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Jacobs is a reality-television star without a reality-television show. His personal traumas and dramas are tracked by a wide audience, some of whom care that he is perhaps the most influential and talented American designer of his generation, and some of whom are interested in him exactly the same way they are interested in the characters on “The Real Housewives of Orange County.” Jacobs’s vision has transformed the luxury-goods market—you can feel the reverberations of his early inspiration that a sloppy flannel shirt could be rendered in fine silk, that the low could be high, and that streetwear could be fashion, in everything from the advent of the now ubiquitous two-hundred-dollar pair of jeans to the frayed hems and distressed elbows on the jackets that Karl Lagerfeld has designed for Chanel in recent seasons. “Marc is a great, great designer—his talent is stronger than it’s ever been before—but he also has a very acute sense of how to deal with the media, how to use the media,” Anna Wintour, the editor-in-chief of Vogue, said. “If you look at the kind of women he’s drawn to, whether it’s Sofia Coppola or Lindsay Lohan, he always taps into them at exactly the right time. To be honest, I don’t think Marc would be in the press the way he is if he didn’t want to be.”

Of an item that ran in Page Six, Jacobs said, with outrage and delight, “Last Tuesday, they had me making out with my ex-boyfriend Jason Preston at Pastis and bad-mouthing someone I went out with for four days. Well, first of all, I did not bad-mouth the person I went out with for four days, second of all I was not getting back together with Jason Preston, and, fourth—or first!—of all, I wasn’t even in the city of New York on that Saturday! I was in Paris, France. My current boyfriend said, ‘Marc, you know I don’t believe it, but so many people have asked me about it.’ I was, like, ‘You put me on a plane Friday night! How can you be listening to this?’ ” Last month, Page Six misreported that Jacobs had married Martone.

Jacobs walked outside to the back garden, to take in the evening amid the boxwood. “I like the fact that people are sort of commenting on my appearance,” he said. “I work on these things! So to have them recognized, even if sometimes I don’t like the way they’re recognized, I like that they are, and I feel good that I can admit that, instead of being ashamed.” He paused. “I’m going to get a ‘shameless’ tattoo next,” he said, the Eiffel Tower sparkling behind him in the night sky. “That’s what I think everyone should aspire to in life: being shameless.”

Afew days later, Jacobs was in his fashion-designer box, sitting in a stuffy conference room (smoking) at the Vuitton headquarters, on the Rue du Pont Neuf. He was listening to Madonna on the stereo and going through fabrics with several members of his staff, in search of the prints and textures they would use to design the Spring, 2009, collection. “Gross, gross, gross,” Aisling Ludden, an outgoing Irishwoman in patent-leather peep-toe pumps, who has worked with Jacobs for eight years, said. They were looking at a fuzzy purple fabric with a geometric pattern. “That’s a horror, isn’t it?” They moved on to a cream-colored silk embroidered with little tree branches.

“It’s always tough at the beginning,” Jacobs said. “We all want to be responsible in terms of not overbuying fabric. But it’s kind of unavoidable, because we have to get started, and there are deadlines, and the thing is, it’s often not the first thing you respond to that you care as much about in the end. But you kind of can’t get to point Z without going from A to Y.” It’s only in movies that fashion designers think, Eureka! This season, Eskimos, or whatever it is. In actuality, a collection comes together in fits and starts, and there’s no guarantee that it will come together at all. Even when Jacobs’s work overtly reflects his current obsessions—as in the early grunge collection he made while he was besotted with Nirvana and Hole, or his Spring, 2008, collaboration with Richard Prince, in which models dressed as the eerily erotic nurses that Prince likes to paint (Jacobs owns several of Prince’s paintings)—the concept congeals incrementally.

“That’s a crazy one,” Jacobs said, flipping through a book of sequinned netting samples. “A couple of crazies. I think we’ve gone down this road before—”

“Get rid of it!” Ludden shouted.

“And I don’t think it ever goes really far.”

Madonna was singing “Ticktock, ticktock.” Jacobs sighed. “Sometimes I think other people have this ability to do it differently and know exactly what they want to do and say,” he said. “The way my mind works is somebody else has got this so down that they don’t make mistakes and their process is so much more linear than mine. I’ll think that, but, at some point, you know what? This is my process and I don’t know how to do it any other way.” He didn’t stop and look at his “perfect” tattoo, but, of course, he knew it was there. “I’m sure there are people who can’t afford—who don’t have the luxury of being quite as organic as we are,” he went on. “We work up until the last minute.” As a result of this tendency to work until the bitter end—and past it—Jacobs’s Fall, 2007, show in New York started two hours late, prompting the critic Suzy Menkes to say, “I would like to murder him with my bare hands and never see another Marc Jacobs show as long as I live.”

“Are you going to the gym today?” Jacobs asked Joseph Carter, the head of womenswear for the Marc Jacobs Collection.

Jacobs’s assistant came in and told him that Angel was there to see him. People looked at one another in a funny way. A few moments later, a very beautiful, very tall young woman wearing an enormous hat made of feathers, many strands of pearls, a four-tiered black lace skirt, and hot-pink satin high-heeled shoes came into the room. “I bring something for you!” she said triumphantly, and thrust a bottle labelled “Tokaji aszú” at Jacobs.

“Oh,” Jacobs said. “Is that alcohol?”

“Ees sweet wine!” Angel replied.

“Mmm. Thank you. I don’t drink, but I’ll serve it to my guests.”

Angel was led away to change into a dress. “That’s a girl who goes to my gym and she wants to be a model,” Jacobs said, “so I told her she could come by and I’d take her measurements. You should see what she wears to the gym—you know, outfits. Spandex and stretch tulle.”

Angel came back and Jacobs asked her to show him her walk. She marched down the hallway in a dramatic fashion. “Perfect,” Jacobs said.

“Zatseet?”

“Yeah,” Jacobs told her. “That’s it. Come spend a few minutes with me and then I have to get back to work.” He led her into his office, which is wallpapered with pictures of pills on a brown background (a gift from Damien Hirst), and closed the door.

“That’s a particular case,” Ludden said. “She’s really invaded his personal space.” Ludden smiled. “That’s very Marc—he’s definitely always got one eye on the underdog. If there’s a bunch of people in a room, Marc will pay attention to the sadster.”

Jacobs gave Angel a good fifteen minutes, returned, and lighted a cigarette. “Every girl in the world wants to be a model.”

“Was that outfit a joke?” Ludden asked. “Like, is this a reality-TV-show trick, do you think?”

Jacobs laughed. “If you think that was weird, you should’ve been in there,” he said, exhaling smoke in the direction of his office. “I am definitely going to the gym today.”

Superheroes tend to be orphans of sorts, and Marc Jacobs is no exception. His father, an agent at the William Morris agency in New York, died when Jacobs was seven. His mother is still alive, but he doesn’t see her. “I haven’t spoken to her or my sister and brother in years and years,” he told me. “I never feel like it’s a bad thing. I mean, my mom’s very, very sick—mentally ill. She didn’t really take care of her kids.”

Jacobs was brought up by his paternal grandmother, in an apartment at Seventy-second Street and Central Park West. “She had a very bad relationship with her sister, whom I never knew, but I guess there was some argument and they never spoke again,” he said. “Whenever I would mention something about my family, my grandmother would bring up the story of her sister and she would say, ‘We haven’t spoken in years, so you’ll get no argument from me.’ ”

When Jacobs was in his teens, and a student at the High School of Art and Design, he would go to Studio 54 all night, sometimes bringing his books along so he could go straight to class in the morning. “I had a ball,” he said. “I mean, I really did.” He went to France for the first time at seventeen, and “cried like a baby” on the plane home, because he felt so sure that he was meant to be a Parisian. “Living with my grandmother, I just kind of grew up feeling like I’m not going to be obliged to spend Thanksgiving with a bunch of people I didn’t like—or who didn’t like me! I shouldn’t do anything, or shouldn’t feel anything. I either do feel or I don’t feel. I’m not going to should feel. Whether we’re talking about contemporary art or we’re talking about family, pretending that I feel something I don’t feel doesn’t really achieve anything. People say, What if something happened to one of them? Well, if that happens and I regret that, that’ll be the way it is. But right now it’s not something I’m regretting, so I can’t act on that.” When Jacobs says that people should be shameless, he is talking about something more than exhibitionism. He seeks a kind of relentless authenticity.