Marc Jacobs today dedicated his spring 2014 collection at Louis Vuitton 'to the showgirl in all of us'. It was announced immediately after the show ended that it was to be his last at the label after 16 years there. 

The collection, which saw models draped in funereal blacks of the most intricate beading and highest order and wearing vast feather headdresses, was a greatest hits of sorts, with a set comprising all the landmarks of this incredible tenureship. Escalators, a carousel, French maids and baggage handlers to seat the crowds, a Night Porter lift and hotel room doors.

Models wore jerseys emblazoned with '14' for the season of Jacobs' retirement, which are sure to become a collectors item in this aftermath.

It was a suitably elegant and extravagant end to a collaboration that has yielded some of the most recognisable and extraordinary fashionable moments and merchandise ever seen - from the Stephen Sprouse graffiti scarves to the Yayoi Kusama polka print handbags, Jacobs pioneered the notion of fashion as commercial art.

In a defence of this love of showmanship and spectacle, which has over time seen Kate Moss walk as a fetishised bondage queen and a dozen models dressed as collage artist Richard Prince's nurses, Jacobs added, 'connecting with something on a superficial level is as honest as connecting with it on an intellectual level.'

His successor has not yet been announced, although speculation is rife that it may well be Nicolas Ghesquiere, who left Balenciaga almost a year ago.