Marc Jacobs Blows Up Fall 2025 to Epic Proportions With Big Bows, Big Sleeves & Big Beauty
In Marc Jacobs’s world, the category lately has been: overflowing excess. The designer has steadily grown his garments and accessories the past few seasons, literally. And for fall 2025—a collection he showed at the New York Public Library on June 30—things got bigger than ever. Ballooning hips, cocooning shoulders, and exploding silhouettes took center stage; cargo pants became new sculptural forms and draping and layering took on entirely new lives. Models teetered across the straight-and-narrow runway in ultra-towering heels, in a quick and relatively quiet show that started right on time and lasted roughly four minutes, true to typical Jacobs form.
In recent years, Marc Jacobs has made it his mission to commit to bulbous, oversize shapes that now dominate his work. Previous collections have touched on absurdist, doll-like forms that merge two-dimensional shapes with over-the-top volume. Jacobs himself has cited Vivienne Westwood—an early example of a designer who twists and contorts the female form—as an influence, and even dedicated an entire collection to her after her passing. Yet Jacobs brings in his own house codes, which usually touch on the flowery, girly-girl-meets-grunge aesthetic with which the designer started his career. The result is a kind of surrealist fantasy that Jacobs’s biggest fans live for.
The theme this season? “Beauty,” in the designer’s own words: “A quality or combination of qualities that gives pleasure to the mind or senses and is often associated with properties such as harmony of form or color, proportion, and authenticity,” as the show notes succinctly read.
There was a kind of beautiful impracticality to the clothing, seen especially in the superfluous gowns replete with lace, trains, and bustles. One big, ballgown-style skirt was layered with dimensional folds and pleats that dragged on the ground. The aforementioned cargo pants had pockets bigger than the models’ heads. To add a touch of ladylike glamour to contrast against the bulbous forms, nearly every look was topped off with a supersize, chunky bow. As Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds’s Song for Jesse played in the background, model after model emerged with more, more, more: fabric, shaping, padding—repeat!
One of designers’ biggest obsessions and a major trend to emerge from the fall 2025 fashion weeks was the look of artificially induced curves—padding on the hips, breasts, and back, done by everyone from Alaïa to Prada, Vaquera, and even Maison Margiela’s most recent couture show. During a time when Ozempic culture and waif-thin bodies are back in style, it’s certainly a statement to make such huge silhouettes.
There were just 19 looks presented, but the fall 2025 collection cemented Jacobs’s flair for dramatics. With echoes of Belle Époque grandeur and riffs on Victorian splendor, the designer presented both his own version of beauty and an act of provocation—all wrapped up in an enormous leg-of-mutton sleeve.
