FASHION

Marc Jacobs Is a Family Affair for Frances Bean Cobain

Courtney Love’s daughter succeeds the ’90s grunge icon as Marc Jacobs’s muse, but with an edge.

by Katherine Cusumano

Last year, Marc Jacobs cast Courtney Love alongside Missy Elliott and Marilyn Manson in his very ’90s-inspired Fall 2016 campaign. It was the perfect prelude to his Spring 2017 show, filled as it was with ’90s rave attire: babydoll dresses, candy-colored accents, and the contentious faux-dreadlocks worn by each model, purportedly in homage to Lana Wachowski. For Spring 2017, the designer cast Love’s daughter, Frances Bean Cobain, as the new face of the brand. With her grunge bona fides and carefree attitude, she makes the perfect posterchild for the brand — and the ideal successor to her mother in fronting the Marc Jacobs campaigns. (The duo has also appeared hand-in-hand front-row at Chanel, among others.) Cobain was among the expected faces in Jacob’s star-studded front row during his Fall 2017 show Thursday. And, just as she succeeded her mother as the face of Marc Jacobs, she also channeled Love’s sweet-meets-grunge aesthetic in a Marc Jacobs ensemble sitting front row at Thursday’s show.

Frances Bean Cobain in Marc Jacobs at the Marc Jacobs Fall 2017 show in New York, New York, February 2017.

Jamie McCarthy

Who: Frances Bean Cobain.

When: Thursday, February 16.

Where: The Marc Jacobs Fall 2017 show at the Park Avenue Armory in midtown Manhattan, New York, New York.

What: A white lace babydoll dress with cuffs of purple ostrich feather and black knee-high combat boots from the Marc Jacobs Spring 2017 collection with a smoky eye and a mulberry lip.

Why: Cobain ended fashion week on a high note. During the last major show of the calendar, the grunge scion channeled her mother’s punky look in a delicate white lace minidress. Yet the dress, pulled from the Marc Jacobs Spring 2017 show, isn’t just a reiteration of the ’90s: the design gets its decadent edge from the lavender and deep purple feather cuffs topping the whole thing off. (Hold the “Violet” references, please.) While it was paired with precariously high platforms on the runway, Cobain styles it instead with knee-high combat boots, making it her own.

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