Marta Jakubowski Spring 2018 Ready-To-Wear ....Fashionweekly....On Fow24news.com

A single spotlight, picking out a vixenish girl with a short, tight skirt and stilettos at the end of a runway: What can that possibly evoke, other than the show-style of Tom Ford in his Gucci years? Marta Jakubowski’s show—her runway debut—was the first in London to go there with the aughts revival.....
Through her eyes, though, there’s no parody or campness about it. In this reverb of that lost time of fabulosity, it’s a young woman who sees a need to bring sexy back, and that’s a bit different.

If you think about it, who has put any belief into evening tailoring for women in the past decade? It’s been printed or lacy cocktail and evening gowns for as long as 25- to 30-year-olds can remember, and that must mean it’s getting old. Meanwhile, the token alternatives, sporadically offered, have been variations on Le Smoking, perhaps in jumpsuit form, but more ordinarily, as jacketed pantsuit two-pieces. Classic is what it’s called. Even women who resort to nighttime tailoring know that masculine-feminine is a cliché which hasn’t been fundamentally renewed since Saint Laurent coined the style in the second half of the last century.

No big claims that Marta Jakubowski is a fledgling Saint Laurent, or a second Tom Ford here, but nevertheless, the technical and emotional validity of her merging of drape and tailoring in the same garment is an eye-opening possibility. She’s the first woman designer in a long time to tailor with enthusiasm—the last were Jil Sander and Ann Demeulemeester, and they’re retired now.

Jakubowski, like both of those predecessors, comes from a European background—born in Poland, part-educated in Germany, she finished her schooling at London’s Royal College of Art. Her emergence as a new-generation feminist designer who is dealing with suiting and pencil skirts—not in a retro banker uniform way, but as something to go out and possibly dance in—is something to watch.