Escapism and exploration have been top of mind at fashion houses recently: at haute couture week, and on February 3, at Marc Jacobs’s spring 2025 show in New York—an off-schedule sort of opener to New York Fashion Week, which officially begins on the 6th. The designer presented real-world takes on the surrealist trend: explosive silhouettes reimagined and expanded into larger-than-life pieces that take up space and subvert the body into something entirely new.
Jacobs has been playing with this idea for a few seasons now, creating wonderfully weird, stiff shapes that verge on doll-like with their 2-D sentimentality. He loves a big, voluminous look that re-thinks proportions and offers up the kind of perplexing palette that really makes you think about fashion as costume—or the lines between both. For spring 2025, the show notes alluded to the idea of “courage,” stating, “With precious freedom we dream and imagine without limitation… not to escape from reality but to help navigate, understand, and confront it, exploring through curiosity, conviction, compassion, and love.”
A trio of convex pastel shoulder-padded sweaters that were football-player-meets-demure-lady-who-lunches opened the show, paired with thick black leather belts and high-waist slacks with hips that jutted out. Next came the puff ball dresses, with their amped-up, chunky little miniskirts like button mushrooms, their tops all slightly rounded as if they’d been filled like an antique stuffed toy.
To accessorize? Red polka dots, placed either over each of the models’ mouths or on their cheeks, and elf-like boots. It was as if Jacobs was inventing his own version of a cartoon character here; one that would make even the most jaded fashion nerd’s heart race. There were also allusions to Comme des Garçons, Yohji Yamamoto and Vivienne Westwood collections of the past (no surprise, given Jacobs staged a show in Westwood’s honor in 2023).
The front row was packed with New York icons like Jenna Lyons as well as Sofia Coppola. Other highlights of the collection included sculptural, swollen sweaters, and a vintage-style babydoll nightgown blown up to comical proportions, then paired with extra, extra long-toed heels.
Corporate-core skirt suits, ladylike sweater sets and little black dresses were turned on their heads with maximalist magnitude. The electric purple, cheetah print, and large polka dots created through the use of three-dimensional chunky rhinestones served as an electric current to the shapely silhouettes. Three bulbous, blooming dresses in autumnal colors closed the show, their bumps serving to radicalize otherwise formal, unconventional dresses. In these days when reality seems more like a dark fantasy, it’s never been a better time for designers to stay weird.
