Marc Jacobs will close NY Fashion Week this season, 25 years after showing his first eponymous collection in 1986.

You’ve heard of Marc Jacobs, obviously. You know him as the blue-haired, kilt-wearing, diamond-lobed designer at the helm of two hot houses, one on each side of the pond. You know that you and about a million other women from SoHo to Shanghai love the quirky-feminine look of his own label as much as the coquettish glamour of his work for Louis Vuitton.

Fact is, his is such an interesting persona that you probably know more about Marc Jacobs, the all-purpose celebrity than Marc Jacobs, the fashion designer: According to a 2008 New Yorker profile, market research at a Midwestern mall showed that American shoppers did recognize the name, but were a bit confused about whether Jacobs was an actor or a rock star. His mass-media fame has been fueled by Perez Hilton–worthy personal trials and travails, a love life documented avidly by the paparazzi, and lusty tales of wild, extravagant parties. (The Marc Jacobs company’s holiday bash promises two things every December: debauched revelry, and an appearance by the boss in the most outrageous getup imaginable.) Fans riding past his Bleecker Street, New York, fiefdom on a tour bus in 2010 were probably not surprised to glimpse a blow-up of its tanned, tattooed king posing provocatively on a bed of crinkly silver Mylar to promote his new fragrance, suggestively named Bang.

But Jacobs was not simply born god of an empire bearing his name. Before a muscular makeover in 2007-2008, that glistening Adonis plastered across city billboards had been the very image of a classic New York neurotic—an uncombed, bespectacled chain-smoker with a penchant for faded logo tees and tattered Converse sneakers. But waxed and buff or downtown-dishevelled, Jacobs has always been a genuine arbiter of cool, a prodigious talent with a third eye for knowing what women want to wear.

From his first whimsical sketches, his pencil has intuitively tapped the Zeitgeist. In 1984, when he was still a design student, his oversize, polka-dot sweaters swept up a batch of awards at Parsons School of Design. Within days, the au courant Manhattan boutique Charivari had commissioned a set, and before the ink dried on Jacobs’s diploma, he was offered his own label. His earliest runway outings—the first, an over-the-top homage to Amadeus and Purple Rain, the second featuring cheeky pink smiley-face sweaters—charmed critics at The New York Times, which ran a picture of fashion’s latest whiz-kid, clad in a voluminous sweater and high-tops, Mickey Mouse–gloved hands raised high in triumph.

But as the saying goes, nothing good ever comes easy. The next few years would test Jacobs in many ways: Theft, fire, backers gone AWOL, and a cancelled show were just the start of his troubles. In 1992, he was gaining a toehold as the new head of the classic sportswear label Perry Ellis when he staged his infamous Grunge show. While many in the front row adored his upmarket take on garage-band chic—modeled with just the right slacker insouciance by Shalom Harlow and Christy Turlington—his bosses, who promptly gave him the boot, did not.

Ultimately, Jacobs’s daring bid to elevate a counterculture movement to the runway would fix his reputation as a designer with an on-pulse prescience for trends. His streetwise aesthetic—in his words, “a little preppie, a little grungy, a little couture”^[1]—won him the hearts of all the hippest chicks, including the indie director Sofia Coppola and Winona Ryder, Hollywood’s deposed princess. (Kate Moss is another friend and muse.)

For more than 20 years, he has been building his brand of playful and highly wearable clothes and accessories. The offbeat It girls he casts in his ads—often, star friends like the aforementioned—are the type who toss flea market finds together with Parisian labels and can carry off quirky, clever, or even cartoonish looks (a trompe l’oeil handbag or the superpopular Mouse flats) with confidence. As a complement to his namesake collection, Jacobs introduced its hugely popular little-sister line, Marc by Marc Jacobs, in 2000.

In 1997, the French conglomerate LVMH tapped the native New Yorker to jazz up the 143-year-old house of Louis Vuitton. Fulfilling a long-held dream, the hugely prolific designer decamped to the City of Light and positioned himself as a kind of louche lad of the luxury set, partying hard while spinning out season after season of glossy looks for Parisian glamour girls—and all those who wish they were one. He gambled Vuitton’s fortunes on collaborations with the eighties-neon designer Stephen Sprouse and the whimsical Japanese artist Takashi Murakami, and—like everything he touches—the results (subverting the L.V. monogram into graffiti scribbles and Skittles-rainbow colors) were solid gold. Within ten years, Jacobs had quadrupled the company’s profits, turning what was essentially a staid luggage firm into a global fashion powerhouse.

Amid the chichi trappings of his life at the pinnacle of fashion’s power structure, Jacobs’s irreverent wit still prevails. He has sent models down the runway with their hair done in enormous poodle-poufed afro wigs, and sporting Eisenhower-era cocktail dresses with a hot-pink fishnet-stocking print. “Go out on the street—that’s how a stylish girl dresses,” Jacobs once said. “Fashion has to have irony right now.”


source: vogue