The second time is always harder than the first one. Especially, when the first one was successful. This was the main fear of Luella Bartley and Katie Hillier for their second Marc by Marc Jacobs collection. The pressure the two designers had to fight, after their first impeccable collection could be described as “the second album syndrome”.
Under such pressure, they needed to feel more comfortable and safe. And they traveled to a setting like this, back home, to England, and proposed a “New World System”, as a shirt and t-shirt series would state. A new tribe of hard-core girls, with a strong sense of community, with a different optimism and idealism, was the designers’ suggestion. They still love latex -they spray it, to make it dotted-, they still wear their bandeaus over their t-shirts, they make their nurser-y socks part of their looks. They are not the ninjas of the previous collection, neither an evolution of them. What they have in common though, is that they are part of a team, everyone would want to belong to. And everyone can do it.
They can become part of it, because its only premise is freedom, spiritual at first and everything else follows. This freedom is what Marc Jacobs’ MBMJ line talks about. And freedom to experiment. And once it is fruitful, you wonder what comes next. The pressure for Bartley and Hillie is still on. Luckily, it is still positive.
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