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Marc Jacobs After-party Unlike Any That Has Come Before

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Michelle Trachtenberg and Marc Jacobs, k-i-s-s-i …Photo: Patrick McMullan


The extreme lateness of the Marc Jacobs show made for perhaps the least star-studded after-party we’ve ever seen the designer give. Lost in the transition from the Armory to 24 Fifth Avenue? Victoria Beckham, Heath Ledger, Amy Poehler, Carmen Electra, Courtney Love, Debbie Harry, Michael Stipe, Mischa Barton (for once, looking like the stunner that she is in a gold headband and scarlet goddess gown), Russell Simmons, Sheryl Crow, and Anna Wintour (who literally sprinted from her seat with daughter Bee Shaffer the second the lights went up). The stalwarts were pretty much who you’d expect: annoying starlet Michelle Trachtenberg and her bestie since age 10, Lydia Hearst, hamming it up for photographers in the nominal VIP section; Michelle Rodriguez, rocking neither her alcohol monitoring bracelet from the last season nor her face paint from the previous night’s Dazed & Confused after-party; Vincent Gallo, without his trusty Lord & Taylor gift bag; and Duran Duran and Kim Gordon, trekking on through the night like the veteran rock stars that they are.

Jacobs himself arrived about halfway through the party and took his usual place in front of the television monitor to watch the show he’d just put on (though he wasn’t chain-smoking as usual). He said he was too tired “to stream” about what he’d just done, so we turned to John Currin for some post-show analysis. He thought the fact that none of the shoes fit any of the models — they walked with their heels atop the backs — must have been an aesthetic choice: “I’m sure it was on purpose. I thought it looked really cool.” He then commented on the sheer outfits with prints resembling underwear. “I loved the panty thing in the front, and how they’d turn around and you could see kind of see their butts in the back. In a funny way, it was very prurient. It acknowledged that you look at women with a real, almost vicious will to take them apart, and it’s like they’d already been taken apart and put back together in a sexual way.”

Marc Jacobs’s employees, meanwhile, were feeling pretty physical themselves. We saw accountants and store managers doing high kicks and head spins worthy of So You Think You Can Dance. Having attended every one of their Christmas parties for the last three years, we’re beginning to get an idea of the job-application process: “Can you break-dance? How many wigs do you own? What’s your feeling on body paint?” —Jada Yuan

There’s so, so much more—quotes and pictures from Courtney Love, Posh Spice, Helena Christensen, and others—in Party Lines!

Marc Jacobs After-party Unlike Any That Has Come Before