To escape the airless, unmoving heat last night and reeling from a stomach bug, I looked at photos from the fall 07 collections, letting those rich maroons and oxford high heels work their magic. Fashion is a great arena for turning nostalgia into anticipation: you can practically hear the crunch of an apple, feel the autumn crisp air, watch the lazy cascade of golden maple leaves, as you soak up the photographs of tweeds, knits, leathergoods. All the same, who’s doing it differently? I'm asking, who among the vogue'd, just for now. Take a guess.
     Marc Jacobs. His ads, shot by Juergen Teller, eschew the in-your-face giantesses that crowd the rest of the ad space. These, elegant, pale, are on entirely different scale. That's the difference: the scale. Here, distant models linger in relaxed poses, clad head to toe in his exquisite fall clothes. You are looking at them as if they are down the block, waiting for someone else. They are tiny.
    That distance creates desire: you want to get closer to those clothes. And yes, it’s a tad miffing that the cover story on Winona Ryder manages to drop the name Marc Jacobs every other column inch—okay, we get it, she loves him (that “incident” in 2001? She was shoplifting his designs from Saks). But Marc knows what he’s doing. The sublime, oceanic depth of the velvet gown she wears on the cover—with an odd smile that says, should I look amazed or should I just be elegant? The enegetic haute carefee tie of the bodice bow—luxe, but young. Even as he gets older, he keeps it young.

Loïc Prigent’s documentary: Louis Vuitton and Marc Jacobs, is officially released in the US September 5 (although you can get it at Colette already). Prigent also did an astounding, yes-this-is-really-what-it’s-like series on Lagerfeld’s Fall 2004 Chanel couture collection (Signé Chanel). But this more recent look at Jacobs at LV is a thrill.  Prigent turned his lens on the brilliant, endless transfusion of Technicolor energy that Jacobs brings to LV. Such a long way from his grunge days and Perry Ellis (who fired him, back in the early 90s, for being too radical), it’s a blast to see him at work. Remember the candy-colored logo bags of summer 2003? One of Jacob’s famed collaborations—this one with Japanese graphic artist Takashi Murukami—they won street cred as the Most Copied on Canal Street, the most carried by Japanese hipsters on 10th street, and the most coveted in hip-hop. So about those oxford heels….