Outside, the marquee announced “Marc Jacobs: One Night Only!” and a red carpet stretched halfway down the block, lined with curious locals and tourists alike, who really were in for the evening of their lives. Emily Ratajkowski, Irina Shayk, and Alek Wek numbered among his models, and they worked the carpet while inside the invited audience watched the goings-on on the Ziegfeld’s legendarily big screen. This was a good half decade before Balenciaga’s Demna did something similar at his Simpsons show in Paris, by the way, but only Jacobs had the Brian Newman Orchestra.
The collection was really something too. A red-white-and-blue ode to Times Square, the movies, America itself, with Maria Callas as Medea singing on an opera cape, Janet Leigh doing her Psycho screech on a pantsuit, and a Fiorucci angel alighting on a lacy slip dress. There were movie usher suits trimmed with gold braid, Letterman jackets festooned with pins, and kitschy flag tees. Beth Ditto herself sashayed down the runway in a 1930s Jean Harlow gown.
“That’s entertainment baby,” Jacobs pronounced after the show, and, boy, did we have fun. We’ve seen many shows in the decade since that have blended fashion and spectacle, but Jacobs wrote the playbook. I still have the T-shirt. It’s holey and hanging on by a thread, but I’ll always have my memories.