In recent collections Jacobs has been playing with flatness and dimensionality in exciting ways. “I think I’m just looking at fashion in a way that doesn’t have to do anything, it just needs to be something one sees and experiences,” said Jacobs. “I think sometimes you just do things because you’d like them to be, and that’s it. The dollhouse thing, I think there’s always something very haunting and bizarre about them. And those miniatures, I don’t know enough about them, but I mean I know people are super, super obsessed over the tiniest, the most detailed, perfect representation, and I just find the fetish quality of all that to be really incredible. I admire people who take things to that end, and with a dollhouse there is also that need to create this little tiny world that is a version of some other real world somewhere. But somewhere in the translation, it does go really bizarre.”
For her part, Weyant is fascinated with dollhouses because, she said, “they sit at the intersection of so many things that interest me in my work; domesticity and memory and the wonkiness of it.” At a time when there is a glaring unbalance between male and female creatives, it’s worth noting that 40 blocks uptown from Weyant’s magical abode, the Stettheimer Dollhouse, created by Carrie Walter Stettheimer in the years between 1916 and 1935, resides in the Museum of the City of New York. That artwork depicts the Roaring ’20s in miniature while Weyant’s dollhouse, located in the Academy Mansion, built in 1920, speaks to a wider audience and represents a different, digital era, which Weyant is keyed into. “Sometimes I have fun playing with the ‘Instagram meets old painting’ type of clash,” she said in a past interview.
