A Beginner's Guide to Resort Season: Marc Jacobs, Calvin Klein, Lanvin, and more.

I know most of you guys are here for the superheroes, but I gotta be what I gotta be, and sometimes that means posting about mediocre high-end fashion. Right now we're in the middle of Resort/Cruise season which, as you may have noticed from the name, is an imaginary season. In the world of Game Of Thrones, seasons take years to change, meaning that the characters get years to practise the best way to portentiously say "Winter. Is. Coming." In Fashion Land, Resort/Cruise season is the time between Spring and Summer when you swan around various luxury locations while wearing £3000 sunglasses and doing things that are way, way classier than watching Game Of Thrones. The purpose of Resort/Cruise season is to sell designer clothes to these rich people so they have something new to wear on their yacht. This year's Chanel show was pretty good, but by and large the attitude of most major fashion houses to Resort/Cruise season seems to be: "Someone's gonna buy this shit, so let's just print out some bikinis and knee-length skirts and go to the bar, YOLO."

Chris Benz. (All photos from Style.com.)

One of the A+ things about Resort season is the hilariously lacklustre photoshoots. Even during Couture season some designers choose to exhibit using photoshoots instead of live shows, but usually that's either for aesthetic reasons or because they can't afford decent placement at Fashion Week. During Resort season, however, pretty much everyone whose name isn't Lagerfeld exhibits solely via lookbooks. And those lookbooks, as you may be able to tell from the above photo, can be kind of... dodgy. For one thing, the monochrome photo of palm trees looks like something you'd see hanging up in a coffee shop, and it's held up by bullclips. Secondly, the lighting is edging dangerously close to "we shot this in my garage". 

New York Fashion Week, Fall 2012: Marc Jacobs, A Détacher, Charlotte Ronson, Doo.Ri, and Helmut Lang.

Marc Jacobs
"Dickensian" is one of the adjectives I've seen bandied about with regards to Marc Jacobs' latest collection, although I'm not sure if I see much of that myself. The loose fit of the coats and the oversized hats may suggest the look of a Victorian street urchin, but I suspect that many of the Dickens comparisons are thanks to the fact that the runway show was soundtracked with extracts from Oliver!

Slightly suspect concept work aside, this collection was absolutely brilliant. Marc played around with texture even more than he has done in the past, to the point that it often seemed more couture than RTW. He clearly has no qualms about putting on a big show for the Fashion Week crowd -- sets, music, the whole shebang.

There was a lack of conventionality that one doesn't often see in ready-to-wear collections from major mainstream labels. The silhouettes were all wide-hipped, often ignoring the contours of the body entirely -- a brave step away from current trends both on and off the catwalks. On paper this wasn't a look that should have worked for me, but I found myself surprised and impressed again and again by the beauty and wearability of outfits that eschewed the waist entirely and padded out the hips to near-comical proportions.