Thighs, platforms and colour: that’s the message for spring if style seer Marc Jacobs and millennial TV programme Girls, are to be trusted as cultural touchstones. The new cover of Glamour magazine features the cast lined up in Marc Jacobs’s SS17 collection. The show’s styling – a re-imagined take on basic basics and student flatshare chic – hasn’t changed much in the five years since Girls first aired, with the line between pyjamas and daywear barely perceptible. And this cover is simply an elevated version of that: truncated hemlines, baby-doll dresses and post-internet hoodies.
As ever, Jacobs has tapped into the moment with his styling. Last year was a pretty sour one but, in contrast, Jacobs spring show – a neo-future imagined by Edward Gorey – was one of the season’s springiest, a stab at optimism and, as always, its own form of entertainment. Models with distressed dreadlocks, appliqué micro-dresses and hoodies featuring Julie Verhoeven prints walked in sky-high platforms (we haven’t seen them that high since Alexander McQueen’s 201o Armadillo boots), all inside an ersatz club designed with noughties glitz and colour.
Equally glaring here is the feminist manifesto. First, the magazine was put together almost entirely by women. Second, with Girls being shorthand for the (sometimes contradictory) current feminist perspectives, the cast use agency and autonomy to turn the sexual objectification of women on its head. The trouser-less look, or at least the very short hemlines, is a middle finger up to slut-shaming – much like the past five seasons of the show where trousers have generally seemed to be an afterthought.
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