointed out. Looking at them from the screen, they seem to represent the zenith of Jacob’s creativity, the disco ball to his never-ending party.

Rising stars Lulu Tenney and Alex Consani ended the show in billowing red dresses with appendages that look like they had deflated on impact. Both models had black platypus-like stilettos on, ruffled Elizabethan hair and pouted lips, shut with a glistening sequin disc. The two models walked upright, cinched and staunched by the mass of the garment and the pressure of lifting Jacobs’ ideas.

Idiomatically, the collection was also an exploration of form, volume and scale, challenging our perception of garment construction and our expectation of usage, just as the Minimalists and Abstractionists did in the twentieth century with painting. Jacobs has wrestled with the marriage of fashion and art, always acknowledging the commercial aspects of the former. Over his last few collections, though, he seems to be drawing closer to the idea that fashion can be an art form, even if subconsciously so. He seems to be probing how fashion, just as art, can help sustain and encourage us, two actions we need most in this artless world.