Marc Jacobs — master of reinvention

The designer Marc Jacobs has been in and out of fashion multiple times in his long career, and his business has been reinvented almost as often as his collections. Which is often: Jacobs is one of those creatives who radically shifts between different ideas and ideals, proposing views of beauty that are frequently the opposite of the ones before.

Case in point: in February, Jacobs showed a collection out of kilter with the rest of the fashion industry. He habitually shows his spring/summer collections, which his eponymous company, Marc Jacobs, labels “Runway”, a week before the rest of his American peers unveil their autumn/winter wares. This Runway collection seemed equally out of line with his own previous season’s style. Gone were the pointed flat shoes and ankle socks, the bustier mini dresses and slouchy tailoring of his previous season. In came clothes cut to seem paper-flat or structured to stand proud on the body as if floating, dresses pocked with mirrors like vastly oversized sequins: the models, under bouffant hair-dos, resembled dolls. Emphasising the discombobulation, Jacobs paraded them under a sculpture by the late artist Robert Therrien — a 10-feet-high table and chairs, rendering everyone diminutive.

“This was my favourite show of my post-pandemic era,” Jacobs wrote to me, via Instagram, where we sometimes connect to share our mutual fashion obsessions and, occasionally, purchases. “I am very pleased with it.”

Jacobs, 60, is arguably one of the most interesting designers working in fashion. He produces clothes that influence others — the trend for bags heavily adorned with brass hardware that defined the 2000s came from Jacobs’ eye, and his stellar turn as the first-ever artistic director of Louis Vuitton (from 1997 to 2014) not only introduced the first blockbuster-hit remixes of the house’s monogram logo, but arguably the whole idea of fashion collaboration, certainly on a vast branded scale.

It was groundbreaking, revolutionary even, when Jacobs partnered with the artists Stephen Sprouse, Takashi Murakami and Yayoi Kusama to rework Vuitton’s bags. He also invited Pharrell Williams, who is now creative director of Vuitton’s menswear, to work on sunglasses at the brand, a shift Williams told me last year was “game changing, for not only people of my ilk, but also for the fashion industry”.

One of Jacobs’ most influential moments was one that actually got him fired — in 1992, he presented a collection inspired by grunge music for the American label Perry Ellis, where he was in charge of design at the time. It was also influenced, Jacobs said, by the way off-duty models around him were dressing, mixing thrift-shop silk dresses with thermal underwear, wool beanies and Dr Martens boots. In the long run, it has proved seminal — at the time however, it was a critical disaster. The esteemed fashion journalist Suzy Menkes, then of the International Herald Tribune, even distributed badges reading “Grunge is ghastly”, to make her feelings on the subject crystal clear — though the following season a host of other designers presented grunge-tinged shows. The conservative Perry Ellis management, freaked by the negative press, fired Jacobs — the first time this golden boy was “out” of fashion.

This year, Jacobs celebrates the 40th anniversary of his brand — and in that spring/summer 2024 show there were a bunch of echoes of his past collections — Hitchcockian skirt-suits studded with big retro ’60s buttons, characteristically Jacobs snub-toe high-heeled shoes, and a blown-up version of one of those brass hardware-heavy bags from 20-odd years ago.

“The company is celebrating 40 years,” Jacobs says, carefully. But “there was absolutely nothing in what we did [in the Runway show] that was a deliberate attempt at celebrating that”. His accent is strongly New York — he was born there in 1963, brought up by his paternal grandmother on the city’s Upper West Side and educated in fashion at Parsons New School for Design.

He is now speaking over Zoom, from his home in Rye in Westchester County, north of Manhattan. We were supposed to speak in person during New York Fashion Week, but a snowstorm stranded Jacobs upstate. On a table behind him is a book charting the work of the French interiors photographer François Halard; outside the wide windows, deep snow is still lingering several days after our cancelled meeting.

Despite the landmark anniversary, Jacobs isn’t in a retrospective mood. He has, nevertheless, conscripted the artist Cindy Sherman — who starred in a Jacobs campaign in 2005 photographed by Juergen Teller — to feature in another round of advertising, again shot by Teller. “Cindy’s part of our little family,” Jacobs says. “With this 40th thing, there was this thinking of: let’s reach out and try to spread our web and bring in the people that have meant something to us over the years.” There is also a capsule reissue of greatest hits curated by friends and fans, including Pharrell Williams and the film director Sofia Coppola, a longtime friend.

It’s been 40 years of ups and downs. Not only the grunge debacle but, more recently, troubles with his own business. After a boom period in the early years of the millennium, Jacobs wound up shuttering shops worldwide. The company is owned by LVMH, which does not reveal the revenue of individual brands, but on an earnings call in January 2017, group CEO Bernard Arnault made an exceptional comment: “I’m more concerned about Marc Jacobs than the US president,” referring to the then-incoming 45th president, Donald Trump.

Today, however, Jacobs’ business has switched course. His runway is still extreme, a fashion-follower’s dream, but the company now offers branded products aimed at a younger Gen Z consumer, as well as a range titled Heaven that replaces, in effect, the Marc by Marc Jacobs line. Much loved by Gen X and millennials, that was a denim-heavy, street-savvy lower priced line launched in 2000 that provided the lion’s share of Marc Jacobs’ income before it was folded into his mainline in 2015. And now Jacobs has another hit bag on his hands with his Tote, a cotton or leather carryall in four sizes printed with “The Tote Bag” in giant capitals and the designer’s name in its logotype. Launched in 2019 and pandering equally to enthusiasts of shouty logos and normcore, its multicoloured iterations have a ubiquitous presence on the arms of young people.

In January, Marc Jacobs was highlighted in LVMH’s 2023 full year report for its “remarkable performance”, alongside heritage brands Christian Dior, Celine, Fendi, Loro Piana, Loewe and Jacobs’ former house, Louis Vuitton. Jacobs is the only non-European brand on that list.

Jacobs isn’t a business person — his early business partner was Robert Duffy, who co-founded Jacobs’ label, working alongside him until 2015. As with many other great designer-CEO partnerships (Yves Saint Laurent and Pierre Bergé, Valentino Garavani and Giancarlo Giammetti), that left Jacobs free to create unfettered by economic worries. “The motivation [for] what I do now, or what I did then, is the same. It was to make fashion,” Jacobs says. “I tell my little team, which is very, very small, we have one job, it’s to entertain. That’s it. We don’t have to hide a commercial hoodie in there. I mean, we don’t have to do any of that. If that’s our choice, that’s fine. So we are really free.”

Jacobs’ Runway collection clothes are only sold through Bergdorf Goodman in New York — they are made in tiny numbers, and are priced according to both their scarcity and the amount of work that goes into them. Jacobs says he was dumbfounded when he was told that a crystal-embellished cotton army jacket, retailing at $22,000, had recently been sold.

Nevertheless, there’s a flush of pride when he speaks of the turnaround — his word, not mine — in the fate of Marc Jacobs International. “We have this CEO [Eric Marechalle] . . . I adore him, and I think he’s doing a great job,” Jacobs says. It’s the first time I have ever heard a designer call their CEO adorable.

Mr Arnault has always been supportive of me

New priorities are at the heart of Marechalle’s strategy (the executive joined in 2017 from Kenzo), including using the show as a marketing tool and the Runway collections as inspiration for mass-appeal, accessible products (if Runway has polka dots, the other lines will too). After downsizing in recent years (it currently operates 116 stores; at the height of its success there were 250) the brand is scheduled to open 20 stores worldwide between 2023 and 2025.

“Eric came in and he made it very clear to me that he believed in the Runway [collection] — not for a commercial ready-to-wear product as much as its halo effect on the people who work in the company . . . to stimulate them, to inspire them,” Jacobs says. “I think the high up people at LVMH have also been really respectful and excited by how he’s turned things around. Clearly, Mr Arnault has always been supportive of me. Even when anybody in business would say, ‘This is just a catastrophe. You’ve got to let it go.’” He adds that Marechalle “has everybody at LVMH saying, ‘Wow, we haven’t experienced such a turnaround anywhere’”.

But for Jacobs, fashion is about creative expression, business is the gravy that allows him to do what he loves. “I do feel like, when there’s this incredible creative energy and you’re really into what you’re doing, it attracts other creative energy,” Jacobs says. “Magic happens.” 

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