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His grandmother died in 1987, but in his adult life Jacobs has had another guardian: Robert Duffy, a tall, tanned, silver-haired man of fifty-three, who has been Jacobs’s best friend and his business partner for twenty-four years. When he was thirty, Duffy, the son of a steel executive, wanted to go into business with a young designer. Jacobs was attending Parsons School of Design, and Duffy went to see the fashion show he put on for his graduation. “These three sweaters came out that were just like the most awkward proportions and shapes and colors, and they just looked so right on those girls,” Duffy told me. “There was nothing intimidating about the clothes—I found them very friendly, and I still to this day do. He’s never lost that childlike quality that he has in him when he’s designing, and it’s just something that I love the consistency of. Wherever his influences come from, whatever it is, I can always tell if he’s had a hand in something.” Duffy has “1984” tattooed on his right hand, in honor of the year that he and Jacobs formed their partnership.

Every year, Duffy travels to Asia to visit the Marc Jacobs stores there—forty-six in Japan, seventeen in China, sixteen in Korea, ten in Taiwan, eight in Hong Kong, four in Malaysia, three in Singapore and in Thailand, two in the Philippines, one each in Vietnam and Indonesia, and another about to open in Macau. The day before he was to leave on this year’s trip, Duffy was sitting at a table in the Marc Jacobs office in Manhattan, where he works with Jacobs for about five weeks before every show, when Jacobs is in town. “That’s our desk,” Duffy said, pointing across the room at two desks, back to back, in front of the windowsill, where the seven Council of Fashion Designers of America award trophies that Jacobs has won stand in a row. “Mine’s the left side and his is the right side, but when I used to work over there”—Duffy pointed to the left side—“he used to work over there, too. So then the whole desk became his. So I moved over here.” Duffy pointed to his seat at the table. “So now he sits where you’re sitting”—across the table from Duffy. “It’s horrible! I’ll have all my papers and my notes and my margins and my, you know, audits and my **** on the table and I’ll come back and there’ll be spinach on my audit. Or he’ll take this thing that says ‘confidential’ and all of a sudden he’ll flip it over and start sketching things, and I’m, like, where’s that confidential audit that no one’s supposed to be touching or looking at? And then I’ll find it months later in the design studio.”

Duffy says that his relationship with Jacobs has been one of the few constants in Jacobs’s life during the past two and a half decades, and, in spite of that—or because of it—he is never surprised by Jacobs. “When he decided, or we decided, or originally I decided, to get him clean and sober, I got him to a doctor and I got him to a nutritionist, and so his body started changing, and he started taking an interest in his health. He started morphing into this person that he always sort of didn’t ever want to be. He always took a certain pride in being an outsider and sort of chubby and nerdy and wearing glasses, having awkward muses and friends and things.” Before Victoria Beckham, Jacobs’s ads starred women with more obvious glamour, like Jennifer Jason Leigh and Winona Ryder.

“People were reacting to him very differently, in a way that I don’t think he ever thought he would like,” Duffy continued. “That just led to his fascination with celebrities, and he started watching these reality shows that I’ve never watched in my life, and then he started dating Jason, the call boy—a self-promoter.” It was the exposure moment, and Duffy said he never doubted that it would “play itself out.” Leaning against a wall near the windowsill was a framed cartoon of a woman selling her soul to the Devil for tickets to a Marc Jacobs show.

“Marc becomes enchanted with certain things at certain times,” Duffy said. He watched Jacobs’s interest in art, for instance, flower into a penchant for collecting (which has at times necessitated borrowing large sums of money). “He was buying art until I was, like, ‘Marc, stop! You’ve got to pay your taxes!’ ” Duffy predicts that this particular passion will persist, but that it has peaked. “He took it from collecting personally to getting artists to work at Louis Vuitton,” Duffy said. “He made what he was doing personally a trend, a cultural thing.” Then, there was the matter of the bull terriers. “When he wanted to get a dog, it was, like, ‘Oh God, we’ve got to get two, and they’ve got to be bull terriers, and they’ve got to be crazy and they have to be brought into the office every day.’ ” Jacobs has tattooed likenesses of both his dogs on different parts of his body.

“I’m terrified of the day that he decides he wants to start gardening,” Duffy said. “Because we’ll have, like, Central Park in here or something.” He was happy that Jacobs seemed to be finally—if impermanently—content. “You never know what’s going to trigger something,” he said. “He’s hypersensitive, and so insecure. About his talent he’s so insecure.”

It’s fun to watch people turn into pictures. You start out with a short, frizzy-haired woman in a pants suit and high-heeled boots, but then she lights a cigarette and makes a grouchy smirk, the flash explodes, and, voilà: Fran Lebowitz.

On the evening of the Council of Fashion Designers of America awards gala, at the New York Public Library, the little courtyard in front was crawling with beautiful women making faces, and assuming poses not found in nature, for the cameras clicking all around them. The exception was Victoria Beckham, who was wearing a pouf of a dress made from hundreds of heart-shaped pieces of fabric (by her date, Marc Jacobs), and who always looks as if she’s having her picture taken, no matter what she’s doing. Hebrew lettering was tattooed down her long, lean neck. “It’s in Jewish,” she said. “My husband’s part Jewish.”

Jacobs walked toward the library entrance with Harvey Weinstein and his wife, the fashion designer Georgina Chapman. “That Murakami thing!” Weinstein barked.

“Oh, it was great!” Jacobs said, smoking.

“It’s ridiculous!” Weinstein shouted. “You made him! Ridiculous!”

“That’s a great color on you,” Jacobs told Chapman, who was wearing a dark-crimson gown. “No, it really is.”

“I designed it,” Weinstein joked, pawing at his wife’s shoulder.

“Oh, he does everything!” Jacobs retorted. “I want to be you when I grow up, Harvey.”

“You stole all your ideas from me,” Weinstein said.

“What?” Jacobs asked.

“I’m kidding! I’m kidding!”

Jacobs had been nominated for the accessories and womenswear-designer-of-the-year awards, but he won neither. At his table, after the ceremony, he stayed on his BlackBerry, text-messaging Martone, while Victoria Beckham, Robert Duffy, the hip-hop star Lil’ Kim, the comedian Amy Poehler, and their dates attempted to have a conversation. After an appetizer of tiny turnips was cleared away, Poehler got up to say hello to other people she knew, and when she returned she found that the entire table had evacuated, before the main course had even arrived. “Are they afraid of food?” she asked.

Jacobs said later that he and his celebrity entourage had gone to meet David Beckham at Nobu. “It’s been years since I’ve wanted to go to the C.F.D.A. awards,” he said. “I feel a bit obliged, and, again, when I go against what I feel and do what I’m obliged to do, I’m always unhappy.” Victoria Beckham had given a little speech about Jacobs during the awards presentation, in which she remarked that, from season to season, Jacobs’s collections tend to be “diametrically opposed, yet completely signature.” It was perhaps the only element of the evening that pleased him.

“I love frogs,” he told me. “This sort of fairy-tale frog that became a prince, and the chameleon who changes colors with his environment. ‘Zelig’ is my favorite film. I understand that. I can hang out in a sports bar with a bunch of straight guys and say ‘Go, Knicks’ and I can run around in the art scene and I can also be at the Met ball and be Mr. Fashion Designer with Anna Wintour. I can go wherever I want; I can be whatever I choose.” This, in the end, is Marc Jacobs’s superpower: “I can change colors—for my own amusement and, perhaps, the entertainment of others.”