An open letter to Marc Jacobs

Dear Marc (if I may call you by your first name):

I rather like you. Or, I should say, I rather like your designs; I've never met you personally. (Although I do happen to know that you're BFFE with Rufus Wainwright, which leads me to believe that I would indeed like you on a personal level, because he is foppishly fabulous and has quite a way with words in both English and French. While we're on the subject, I often wish that the stars would align and the two of you would, in a magnificent flash of light, realize that you are madly in love with one another and unite as the best gay couple ever in the history of the universe. But I digress.) I would go so far as to say that you are my favorite American designer, and I envision you holding that premier position for as long as Michael Kors goes on producing diffusion lines best suited to the middle aged (king of jet set American fashion, my ass), and Proenza Schouler continues to not make anything I can afford (except the Target collection - love). Your aesthetic is quirky and interesting. Your pieces are the textile equivalent of bangs: fashion forward but a little bit subversive at the same time. Coco Chanel once said, "Elegance is refusal." Marc Jacobs is, in many ways, refusal. It isn't meant to be sexy, but it consequently is. When I wear your clothing, I feel confident that I will be the best dressed girl in any room I enter. Even your perfume is a delight; it smells like gardenia and deliciousness and is the first perfume that ever got me to commit (apart from those torrid nighttime indiscretions with Michael Kors...gardenia is all well and good, but sometimes one needs a bit of tuberose and Moroccan incense to up the ante, if you know what I mean). I guess what I'm trying to say is, Marc, I'm your girl.

However, this is not a love letter. We've got a problem. Your clothes, though lovely, have a tendency to be...how shall I put this delicately?...structurally unsound. The quality is not nearly as high as one would reasonably expect from a line at your price point. I should not have had to sew the buttons back onto a $500 peacoat every two weeks before discovering the wonderful world of upholstery thread, which holds them on indefinitely. Why didn't you foresee that your heavy brass buttons would eventually fall victim to gravity, and use heavy-duty thread yourself? (Although, after all this rigamarole, if there is a better amateur attacher of buttons in the greater Boston area, I would be shocked. So that's something.) Furthermore, the stitching at the base of the zipper on my $350 silk dress should not be coming undone after a single wear. I realize, as an occasional seamstress myself, that zippers can be tricky. But I am a mere hobbyist, and I firmly believe that anyone who sews zippers for a living should be just a smidgen more adept with them. The thing isn't even from a discount store; it hasn't been hanging on a rack at Filene's Basement, taking abuse at the hands of the hoi polloi. I ordered it from Net-a-Porter. It came in a dust bag, like a designer purse, and the fanciest box imaginable. It did not lead a hardscrabble life before I welcomed it into my closet. So I find myself perplexed. I'm not well-versed in the particulars of your manufacturing. I'd imagine you're not turning your designs out in sweat shops. But...not to put too fine a point on it, but my Nikes have held up for years, and they were probably sewn by a malnourished, sleep-deprived child. What gives?

Admittedly, I'm a glutton for punishment. I'm not going to stop wearing your clothes in protest. But I really think you could learn a lesson from your peers in terms of clothing construction. Not to be all shallow and materialistic, but I've accumulated quite a cache of prestige labels, and my Diane von Furstenburgs and Nanette Lepores are not falling apart at the seams. Even the aforementioned Proenza Schouler for Target pieces, which have all sorts of intricate trapunto detailing that by all logic should have pulled out ages ago, have held up flawlessly despite a summer in heavy rotation. It's a bit ridiculous that this dialogue is even necessary. I'm disappointed in you. I shouldn't be sitting here right now with a miniature safety pin securing the base of my zipper. That is egregious.

(Alas, the necessity of said safety pin does little to diminish the impact of the look overall...which is why the balance of power in our relationship will always skew to your side. I look good. I mean really good. Everyone! Come see how good I look!)

Finally, an aside to all the people who bitched the time I wrote a lengthy, enthusiastic diatribe in favor of MAC foundation and may have found this missive to be flighty or pretentious: no. You're wrong. Fashion is art, and the most democratic and far-reaching form of it at that. It's a wearable expression of style and taste, with cultural and social connotations, and it is far more meaningful than many would like to admit. High-end designers are as much artists as any painter or sculptor. Couture is constructed in a deliberate, thoughtful way that is often akin to architecture, and even though the vast majority of us will never be able to own a couture piece, these ideas and techniques trickle down in various manifestations (and sometimes perversions) to the items that are available at all price levels. To paraphrase Meryl Streep as the fictional Miranda Priestly in The Devil Wears Prada, every single item of clothing in your closet was at some point selected for you by someone in the fashion industry. So get over yourself. Fashion is as intellectual and important an art form as any other. In fact, I would argue that it is more important than most others...after all, what other art form is so pervasively present in everyday life, even for those people who ostensibly don't care about it? The only other one I can think of is cuisine (which, as we all know, I am equally passionate about). I'm not superficial. I'm a fashionista.

Anyway, that's my story and I'm sticking to it. Marc: go to your room.