Residing outside the traditional fashion calendar, as he has for the past few years, Marc Jacobs has been pleasantly unmoored not just from the bounds of the Fashion Week grid, but from the aesthetic restrictions that placement seems to require. Like a late-period artist, he has felt free to make work that is challenging, avant-garde, and a tad unapproachable, at least when it comes to his runway collections. Bulbous silhouettes and shoes that look inflated? Bring them on. Punk Victorian dolls with oversized bows? Yes, please.

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Earlier this week, he made a return to the Park Avenue Armory after showing at the New York Public Library for several seasons. With the fashion industry watching (and a vibrant Lyas-hosted watch party popping off downtown), Jacobs challenged our expectations once again. As Björk’s “State of Emergency” played, models emerged in simple skirt-and-sweater combinations, printed dresses, and demure jackets with a late ’90s feel, CBK-core with a Marc spin.

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There were touches of clubland—calling to mind the heroines of The Last Days of Disco, constantly en route from the fluorescent office to glittering nightspots—in the form of sequined bandeaus and colorful shoes. There were welcome touches of weirdness in the exaggeratedly squared-off skirts that recalled Jacobs’s geometric experiments over the past few seasons. An intentionally inverted coat in a deep blue winked at his famed “backwards” collection from spring 2008. And his pitch-perfect colour sense was, as always, on display: For instance, an olive and pink pairing.

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If some of these girls felt like ghosts of downtown denizens past, or Marcs past, there was a reason. It was a collection, the designer said in his show notes, about memory and loss, created by someone whose brain is a Rolodex of fashion history. The “credits and receipts” section of his show notes magnanimously cited references from Yves Saint Laurent, X-Girl, and ’90s Prada and Helmut Lang to Jacobs himself (both at his namesake label and in the grungy Perry Ellis years).

“Hope is work,” he wrote, and while the past may have been ever-present, the collection leaned into the future and the regenerative possibility of moving forward—whether you’re his crisply attired satchel-wearing woman striding into the office or the designer himself, returning to the studio. Who knew there could be this kind of romance in the workaday? While a full-blown normcore revival seems unlikely, the luxury quarter-zips and subway-centric show settings of the past season have suggested that fashion is moving in a slightly more sedate, less look-at-me direction. While far from staid, Jacobs’s collection was an ode to the beauty of paring things back. Just don’t call it quiet luxury.

All photos: launchmetrics.com/spotlight

This article was first seen ELLE US.